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Home / News & Events / Introducing FAME S+Connector: Quantitative Analysis of Financial Data with FAME and S-PLUS

Introducing FAME S+Connector: Quantitative Analysis of Financial Data with FAME and S-PLUS

Presented: Thursday, May 18th, 2006

Speakers: Ken Rossiter, Director of Product Management, SunGard and David Smith, Senior Product Management, Insightful Corporation

In today's financial institutions, quantitative methods are required to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Quantitative analysts need ready access to fundamental corporate data, macroeconomic data, and high-volume financial time series data using flexible and to analyse those data with extensible, modern and cutting-edge analytic methods. For almost 20 years, quantitative analysts have used Insightful's S-PLUS -- the premier software environment for exploratory analysis and statistical modeling-- to improve portfolio performance, understand and control risk and build and deploy competitive trading strategies. Now, with the new FAME S+Connector module for S-PLUS, all the data you need for your analysis is easily available from a single source: SunGard's FAME -- an object oriented, time series database. FAME provides a robust solution for storing and managing high-volume time series data, making it an ideal data source for quantitative analysis using S-PLUS.

In this webcast David Smith, Senior Product Manager at Insightful and Ken Rossiter, Director of Product Management at SunGard will introduce S-PLUS and FAME, and describe how you can use FAME S+Connector to access financial data from FAME and analyse it with S-PLUS. The presentation will include practical examples of quantitative analysis with FAME S+Connector such as GARCH modeling, Value-at-Risk estimation, multi-factor modeling, and backtesting. This presentation will be valuable for any quantitative analyst or financial engineer who needs to reduce the time it takes to find and prepare financial data and perform advanced quantitative analysis on it.

Ken Rossiter, Director Product Management, SunGard

 Ken Rossiter is the director of product management for the PowerData desktop. He has more than ten years experience in building financial analysis systems.

Rossiter began his career as an investment banking analyst at Piper Jaffray and then joined FactSet Research Systems in 1994. He helped pioneer the development of FactSet's Microsoft Office links and query languages and eventually became director of their ProActive Publishing enterprise. Rossiter left FactSet in the spring of 2000 to co-found Triene, a unique startup that combined web and Excel based front-ends with value-add fundamental content and analytics.

FAME was a major supplier of 3rd party data and technology to Triene and eventually Rossiter created a new startup, AgentWare, focused on building Excel / web front-ends and query languages on top of the FAME container. By normalizing FAME data and providing an intuitive query language and request syntax, AgentWare was able to extend the power of FAME analytics to a new set of financial professionals.

SunGard purchased FAME and AgentWare in 2004. The integration of FAME, AgentWare and Sungard PowerData means users can now access real time news and prices as well as extensive quantitative features online and in Excel. Building and enhancing the S+FAME product line will be a key focus for Rossiter throughout 2006.


David Smith, Senior Product Manger,
Insightful Corporation

 David Smith joined Insightful's UK-based team in 1998 as International Product Manager and moved to the Seattle headquarters in 2000. A long-time S-PLUS user with intimate knowledge of Insightful's technology, David is responsible for the design, content and production of Insightful's financial product line. Before joining Insightful, David was employed as a Research Associate at Lancaster University in Northern England, working on methods and S-PLUS based software for longitudinal data analysis. His introduction to S-PLUS came in 1991 as a consultant with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in his hometown of Adelaide, South Australia.