October 2014

October 2014 Meeting

When
October 15, 2014 | 12:00pm - 2:00pm

TOPIC
Predictive Power of the NY Fed's Empire State Manufacturing Survey

ABSTRACT
The Great Recession had a massive negative impact on many company's sales due to external influences which were outside of the control of those companies. However, companies can benefit from understanding economic predictors and anticipate future external impacts on sales. So, imagine the president of a large company asks you to create a leading indicators model of sales. What do you do? This talk will discuss my team's search for economic leading indicators that would be useful in predicting future sales volumes and outline the approach used to build the resulting predictive model. The components of the NY Fed's Empire State Manufacturing Survey will be highlighted for their predictive ability. The econometric approach used will be discussed and the resulting model of future sales using solely external economic indicators. Lessons learned and some reasoning behind the predictability of the indicators will be offered.

Speaker

Lucas Finco

Lucas Finco

Con Edison

Lucas Finco is currently the Manager of Analytics for Energy Efficiency (EE) and Demand Management (DM) at Consolidated Edison Company of New York. His responsibilities include the analysis and planning of the company's EE and DM programs. Examples range from data mining current ConEd customers for possible DM program participants and identifying leading indicators for EE programs, to performing cost/benefit analyses and reporting analyses and program results to the Department of Public Service in Albany. Previously at ConEd, Lucas worked in the Compensation and Leadership & Career Development departments.

Prior to working at ConEd, Lucas founded Quadlet LLC to perform business process analysis and task automation for clients. He worked in a wide diversity of industries such as paper production, computer repair, web database development, education, equities & derivatives trading, real estate, fashion, retail, and transportation.

Lucas has a Bachelor's of Science in Applied Math, Physics and Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. At Madison, he discovered a new mathematical system that exhibited Chaos and was involved in particle physics research at the DESY collider in Hamburg, Germany and the CMS detector of LHC at CERN in Geneva, France. He also won two awards for research excellence; the University Bookstore Research Award for work in Chaos Theory, and the Hilldale Research Fellowship for work with carbon nanotubes. Lucas has a Masters of Arts in Physics from Stony Brook University. His research at Stony Brook focused on quantum computing, both in solid state and optical medium. He also has an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business, with a focus in finance and entrepreneurship.