Makes me wonder: will context bucket plus AI model become as universal a primitive for unstructured data as Excel is for structured data?
"Alternative data" is Wall Street's name for information that doesn't arrive from an exchange: satellite photos of parking lots, credit card panels, SEC filings. Eric Mannes has spent over a decade at Jane Street, first as a commodities trader and now helping lead the firm's alternative data team. In this episode, Eric and Ron talk about what it takes to turn messy external data into datasets a trading strategy can rely on. Along the way, they cover the day oil futures settled at a negative price and the systems that broke as a result; the years when the commodities desk's risk system was one very large Excel spreadsheet; the hard question of what a company even is; and why better ML models raise the value of careful data engineering.