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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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