David Leinweber

David Leinweber is considered one of the pioneers of applying computing and big data to financial markets. He worked at various firms including First Quadrant and the Caltech Advanced Computing Research Institute before co-founding the Center for Innovative Financial Technology. His famous paper "Stupid Data Miner Tricks" demonstrated that certain seemingly predictive correlations in finance — most memorably, that butter production in Bangladesh correlated strongly with S&P 500 returns — were pure artifacts of data mining with no causal mechanism. This work became a touchstone in discussions about the dangers of overfitting and spurious correlations in quantitative finance. His book "Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets" (2009) chronicled the history of quantitative and computer-driven investing.