How Google Cloud’s Scalable Data Storage and High Compute Resources Fuel Investment Research
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Investment management is a heavily data-driven industry—portfolio managers and investment researchers require a large number of data sources to guide them in shaping their investment strategies.
New cloud capabilities and technologies enable investment managers to process data faster than ever before and iterate on ideas quickly to fuel innovation in the signal generation process and gain a competitive edge.
Using the cloud for investment research workflows makes it easier to onboard data from data providers, spin up large compute workloads in the midst of market volatility or during heavy research cycles, and manage complex machine learning or natural language workflows to gain market insights.
We hear from industry leaders that they’re exploring new ways to run investment research. “Differentiated investment strategies require new types of information sources, and new ways to process that information,” David Easthope, senior analyst, Market Structure and Technology, Greenwich Associates. “And that, of course, relies heavily on having access to reliable and scalable storage, computational, and AI / ML resources. More specifically, quantitative strategies can benefit from the computational platforms and embedded AI/ML capabilities the cloud can offer.”
Google Cloud gives investment managers essential components to work and operate faster as they bring their investment research workflows to the cloud. Here are the key highlights:
1. Simplify, speed up your data acquisition, discovery, and analytics
The foundation of any investment strategy starts with data—acquiring it, detecting patterns, and analyzing it for insights. Enabling data providers to easily share large datasets such as tick history within a high-performance analytics engine can greatly reduce the data engineering overhead when possible.
Once data is onboarded, you can tag business and technical metadata related to your datasets and provide portfolio managers the ability to discover these datasets via a search interface.
We further review analytics options for various scenarios, including aggregating massive datasets, creating dashboards, and incorporating streaming analytics workloads.
2. Take advantage of burst compute workloads
Data engineers and researchers require ready access to burst compute capabilities to perform backtesting, portfolio simulations and run risk calculations. Cloud works well for these workloads due to its elasticity, consumption-based models, and hardware evolution.
Many investment managers are shifting to a container-based strategy along with a Kubernetes-based scheduler for greater consistency, scaling and efficiency in environments with a large number of researchers. Cloud managed services and a rich suite of CI/CD tools can make this vision a reality while improving security and developer productivity.
3. Tackle machine learning (ML) and model deployment with the help from cloud
Quantitative researchers scour vast amounts of market and alternative data sources searching for signals and correlations, while ML engineers have the challenge of taking these signals and moving them to production.
Google Cloud empowers users to create and operationalize their models without wasting valuable time with a comprehensive set of MLOps tools.
In this paper, we explore multiple solutions for ML and model deployment. Those capabilities reduce the amount of time operationalizing ML models, so quants and data scientists have more time to devote to differentiating activities.
4. Get the data you need in less time with Natural Language and Document AI
Thousands of financial filings, news articles, and sell-side research reports are generated every day, and it’s difficult for humans alone to process this volume of information. These documents are often generated in many languages and the ability to do entity recognition, sentiment or syntactical analysis in those languages, or perhaps translate them into the language of the portfolio manager is of critical importance. Google Cloud provides these capabilities through pre-trained models, or allows you to train high-quality models with your own datasets.
Getting started
There are plenty of emerging technologies, tools, and approaches available to help investment managers today. At Google Cloud, we can help you access, organize, and utilize these essential components to make your research faster, reliable, and more valuable.
To learn more about these four keys to better investment research, check out our whitepaper for more.
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Tools to Simplify Streaming Analytics
Streaming analytics is transforming how companies interact with their customers and operate with agility.
Dataflow supports a number of features to guide you through your journey to adopt streaming, including notebooks for writing your first pipeline, SQL to accelerate your streaming deployments, Flex Templates to scale streaming in your organization, and enhanced monitoring for operating your pipelines at scale.
In this video Mehran Nazir, Product Manager, Google Cloud, introduces Beam and Dataflow, and other tools, and how to start, how to scale and how to optimize. See how these capabilities can set you up for streaming success.
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Explore the Innovations and Architecture Powering Spanner and BigQuery
Previously, databases had architectures with tightly coupled storage and compute. This resulted in higher latency, and with faster networks these constraints no longer surface. With Google Cloud’s BigQuery and CloudSpanner, the storage and compute architecture have been separated, allowing for better scalability and availability to address businesses’ high throughput data needs.
Watch the video to understand how these database and analysis products leverage Google’s distributed storage system, in-house custom network hardware and software, internal cluster management system and more!
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Video: How AI is Helping Biologists Protect Wildlife
According to the World Wildlife Fund, vertebrate populations have shrunk an average of 60 percent since the 1970s. And a recent UN global assessment found that we’re at risk of losing one million species to extinction, many of which may become extinct within the next decade.
To better protect wildlife, seven organizations, led by Conservation International, and Google have mapped more than 4.5 million animals in the wild using photos taken from motion-activated cameras known as camera traps. The photos are all part of Wildlife Insights, an AI-enabled, Google Cloud-based platform that streamlines conservation monitoring by speeding up camera trap photo analysis.
With photos and aggregated data available for the world to see, people can change the way protected areas are managed, empower local communities in conservation, and bring the best data closer to conservationists and decision-makers.
Camera traps help researchers assess the health of wildlife species, especially those that are reclusive and rare. Worldwide, biologists and land managers place motion-triggered cameras in forests and wilderness areas to monitor species, snapping millions of photos a year.
But what do you do when you have millions of wildlife selfies to sort through? On top of that, how do you quickly process photos where animals are difficult to find, like when an animal is in the dark or hiding behind a bush? And how do you quickly sort through up to 80 percent of photos that have no wildlife at all because the camera trap was triggered by the elements, like grass blowing in the wind?
Watch this video to find out.
How TeamSnap Improved Return on Ad Spend Significantly
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Anyone who has ever coached or played on a sports team, or had a child involved in sports, knows how difficult scheduling and logistics can be. From game and practice schedules, to uniforms and who’s bringing the snacks, it can be a lot for coaches, administrators, parents, and players to manage.
It’s no wonder that TeamSnap, a sports team, club, and tournament management app, has exploded in popularity worldwide. By syncing events to everyone’s personal calendars and providing messaging and payment tracking, TeamSnap makes communication and organization easy.
TeamSnap markets its app to coaches, players, and clubs via targeted YouTube ads. It also uses Google AdWords and DoubleClick to advertise on search results and run programmatic campaigns. These methods have been highly effective, helping TeamSnap grow to millions of users worldwide and become one of the most popular apps in the iOS app store.
As its business and data grew, TeamSnap was challenged to track ROI and measure the customer journey across channels and devices over time. The company’s marketing budget grew quickly, making it even more important to spend wisely. With data in Google Analytics 360, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, Google AdWords, and Salesforce, TeamSnap needed a way to link and correlate those data sources in a scalable, timely, and cost-effective way to understand the true impact of its digital marketing across websites and mobile apps.
To avoid the painstaking manual process of pulling data from multiple sources, TeamSnap began using Google Analytics 360, which integrates with Google BigQuery, to provide a fully managed big data analysis service. TeamSnap analyzes the data using Tableau, which connects directly to Google BigQuery for fast analytics and helps the company share and collaborate on that information with self-service ease.
The combination allows TeamSnap to easily track the activity of millions of users with self-service ease, without worrying about the scalability or availability of the big data platform.
“Before Google Analytics 360, Google BigQuery, and Tableau, tracking our return on ad spend was difficult because we had so much data,” says Ken McDonald, Chief Growth Officer at TeamSnap. “We didn’t always have insights to make the best choices. We don’t have that problem anymore because we’ve moved to real-time reporting. We find additional revenue growth opportunities almost daily.”
Making Ad Dollars Work Harder
TeamSnap now automatically imports unsampled Google Analytics 360 logs into the Google BigQuery data warehouse. To import data from other sources such as Google AdWords, DoubleClick, and YouTube, TeamSnap uses Google BigQuery Data Transfer Service. With all relevant data consolidated in Google BigQuery, TeamSnap can use Tableau to perform advanced analytics on its digital marketing, executing ad-hoc analyses in seconds, while eliminating data sampling issues, to improve accuracy. These analyses can also be reused and shared with internal and external stakeholders via Tableau Online, promoting governed reuse and consistency.
“Using Google Analytics 360 and Google BigQuery with Tableau to track our return on ad spend is ideal,” says Ken. “It’s easy to use SQL to query the data or explore it with drag-and-drop ease.”
With Google BigQuery, Ken and his team can bring all the data from the TeamSnap billing systems, internal CRM, and other Google services into one straightforward dataset that everyone uses. With Tableau, users are able to perform self-service analytics on this data and provision analyses via shared dashboards that communicate the same consistent truth across the company. These dashboards provide a single view of the business to discover new patterns and questions worth analyzing.
All of this results in enormous time savings because no one is re-inventing the wheel. “Using these tools, we immediately reallocated $300,000 of ad spend that was performing poorly, generating 200% ROI in the first two days,” says Ken.
Ken now spends his time analyzing data instead of trying to pull it all together, identifying pockets of inefficient spend in real time and reallocating those marketing dollars toward better performing campaigns.
“Before, we could only focus on the largest campaign-level datasets because it was so time consuming to pull the data,” he says. “With Google BigQuery and Tableau, we can examine our advertising ROI much more granularly and reallocate more than $10 million in ad spend annually to grow the company faster and more efficiently.”
More Effective A/B Testing
To make sure it is delivering the best customer experiences, TeamSnap uses Google Optimize to run A/B tests on its website. It uses Google BigQuery and Tableau to verify and supplement these findings by measuring longer-term customer behavior across devices, spanning both web and mobile apps.
By pulling in data from Google Optimize, Google Analytics 360, Salesforce, and in-house billing and CRM systems, and understanding it with Tableau, TeamSnap has increased the accuracy and effectiveness of its A/B testing, gaining a more complete picture of customer onboarding and activity. In some cases, it found that short-term indicators it previously trusted were actually poor predictors of long-term behavior.
“Integration between Google Analytics 360 and Google BigQuery is seamless, giving us much more confidence in our A/B testing,” says Ken. “We’re constantly finding new and interesting ways to use our digital marketing data. Often, making a simple change can increase revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”
Improving Product Quality
TeamSnap also uses Google BigQuery and Tableau to improve its own product, tracking customer activity at such a granular level that usability and functionality issues can be exposed and addressed faster. It’s also increasing customer engagement by verifying that potential customers are coming in through the right onboarding path—for example, a coach versus a player, or a consumer versus a club or other sports business. Using A/B testing to make sure customers are routed to the appropriate flow, TeamSnap drove $4 million in additional customer value each year.
“We initially chose Google BigQuery and Tableau to help with marketing, but we realized quickly that they could help us on the product side as well,” says Ken. “Most of the testing we do is about making things better and easier for our customers, and we’re accelerating that process with Google BigQuery and Tableau.”
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Swarovski’s Journey towards Online and Offline Conversion with Predictive Analytics
Luxury brand and leader in crystals and glass production, Swarovski has charmed customers with its exquisite collections for over 125 years. To understand their customers better and map their online behaviors, Swarovski had to overcome prediction hurdles as majority of the purchases are not frequent or habitual. They are mostly impulse buys or have no rational behind the purchase in order for the brand to accurately map customers’ interest and delight them with relevant personalization or website customization strategy.
Swarovski used a machine learning (ML) model to predict the most performing SKUs and list of products based on both online and offline indicators to target buyers. A score was assigned to each product in the list and was personalized at the country level that delivered relevant insights. Swarovski is aiming to expand the product listing page to personalize at customer level. Watch the video to dive deep into Swarovski’s data analytics efforts to answer complex questions, reporting and prediction using both online and offline data.
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