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A popular Wendy's commercial in the 80s made famous the question: "Where's the beef?" Good one. And here's an even better one: "Where's the alpha?" You might want to whip this one out the next time you meet with your portfolio manager.
Alpha is the over-and-above-the-expected return. It is the "value added." Therefore, it makes sense that a positive alpha means an investment has outperformed its market-predicted return, while a negative alpha would mean just the opposite. The expected return is calculated by a formula that takes into account the investment's level of unavoidable risk (aka beta).
Ever stepped into an elevator and after the doors close you become aware of an almost-suffocating scent coming from the woman next to you who must have bathed in perfume? Well, as you know, once the doors close you can't escape the smell until the ride is over. This is similar to beta, which is risk that can't be reduced or diversified away. A measure of "systematic" or market related risk, beta is used as a measure relative to a certain index -- such as the S&P 500.
So, for example, let¿s say your portfolio is managed to compete against the S&P 500. If you generate a better return than the index while not taking on added risk (standard deviation of returns) then you get alpha. Low beta means the market-related risk is low and vice versa for high beta.
Another example, let's say a mutual fund or stock has a beta of 1.5 relative to the S&
P500 ¿ that means it is 1.5 times as risky. So, over time, if the S&P 500 goes up 1%, your portfolio should be up 1.5%
plus (one can hope) some percentage of alpha. If the S&P 500 is down 1%, your portfolio should be down 1.5%.
Alpha
and beta are based off of linear regression of a set of data. Warning: this may cause a high school fifth-period flashback,
but it will be over before you know it:
The equation for a line is Y = a + bX.
a = alpha (the Y intercept - the added
value)
b = Beta (the coefficient you multiply X by)
X = S&P 500 (in this case)
Y = your portfolio
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Monday, April 28, 2008
Netezza Unveils Patent-Pending Data Warehouse Functionality at Third Annual European User Forum
Comtex
FRAMINGHAM, Mass., Apr 28, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) ----At its recent European User Forum, Netezza Corporation (NYSE Arca: NZ) unveiled its Compress Engine functionality which will double the speed of its high-performance data warehouse appliance while reducing the data footprint by up to four times. In some cases, customers will realize even greater compression ratios. The Compress Engine, which was announced last December and released on a limited basis, will be available for full distribution this May as part of Release 4.5 of the Netezza appliance.
Among the customers already signed up to use the Netezza Compress Engine software are NYSE Euronext and The Nielsen Company - members of a growing class of businesses faced with rising data volumes and urgent analytic needs. NYSE Euronext, which operates the world's leading and most liquid exchange group, offers the most diverse array of financial products and services. NYSE Euronext implemented the Compress Engine for high-performance analysis on more than 200 terabytes of data.
"We have already realized a significant increase in capacity with Netezza's Compress Engine feature. We more than doubled our existing database capacity by simply upgrading the software on the appliance," said Steve Hirsch, chief data officer, NYSE Euronext.
"With this latest release of the Netezza appliance, we expect to double both query performance and data load speeds, above and beyond the high performance the system already delivers," Hirsch continued. "These performance gains are key for us as they enable the platform to keep pace with our ever increasing data volumes without increasing footprint. Additionally, the improvements allow us to better serve our user community, enabling faster analytics across deeper datasets."
Not Your Father's Compression
Unlike traditional compression approaches used by several of the competitive data warehousing vendors, Netezza's Compress Engine is designed primarily for performance improvement, and not merely to reduce data sizes and system footprints. While other compute-intensive approaches sacrifice performance for the sake of compression, Netezza Compress Engine delivers a significant boost in performance.
Netezza's unique approach employs a patent-pending method for compiling columnar data in all tables of the database, allowing the Netezza appliance to compress the data to use disk much more effectively, greatly increasing query performance as data streams from the disk.
According to Philip Howard, director of Research - Technology at Bloor Research, "While there are lots of companies doing compression, there is an overhead involved in de-compressing the data, so you get a performance hit for tables below a certain size; above that you get a performance benefit. This means that there is an administrative overhead involved in determining which tables to compress. However, Netezza, true to its appliance principles, has implemented compression in such a way that this performance overhead is eliminated so that you get performance benefits with no administrative overhead."
Compress Engine is part of the Netezza's FPGA-Accelerated Streaming Technology (FAST) Engines(TM) framework, the foundation of its patented streaming architecture. Features of the Compress Engine include:
-- Doubling system performance
-- Delivering up to 4x storage capacity
-- Software-only upgrade
-- No tuning or administration required
-- System-wide data compression
-- Decompression at streaming speeds
For more information about Netezza's FAST Engine's framework and Compress Engine, please visit Netezza's blog posting at http://www.beyeblogs.com/netezza/.
Availability
Release 4.5 of the Netezza system will be available in May 2008.
About Netezza Corporation
Netezza is the global leader in data warehouse and analytic appliances that dramatically simplify high-performance analytics for business users across the extended enterprise, delivering significant competitive and operational advantage in today's information-intensive marketplaces. The Netezza Performance Server(R) (NPS(R)) family of streaming analytic(TM) appliances brings appliance simplicity to a broad range of complex data warehouse and analytic challenges. Customers who have realized the benefits of Netezza appliances include Ahold, Amazon.com, CNET Networks, Debenhams, Department of Veterans Affairs, Epsilon, Nationwide, Neiman Marcus, Orange UK, Premier, Inc., Ross Stores, Ryder System, Inc., The Carphone Warehouse, The Sherwin-Williams Company and Virgin Media. Based in Framingham, Mass., Netezza has offices in Washington, DC, the United Kingdom and Asia Pacific. For more information about Netezza, please visit www.netezza.com. Netezza, Netezza Performance Server, NPS, FAST Engines and streaming analytic are trademarks of Netezza Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
SOURCE: Netezza Corporation
For Netezza Corporation Payal Cudia or Ann McDonough, 781-684-0770 Netezza@schwartz-pr.com
Copyright Business Wire 2008
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