Cormac Kinney

Cormac Kinney
Born Cormac Kinney
(1971-06-18) June 18, 1971
St. Louis, Missouri
Residence New York City
Nationality American
Education Carnegie Mellon University
Occupation Entrepreneur
Known for Software inventions

Cormac Kinney is an entrepreneur and software designer. An inventor of Heatmaps,[1] trading and risk management systems used by institutional traders,[2] and news analysis methods for quantitative securities trading. Heatmaps have been cited in over 360 patents subsequently granted by the United States Patent Office.[3]

Background

He grew up in University City, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, the oldest of six children. Graduated from Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering, earning Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Industrial Management, and a Master of Science in Industrial Administration and Finance in 5 years, skipping one year of college, but leaving a Software Engineering degree uncompleted.[4]

He has lived in Manhattan, New York City since 1994.

Career and Inventions

As a student at Carnegie Mellon, Kinney founded two small software companies in succession, sold to Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., and H.J. Heinz. Both were related to optimization.[5][6]

While a graduate student at CMU, he became a founding member of the Carnegie Mellon Fast Lab consortium,[7] a real time trading simulation using trading floor data and technology, subsequently expanded to universities in 20 countries. The Smithsonian Institution awarded the Fast Lab consortium the ComputerWorld Smithsonian Award.[8] In addition to his research there, he contributed the state of the art fibre-optic networking equipment used by the Lab. His research focused on visualization for financial markets, and culminated in the invention of Heatmaps in 1993.[1][9]

Heatmaps, NeoVision

In 1993, with Carnegie Mellon Senior Research Scientist, Marc H. Graham, Kinney founded NeoVision Hypersystems, Inc.[9] to develop and market the Heatmaps technology. NeoVision Heatmaps are a real time middleware and computation platform with a now-familiar colorful visual interface. With the Heatmaps platform, specialized trading, risk management and broker monitoring applications were built, consolidating vast amounts real time and static data.[10]

After licensing the technology to trading desks at Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley,[10] and 9 departments in Deutsche Bank, he raised a total of $8 million from Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns, Intel Corporation and venture capital investors.[11][12]

With fresh capital, Kinney hired Brian Barefoot, President of PaineWebber International, and formerly global head of sales and trading at Merrill Lynch as CEO, added Deutsche Bank’s Global COO to NeoVision’s board,[13] and continued to expand the rollout of Heatmaps to many large buy and sell side financial institutions, including Bank of America,[14] PaineWebber,[15] Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney and 13 other brokerages,[16] JPMorgan Chase,[17] Fidelity[18] and the DTC, for monitoring up to $1.7 trillion in daily transactions.[19] Subsequent to NeoVision, Barefoot became President of Babson College for seven years.[20]

Significant distribution licenses were made with Bloomberg L.P., Dow Jones Telerate, Thomson, and Reuters to license Heatmaps to over 300,000 desktops.[6][15][21][22] The Nasdaq was the first to license a web version, webHeatmaps, which has been included on the front page of www.nasdaq.com since 2001 through 2013,[23] with approximately 2.4 million daily page views.[24]

In 2002, he designed a trade cost analysis system for Fidelity Investments - cited by The Wall Street Journal as "a sophisticated tracking system to see which brokers can execute trades most efficiently," which was credited, in part, with reducing the mutual-fund firm's trading costs by hundreds of millions of dollars per year, to half the industry average.[2] This system, Brokermaps, was later installed at Bank of America Investment Management, Invesco, Janus, Merrill Lynch Investment Management and Putnam Investments.

As of July 2013, since 1993, Heatmaps have been cited in over 350 patents granted by the US PTO,[3] and in dozens of peer reviewed research papers.[25][26][27]

After a planned $30 million IPO fell through due to the dot com crash,[28] NeoVision was acquired in 2003 by financial software conglomerate SS&C Technologies.[29] Today the NeoVision technologies are incorporated into several SS&C products.[30]

Quantitative Hedge Fund Activities

After the sale of NeoVision, Kinney shifted his focus to quantitative trading, developing a computational linguistics based trading system, which he used to manage hedge fund strategies at Amaranth Advisors, and Tudor Investment Corp. Subsequently, he launched Sentiment Strategies, a New York-based hedge fund consulting firm, additionally managing a $400 million portfolio for Millennium Partners,[31][32] and QuantFund LLC, a quantitative hedge fund.[33]

Awards

References

  1. 1 2 "United States Patent and Trademark Office, registration #75263259". 1993-09-01.
  2. 1 2 "The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2004 - How Fidelity's Trading Chief Pinches Pennies on Wall Street, by Kate Kelly and John Hechinger".
  3. 1 2 "United States Patent Office Search".
  4. 1 2 "Pittsburgh Business Times, November 14, 1994, by Tascarella, Patty".
  5. ↑ "Fortune Magazine, May 2, 1994 - The New Face of Small Business, by Brian O’Reilly". CNN. May 2, 1994.
  6. 1 2 "Forbes Magazine, May 17, 1999 – Hot Stuff, by Silvia Sansoni". May 17, 1999.
  7. ↑ "Listing of Carnegie Mellon Fast Lab Members".
  8. ↑ "Georgia State University - Bio of Professor Sanjay Srivastava".
  9. 1 2 "Sept 5, 1996 - Heatmaps on Wall Street".
  10. 1 2 "Waters Magazine Nov 27, 1995".
  11. ↑ "Inside Market Data May 28, 2001 - Deutsche Bank Using Neovision’s Heatmaps".
  12. ↑ "Success Magazine, Jan 2000 - Six Degrees of Capitalization, by Elaine Pofeldt".
  13. ↑ "Deutsche Bank Announcement, Mar 14, 2001".
  14. ↑ "Thomson Corporation, Oct. 7, 2002 - Bank of America Selects NeoVision Heatmaps; NeoVision Portfoliomaps".
  15. 1 2 "Inside Market Data, July 8, 2002 - Brokermaps at PaineWebber".
  16. ↑ "Inside Market Data, Oct 10, 1998 - Strike Teams Up with NeoVision, by Robert Sales".
  17. ↑ "Trading Technology, Nov 8, 1999 – Firms Install Heatmaps".
  18. ↑ "Waters Magazine, Sep 1, 2003 – A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words".
  19. ↑ "National Securities Clearing and Depository Trust & Clearing Corporations Select NeoVision Heatmaps".
  20. ↑ "BusinessWeek Biography of Brian Barefoot".
  21. ↑ "Nov 16, 2003 - NeoVision Announces Licensing Agreement with Bridge Information Systems".
  22. ↑ "Bloomberg Licenses Heatmaps for 95000 Users".
  23. ↑ "Intel Corp announcement of webHeatmaps on Nasdaq.com".
  24. ↑ "WebStats Visitor Approximation for Nasdaq.com".
  25. ↑ "IEEE Computer Society Journal Jul 11, 2008".
  26. ↑ "Universite of Konstanz, Germany – Visual Exploration" (PDF).
  27. ↑ "University of Maryland, NASDAQ Velocity and Forces: An Interactive Visualization of Activity and Change" (PDF).
  28. ↑ "Corporate Financing Week, Oct 19, 1999 – New York Co Plans IPO".
  29. ↑ "SS&C Acquires trade visualization firm NeoVision".
  30. ↑ "SS&C Website page for Heatmaps".
  31. ↑ "ZeroHedge, March 19, 2009 – Movers and Shakers".
  32. ↑ "Sentiment Strategies Management Bio".
  33. ↑ "QuantFund Website".

External References

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