August 12, 2006
The Convergence of Banking and Technology
A Wall Street rush to patent profit-making methods, by Julie Creswell
In 1997, there were 927 patent applications submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for various methods of processing financial and management data. Last year, there were 6,226.
Was RealTick’s HotTrend product ever patented?
Cat: | Time: 5:27 pm (utc+8)
August 12th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
Yeah, I ran into this issue many years ago when I worked for a quant shop. I believe someone at State Street got the first patent ever given for a quantitative investment methodology — basically, just a formula. The problem at the time was that it was similar to work being done and used at lots of quant shops. It caused a ruckus at the time, but then it died down — no one, to my knowledge, ever got sued for patent infringement.
It all seems pretty hokey to me. Imagine if someone had patented mathematics or the alphabet.