Hazem Dawani is CEO at Predata.

What were the key themes for your business in 2019?

Market participants are increasingly adopting alternative data sets into their trading strategies and this year we focused on expanding our presence and offerings to match this growing industry need. Earlier this year our predictive analytics data set went live on Bloomberg’s data site, Bloomberg Enterprise Access Point, and we integrated with FreightWaves’ SONAR platform to create more than 200 custom signals specific to the freight industry. Additionally, we launched an equities offering comprised of signals quantifying attention paid online to each of the S&P’s equity sectors.

What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?
AI that affects real-world decisions tends to work best with human-in-the-loop learning — where you let each side do what it’s best at. For example, you have humans translating the world into inputs, machines finding patterns in large amounts of data, and the humans interpreting machine-generated predictions to make the final decision.

What prominent industry trends are now fading (or will soon fade)?
As high-frequency trading became the new normal in capital markets, one’s “edge” was determined by speed. Now, low-latency service providers have commoditized speed, meaning it is not the sole factor determining whether a market participant has an edge or not. Artificial intelligence and machine learning — making use of alternative data — are the technologies providing firms their edge today, and their influence will continue to grow.