David Leinweber

David Leinweber, author of Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets, was recently named one of the Top Ten Innovators of the Decade by Advanced Trading magazine. As founder of two financial technology firms, and as manager of multi-billon dollar quantitative equity portfolios, he brings a practical approach to innovation. He is now principal of Leinweber & Co., and in a public service role, co-founder of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Leinweber combines the expertise of a computer scientist from MIT, Harvard and the RAND Corporation with the financial experience of a pioneering practitioner in electronic markets and computer driven investing.

His professional interests focus on modern information technologies in trading and investing. As the founder of two financial technology companies, in trading and quantextual investing . At the RAND Corporation his research on real-time applications of artificial intelligence led to the founding of Integrated Analytics Corporation. IAC was acquired by the Investment Technology Group, its product became QuantEx, an electronic execution system used for millions of institutional equity transactions daily for over a decade.

He is known for a practical approach to financial technology innovation honed by eight years successfully managing $6 billion of institutional quantitative global equity portfolios at First Quadrant.

Scientific investing is driven by both quantitative and textual electronic information, and the Internet dramatically transforms 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 a visiting faculty member at Caltech, and at UC Berkeley, he worked on practical applications of ideas at the juncture of technology and finance. He is an advisor to investment firms, stock exchanges, brokerages, and technology firms in areas related to financial markets, and a frequent speaker, expert witness and author on these subjects, including a recent Google Tech Talk.

Leinweber 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.

In 2011, Leinweber was invited to cofound of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Computational Research Division's Center for Innovative Financial Technology, a public service role to help build a bridge between the computational science and financial markets communities. LBL is one of the premier scientific laboratories in the world. Sixteen lab scientists have won the Nobel Prize.