Last month we told you how the Nigerian Stock Exchange has upgraded their software to the NASDAQ OMX X-Stream platform.  This move made them the fastest trading engine in Africa.  Well this week let me tell you about how a Nigerian Tech Entrepreneur is looking to give all financial data platforms a run for their money, right here in the USA, with a new startup Thinknum.

Thinknum organizes the worlds Financial Data, and makes them readily available to analyze on a web platform. The semantic web is making it easier to scour the internet for publicly available datasets, and Thinknum is taking full advantage of this.

With Macro data, Company specific data and market data together in one place on the web, Thinknum users have the ability to perform analysis that was previously only available to people willing to shell out the big bucks for a bloomberg terminal.

If you are a financial techie like myself, then you have probably visited sites like yahoo finance to look at charts, moving averages, bollinger bands  yada yada yada (you have probably also made some really bad decisions with those charts, damn you candle stick patterns!).   These sites are ok, but my beef with them is that you cannot perform any analysis across datasets.  In addition, you are not sure what magical calculations are happening in the background.

The Genius of Thinknum is that the platform allows the user write simple expressions to manipulate multiple datasets.  These will then be plotted on their proprietary web application.  Example, typing the function correl (GS,MS) returns the correlation between Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.  

Then you can string these functions together with mathematical operators to form an expression: correl(correl(gs,ms),hist_vol(gs))-correl(correl(gs,ms),hist_vol(ms))

The above expression plots a chart  that shows how the Correlation between Goldman and Microsoft is correlated with the historical volatility of Goldman Sachs and the difference between the…………….. (you get the idea!)  you can manipulate the data with simple expressions!!! :)……….. try doing that with yahoo 🙂

Not too shabby from a young African Entrepreneur.  The internet is the great equalizer.  It has given people access to goods previously reserved for a select few.  It has created opportunities for innovators willing to brave the  risky road of entrepreneurship.  The guys at Thinknum are creating a new space, and it has tremendous upside.  With the company’s steady rise they will undoubtedly face fierce competition, but I am sure the young founder of Thinknum and fellow Princeton Alum, Gregory Ugwi, wouldn’t have it any other way…………………………………….Stay Mobile!