Big Data Trading Star
Michael Beal makes sense of, and profit from big data.
He is the founder, Managing Member, and CEO of Data Capital Management, LLC (DCM). It is a long/short quantitative systematic event-driven hedge fund–currently closed to new investors–based on big data technologies and data feeds.
Videos: On CNBC, Watch Michael Beal speak about “Using Big Data to Trade Markets,” and discussing how he called it right about the Brexit.
DCM says it sits at the intersection of finance and technology crunching asset-price-relevant information. These include news, images, weather, and social networks information, that inhabit the digital world and affect financial markets,
The firm uses machine learning, a subfield of computer science, that evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence to make sense of billions of digital bits and bytes.
The Beal family’s STEM and business pedigree
The former college basketball point guard, has the DNA, and academic, background to do the job. He graduated from Harvard College with Honors in Economics, and from Harvard Business School with an MBA with Distinction. Previously, he was the Head of Strategy, Finance and Controls for the J.P. Morgan Intelligent Solutions group.
Michael Beal’s father, Bernard B. Beal, is the Chairman of Blaylock Beal Van LLC,, an investment banking firm. Previously he was President and CEO of M.R. Beal & Company. The Minority Business Enterprise was founded in 1988, after Beal was an executive for nine years in municipal and corporate finance at Shearson Lehman Hutton. The elder Beal has a BA in Economics from Carleton College and an MBA from Stanford University.
Michael Beal’s mother, Valerie Lancaster-Beal, is the Director of Finance and Compliance at Data Capital Management. She has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and a BA in Economics from Georgetown University.
She is also the former President of the Metro-Manhattan Links, a chapter of The Links International. The Links is one of the nation’s oldest and largest volunteer service organizations of women of color committed to enriching, sustaining, and ensuring the culture and economic survival of African Americans and other persons of African ancestry.
The Links supports STEM diversity through its Services to Youth programs.
Full disclosure: Frank McCoy, author of this article and Executive Producer of STEMRules, was Senior Editor of Black Enterprise, where he created its Top Blacks on Wall Street feature, Investment Bank list, Asset Management List, suggested BE’s Private Equity list, and created its Investor Round Table feature. Bernard Beal was a frequent source, and a guest on the Round Table.
