This is going to put the little excel based Monte Carlo simulation I teach to shame.

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/watson_in_finance.shtml

Challenges in the finance industry

Financial services firms face some of the most complex information challenges in business today. The amount of information available to support decision making is staggering. Reuters publishes 9000 pages of financial news every day. Wall Street analysts produce five research documents every minute. Financial services professionals receive hundreds of e-mails a day. And these firms have access to data about millions of transactions.

IBM is partnering with financial institutions to teach Watson the business of retail and institutional banking. The ability to consume vast amounts of information to identify patterns and make informed hypotheses naturally make Watson an excellent solution to help make informed decisions about investment choices, trading patterns and risk management.

Watson is being designed as the ultimate financial services assistant, capable of performing deep content analysis and evidence-based reasoning to accelerate and improve decisions, reduce operational costs, and optimize outcomes.

In a bank, an advisor can use Watson to make better recommendations for financial products to customers based on comprehensive analysis of market conditions, the client’s past decisions, recent life events, and available offerings.

The ability to take context into account during the hypothesis generation and scoring phases of the processing pipeline allows Watson to address these complex financial services problems and assist financial services professionals in making better decisions.