Olsen
Richard Olsen was born and brought up in Zurich, Switzerland in a family of bankers and physicists. His main interest lay in studying Economics but his family members did not consider it a real science and encouraged him to study Law. Heeding their advice he acquired his Licentiate in Law from the University of Zurich in 1979 and then a year later his Bachelors from the University of Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In 1980 he obtained his Ph.D. in Law from the University of Zurich. Later, while working at a bank Richard made a proposal to found a research company. At first he was encouraged to write a business plan but before submitting the plan the project was dropped. This was incentive enough for Richard to create his own company and pursue his plans on his own resulting in the birth of Olsen Ltd (formerly known as Olsen and Associates) in 1985.From Olsen & Associates there evolved several companies; Olsen Ltd, Olsen Financial Technologies (co-founded with Rakhal Dave) and OANDA (co-founded with Michael Stumm). He is genuinely appreciative of the multifariousness and creativity of his work, which ranges from management and sales to research and writing; from teacher to philosopher. Olsen Ltd; is a research and investment manager based in Zurich, Switzerland. Olsen Ltd provides managed accounts and third-party products, investing in currencies as a separate asset class or as an overlay to an existing currency exposure. They specialize in a branch of investing known as “high-frequency finance” where trading decisions are based on detailed observation and analysis of price evolution. Olsen Financial Technologies provides financial institutions and researchers with access to one of the world's largest databases of tick-by-tick prices. The company also offers comprehensive software tools to filter, store, and analyze market data. OANDA, on the other hand is an online 24/7 market maker for currencies offering a broad array of auxiliary services.
The Scale of Market Quakes (SMQ) is Olsen Ltd's latest contribution to the financial world. The service is a first installment of the Olsen Information System. Olsen invites companies, non-government and government organizations, universities and private individuals to participate. For more information on how to proceed, please contact us. According to Richard, the financial world is the “nervous system of the global economy”. He believes that the system has failed miserably and is sending out the wrong signals “We have to overhaul the system and transform the markets into a functional nervous system that contributes to an efficient allocation of resources”. With Olsen he looks forward to creating a sustainable society through social investment and risk management.
Richard anticipates that “In a year from now, governments will negotiate, how they can digitalize the financial markets, i.e. introduce real time settlement with second by second interest rate payments and introduce a programming language to fully digitalize contracts and financial instruments, including their collateral. The digitalization of contracts and financial securities is pre-condition for transforming the financial markets into a functional nervous system of the global economy”.
Olsen Information System
The Scale of Market Quake (SMQ) is the first product of the Olsen Information System with predictive information of the world economy and the financial markets that Olsen is building. The service is intended to provide decision support for investors; both institutional and private, to treasurers, risk managers, central bankers and government representatives. Its output is to be generated by processing byte by byte of data on economic activity, buy and sale flows on the financial markets and news events. The added value of the service is its systematic compilation and analysis of the abundance of data that is spewed out by the global economy. The service will be based on the models of high frequency finance that analyze the complex feedback processes in the economy impacting the occurrence and outcome of future events.Weather forecasts are an integral part of our modern lives and are ubiquitous in newspapers, television programs and internet offerings. In the economic domain nothing comparable exists; yes, there is an abundance of written comments of people that compile information with traditional methods but there are no services that compile and process tick-by-tick of data that is spewed out by the global economy from tick-by-tick price information of all the financial markets to all the fundamental data that is tracked in statistics. The processing of data and tracking of feedback processes lays open the forces that impact the future outcome of events and is thus valuable input for informed decisions.
Research
Olsen is a research-driven organization that has played a significant role in the ongoing development of the field of high-frequency finance.With strong links to the international academic community, Olsen is in the forefront of the growing body of research demonstrating patterns of persistent predictability in the financial markets. From these investigations have come leading edge online forecasting technology for business and finance. Richard Olsen teaches at the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents at the University of Essex.
Most of our publications and documents are available at Olsen World for free download except the published papers/book.
Back to top
