David Leinweber

Dr. Leinweber is Haas Fellow in Finance and founding director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. His professional interests focus on how modern information technologies are best applied in trading and investing, and how technology affects global financial markets.

As the founder and advisor to financial technology companies, and as a quantitative investment manager, he is an active participant in today's transformation of markets. Clients at his consulting and software business include some of the world's largest investment managers, hedge funds, brokers and exchanges. All build on a history of innovation in financial technology.

At the RAND Corporation, he directed research on real-time applications of artificial intelligence that led to the founding of Integrated Analytics Corporation. IAC was acquired by the Investment Technology Group, (NYSE:ITG) and, with the addition of electronic order execution, its product became QuantEx, an electronic execution system still in use for millions of institutional equity transactions daily. Large institutions concerned with controlling transactions costs and proprietary traders found them particularly valuable.

As Managing Director at First Quadrant, he was responsible for institutional quantitative global equity portfolios totaling $6 billion. More than twenty long and market neutral strategies utilized a wide range of computerized techniques for stock selection and efficient trading. He won five rounds against the Wall Street Journal's investment dartboard.

Quantitative investing is driven by electronic information, and the Internet dramatically transformed the financial information landscape. This led to the founding of Codexa Corporation, a Net based information collection, aggregation and filtering service for institutional investors and traders. The company's clients included many of the world's largest brokerage and investment firms.

As the founding director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at U.C. Berkeley, and previously as a visiting faculty member at Caltech, Leinweber worked on practical applications of ideas at the juncture of technology and finance. He has advanced the state of the art in the application of information technology in both the sell-side world of trading and the buy-side world of quantitative investment. He's published and spoken widely in both fields.

In his misspent youth, he graduated from MIT, in physics and computer science, where he was one of the first 5000 people on the Internet. That was when it was called the ARPAnet and wasn't cool. He also has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. But on a good day, it's hard to tell.