Browsing: Artificial Intelligence

By Nicolas Rabener, CAIA, Factor Research & Karl Rogers, ACE Capital Investments INTRODUCTION Anyone who has watched the hit TV show “Billions” will have noticed that the hedge fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod and his former lieutenant, and occasional nemesis, Taylor Mason have totally different trading styles. Bobby, although mathematically gifted,Read More

Assuming that the growth of environmental, social, and governance-based investing is not yet at, but is approaching, a tipping point, and assuming that knowing that tipping point with precision will yield alpha, can machine learning help find it? That is the question posed in a recent paper by the globalRead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association Maybe Howard Marks was right when he wrote about Investing Without People. In that memo he talks about the machine which can largely excel at anything that is quantitative and can be counted: in games like chess and Go, the machine can study andRead More

By Rick Roche, CAIA, Little Harbor Advisors, LLC Part 2 of a two-part series on The Alternative Imperative in the COVID Era. In Part 2, the author tackles notorious technology laggards. This piece transitions to alternative data pioneers (Alt-Venturers) and the 4-1-1 on Alt-Data: Hype or Hope? The author dispelsRead More

By Rick Roche, CAIA, Managing Director of Little Harbor Advisors, LLC Part 1 of a two-part series on Alternative Investment Data (Alt-Data) in the COVID Era. In Part 1, the author makes the case for high-frequency, short-interval Alt-Data while discussing three primary drawbacks of interpreting official economic statistics amid aRead More

By Mehrzad Mahdavi, PhD, Executive Director, FDP Institute Imagine if your social media posts or articles were generated automatically by AI as if they were authored by you…well, that day is here! The next generation of NLP called “Generative Pre-trained Transformer, third generation”, or GPT-3, was recently released for betaRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INVESTING IN AI VERSUS AI INVESTING “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” – Sam Altman If investors are looking for that one great AI company that will also end theRead More

Artificial intelligence, understood in a broad sense to include Big Data and machine learning, is a vast as-yet unplumbed disruption for portfolio management and trading as for so much else. People are still trying to get a handle on it. These are fields in which there is a great dealRead More

By Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director, CAIA Association The FDP Institute recently spoke with Al Yazdani, the chief data scientist and founder of Calcolo Analytics, regarding his forthcoming article in the Journal of Financial Data Science: “Machine Learning Prediction of Recessions: An Imbalanced Classification Approach.” The authorRead More

A recent working paper for the European Corporate Governance Institute maintains that technology has the potential to make hedge funds and private equity more accessible to the retail investor. The paper, by Omololu Bajulaiye of Tilburg University, along with some other scholars begins with the non-controversial proposition that venture capital,Read More

This article was co-authored by Dr Mehrzad Mahdavi and Hossein Kazemi, Phd, CFA from FDP Institute, and William J. Kelly from CAIA Association Digital transformation, with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies at its core, has created unprecedented challenges and opportunities across all industries.  The financial sector will be profoundly affected as demonstrated by numerous use casesRead More

A recent test of machine learning in pursuit of alpha finds results similar to what established literature already suggests in looking specifically at the value of algorithms in the US market. But this study then goes global, in a way that most of existing literature on this question has not,Read More

By Ashby Monk, Executive and Research Director at Global Projects Center, Stanford University & Dane Rook, Research Engineer at Global Projects Center, Stanford University “The world needs institutional investors to save society as we know it.” Say these words to your mother, and she may check your temperature; say them at aRead More

There has been a lot of commentary in the financial press about the idea of “fat tails,” that is, about the idea that disasters are more common than a normal or bell curve view of probability would lead one to expect. Indeed, one might even say that there is someRead More

By Dr. Mehrzad Mahdavi, Executive Director, CEO Financial Data Professionals Institute According to a recent WSJ article, (subscription required) many companies have just discovered that AI is not some kind of magic sauce that could be poured over any business process to transform it into a moneymaking machin. The article also points outRead More

A co-founder of Quantigic Solutions has presented what he calls “the freshmanlevel” answer to the question: why did dollar-neutral quant trading strategies, such as equities stat arb, fail so markedly during the COVID-19 market sell-off? Zura Kakushadze, a professor at the Free University of Tblisi, is on reasonably solid groundRead More

Dmitry Borisenko, an independent scholar and a former quantitative analyst at Krauspartner Investment Solutions, posted a complicated article last year with the deceptively simple title, Dissecting Momentum: We Need to Go Deeper. As the title suggests, Borisenko begins with the momentum strategy as a means of reaching alpha. Variables basedRead More

By Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP Now that this attention-grabbing headline has drawn you in, let me clarify. Data scientists should not partake in illegal drugs. Data scientists should participate in pharmacological research, as artificial intelligence and machine learning can add value, even when the data scientist does notRead More

The FICC Market Standards Board Ltd. (FMSB) is a London-based standards body for participants in the wholesale fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) markets. It has been looking into the root causes of market misconduct, and pursuant to that research it recently published a report on the “themes and challenges”Read More

In October 2019, Google announced quantum supremacy: the creation of a special-purpose computer using quantum processors that could perform a calculation impossible for a digital computer. A computer Google named Sycamore resolved in just three minutes a computational challenge that would have required a digital computer 10,000 years. Remarkable asRead More

A recent literature review conveys the state of scholarly understanding of ESG alpha.It also discusses how machine learning may help alternatives managers to track, and at the right time to pounce upon, a critical tipping point. Joachim Erhardt, a managing director at Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) and an independent scholar, startsRead More

Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director of Content Strategy, CAIA Association CAIA Association and FDP Institute recently had a conversation with Mike Chen and George Mussalli. Dr. Chen is the director of equity investments and Mr. Mussalli is the managing director and CIO of equity investments at PanAgora.Read More

Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director of Content Strategy, CAIA Association Michael Oliver Weinberg and Peter Strikwerda work at the Dutch pension fund APG and serve as the head of hedge funds and alternative alpha and the global head of digital and innovation, respectively. CAIA Association and FDPRead More

Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director of Content Strategy, CAIA Association “Building your dream has to start now There’s no other road to take You won’t make a mistake I’ll be guiding you You have to believe we are magic Nothin’ can stand in our way” – OliviaRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 8, Issue 3 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is the official publication of the CAIA Association.  Access to the most current issue is an exclusive benefit of CAIA Membership whileRead More

What Does Machine Learning Have to do with Fama and French? By Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director, CAIA Association “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what itRead More

Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director of Content Strategy at CAIA Association Do you want to be in the room where it happens, when “The Smartest Guys in the Room”* are plotting their fraud and trying to prevent the demise of Enron? Look around at how lucky weRead More

John Bowman, CFA, Senior Managing Director at CAIA Association “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” (Mr. White to 007, Spectre) Despite the crystal blue island water, softly rolling Caribbean tide, and perfect skies outside the hotel all week, I opened my conference wrap-up panel reminding delegates forRead More

Investment management firms are increasingly hard-pressed to hedge away risks, increase alpha, and lower costs: a daunting agenda. One way of going about that is by knowing what is going on in the underlying markets more quickly than the competitors and counterparties do.  To that end: alternative data. Investment firms,Read More

By Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP | Managing Director, Content Strategy at CAIA Association Recently, CAIA Association sat down for a conversation with Guen Donde, the Head of Research for the Institute of Business Ethics (IBE).  Life moves pretty fast in the world of GDPR, big data, and artificialRead More

There is a high rate of failure among quant funds. These include smart beta, factor investing, statistical arbitrage, and CTAs. Such false positive strategies are a widespread industry problem. Since psychiatrists have long traded on the ability of the human mind to find an elaborate narrative in a random inkRead More

Until the final days of 2019, it has been a quiet year for high-frequency trading-related news. The whole concept of a trade executed in nanoseconds, and the related concept of a trading program managed with only sporadic human intervention or oversight, have all faded into background assumptions. What remains isRead More

Machine learning as a way of managing a portfolio is a “wave of the future” with a lot of sea to cover before it breaks on the shore. Meson Capital Partners has sent its investors an update and summary for 2019 Q3 regarding its managed market neutral fund, and thisRead More

A report from CREATE in collaboration with BNY Mellon looks at two related megatrends in investing—climate change and artificial intelligence. It asks in each case: how is this trend perceived in terms of opportunities and risks? What are the specific investment issues involved or solutions likely to be adopted? AndRead More