Would You Give Your Portfolio To A Black Box?

The creation was such a black box that even its creators didn’t fully understand how it worked. That gave Ellis pause. He’s not an engineer and wasn’t intimately involved in the technology’s creation, but he instinctively knew that one explanation—“I can’t tell you why …”—would never fly with big clients looking for answers when Man inevitably lost some of their money.

The Man Group, a publicly-traded British hedge fund company managing $96 billion, has a new hook for investors – a black box AI software program that’s been managing money for the firm and generating good returns. The firm itself makes it clear that even they don’t know why it’s doing what it does – the thing is designed to find opportunities to make money and it carries this out on its own.

And so far, it’s working.

I was fascinated by today’s new Bloomberg Markets piece on the situation, which I’ll send you to in a moment. Our strategy – which is to be over the top and almost unnecessarily transparent in educating clients on our portfolios – stands in direct contrast with this. I suppose the investor groups for these two different approaches are self-selecting to some degree. Some people really want to understand what’s going on with their money while others will accept the fact that maybe they can’t but someone else will.

Read this and let me know what you think here when you’re done.

Source:

The Massive Hedge Fund Betting on AI (Bloomberg Markets)