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Subject: Newsletter July 2019: New landing page | Seal of excellence | Core Team is ready |
New Analytics Series are available | Crowdfunding campaign in full swing | Awesome
Readings for your Summer break
Good morning,
This newsletter is the last one before the summer break, so we added more content than usual.
It takes you 5 minutes to read it.
You can download it in pdf format here. Enjoy! Let us know if you have any comments on the
content or format.
Since the May Newsletter we succeeded:
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 to launch a new landing page
Discover our new landing page here: https://golden.goldbaum.app. We are now fully
transparent about what we do and who we want to do business with. Please share.
Credits: Screenshot of the new landing page, GOLDBAUM
✅👌✅👌✅👌 to receive the Seal of Excellence of the European Commission
Back in June, we applied for the Horizon 2020 dedicated SME Instrument Phase 1. Horizon 2020
is the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative
aimed at securing Europe's global competitiveness (read more about it here). This funding
scheme helps innovative European tech projects such as ours. As we scored very high in the
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June proposal call we received the Seal of Excellence awarded by the European Commission
(see picture). We eventually found out that we came very close to making the cut.
The last call ever for Horizon 2020 is in September. And we decided to go for it again. We are
looking for support, of all kinds to improve our proposal. You can help us by downloading one
of these two letters of support, here or here, and fill in your details and sign it. You can send us
back the letter over email (as a scan or even phone picture). For some of you, this could
represent a business opportunity. Do not hesitate to get in touch with us to know more about
it.
Credits: Scan of the Seal of Excellence, GOLDBAUM
👋👨 💼👋👨 💼👋👨 💼 to finish building the team for the summer
Mr Augustin Laruelle is our second summer intern. He enrolled in his fourth year of
engineering at Ecole Polytechnique. Augustin joined Marco and Antoine on the data analytics
side and helps draft our analytics notes.
Mr Donovan Guillot is our third and last summer intern. Native from Tours (France), he
just enrolled in his penultimate year in software engineering at Polytech’. Donovan joins
Aymeric and Alexis for the rest of the summer to assist on our data infrastructure software
called Taipan.
Léni G., our first Dev Summer Intern, is leaving us in less than a month to go back to
school to finish his engineering degree. He has contributed significantly to the technical
development in the back end and the front end. We hope to see him again next year.
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We will start to hire again in the last quarter of the year. Stay tuned.
📄📄📄📄 to send out more analytics notes
Our series of in-depth (subscriber-only) publications show the strength of our tools on
real cases of ongoing financial research. After looking into portfolio constructions thanks to the
most popular analytics (Tracking Error, Tracking Difference), we have shown that this is not
enough. We also developed analytics of some product flows and their impacts on global
markets. We are also showing how our tools can be used to assess the risks and opportunities
around events such as U.S. NFPs.
Credits: Flow analytics, GOLDBAUM
💰📈💰📈💰 to start our crowd-funding campaign
It will run the whole month of July and spill over in August, check out our co-funding page here:
https://ayomi.fr/cofunding/land/2753/ [it is in French]
📚📚📚 to read these articles
Foreword: We added more articles this time. We did not read more than usual, but as we believe that your summer
break already started for you, we got your reading covered. So wherever you are, on a beach, country-side or on a
mountain-top, enjoy.
Deutsche Bank Is Quitting Stock Trading. What It Means for Equity Research [English]: Rumours
about the German bank BIG layoffs had been around for a while. However, the fact that
Deutsche Bank’s decision to exit the equities trading business but keep its research division
intact comes as a surprise. MiFID II has had already a meaningful impact on the equity research
business. Research budgets are down almost 20% last year at the investment banks, and the
average asset manager is paying now between 15 and 20 research providers (Bulge bracket or
Boutique). Half of institutional investors want to reduce their spending on research, while the
other half wants to bring research expertise in-house. Either way, you should seriously consider
how to get a lot of bang for your buck in a research market which becomes more and more
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competitive. This new paradigm is benefiting both buyers and sellers of unique market insights
and services. Contact us to get to know how. NB: To all our dear friends at Deutsche Bank (if you
are still able to see this), we stopped recruiting for the summer. However, get in touch after you
have taken some time off and thought about your next move. There are opportunities at
GOLDBAUM.
IHS Markit partners with Algo-Chain to provide ETF and index analytics [English] : Another
leading index provider, IHS Markit, is partnering up with a data analytics startup (such as ours)
to bring transparency and deep insights on financial markets. This comes after, having acquired
alternative data analytics platform Quandl last year, Nasdaq Pivots to the Buy Side.
Facebook’s Cryptocurrency Will Challenge The Global Financial Establishment [English] : It has
been a while since we wrote anything about crypto and the technology behind it (How does
Blockchain work? Here is an excellent primer). According to ECB Executive Board Member
Benoît Coeuré who has a strong view on the development of cryptocurrencies “It’s out of the
question to allow them to develop in a regulatory void for their financial service activities,
because it’s just too dangerous”. Since the Global Financial Crisis, a large part of new money
was created (“printed”) by private banks - in the form of credit mostly. It is not our objective to
explain the whole history of private money in about three sentences. However, we just note
that the new advocates of cryptocurrency such as the U.S. tech giants are not really innovating.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, U.S. commercial banks created paper money themselves in a
physical realm: it funded railroads, mining and the premises of what U.S. mass retail
consumption would look like in the following century. It was a different era, but everything ran
more or less decentralized and smoothly. Until it didn’t anymore. After panics and bank runs, a
centralized national bank was created: the FED. Hence we ask ourselves, do we actually need to
waste time and resources on decentralizing money into a digital realm so that we can centralize
it back later? The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority might have the answer: FCA proposes ban
on cryptocurrency products [English]
Banks falling behind in digital transformation efforts [English] : According to Accenture, banks
have spent $1Trillion in new IT development and digital solutions over the past three years. But
they still struggle to harness the right ROI out of it. Banks surely robotized away a lot of painful
tasks in their cost-centres (Back-office, Middle-Office) and will continue to reduce the necessary
costs in these areas over the next years. Nevertheless, their profit-centres (Front-Office) are
still lagging. How come their customers do not massively adopt their new digital interfaces and
services? We keep banging on the fact that banking customers consume innovation and new
digital technology in a different way than they use financial or banking products. The two
behaviours are tremendously different as it is a function of how a consumer feels comfortable
with digital technology compared to what was available before. If you just look at smartphone
adoption rates, a third of consumers had one 5-7 years ago. These days it’s like almost 90%. The
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digital retail estate for mobile apps is hyper-competitive, and banking apps do not capture the
same attention (span) as social media apps or games do. Hence, even if banks decide to spend
more resources and effort into trying to steer customers, be it for revenue-generating or
cost-saving objectives, into the digital channel, they are going to go up against powerful societal
forces of how we actually evolve as a society to become more digital. Needless to say, they will
have to innovate to provide value in some services for a customer willing to pay for it. And this
comes in an era where most of the digital consumption they do, does not require them to
spend directly for it - in monetary terms.
Stop trying to invent the next Facebook or Amazon [English] : We agree with the author that
you do not have to disrupt an industry to succeed. It is a great story about how Zoom came out
of WebEx and inspires us all here in the team.
We also add some great readings about machine learning, artificial intelligence and the
meaning of life (why not?)
Machine Learning is Fun! The world’s easiest introduction to Machine Learning [English]
Why Machines Need to Dream The ingenious neurobiology of mammalian sleep has been
mathematically modeled to streamline A.I. memory and storage capacity [English]
Why the meaning of life can’t be Googled [English]
🎥🎥 to act in a promotional video
As Fit 4 Start alumni, we feel that we must promote this acceleration programme Fit 4 Start -
Are you ready to take off? [Youtube]. If you are an ICT, HealthTech or SpaceTech start-up (or
know someone), then the Fit 4 Start accelerator programme is perfect for you! Call us to know
more about our experience. We also joined the BCFL last month.
We did not put a section about our whereabouts over the summer as we will mainly work on a
couple of projects in Luxembourg and take some time off in our home countries to rest. Have a
great summer and see you all in September - fresh and sound.
The GOLDBAUM Team
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