asset management

Quant Invasion Continues As Data Infrastructure Overtakes Eyeballs

Clues... At it's core, this is much of what we are ever doing as a research and advisory operation: Looking for clues. Ideally, we are looking for the kinds of clues that recur as patterns. And then, tell the stories from those clues and patterns. (Better yet, if we can devise a mechanism to systematically discover more clues and more patterns with regularity, then we will have developed something quite valuable. But, I digress...) So, it was with great fascination that we discovered one of the next important clues; some evidence of the nature of transformation in the trading and investment world - and that which is indicative of so many other sympathetic movements in the broader financial industry. This is the falling of dominoes that we often refer to. Here's the gist: Quantitative methods are set to pervade much more of the traditional asset management community and a broader cross-section of the strategy spectrum. Likely more than expected. Reason being: Fee compression renders traditional investment processes too expensive and [...]

By |2020-08-17T07:14:07-04:00August 29th, 2018|For Subscribers|

Context Machine: Introducing a Techno-Operational Benchmarking Framework for Asset Managers

Executive Summary Riding the wave of the FinTech juggernaut, technology now permeates all aspects of the financial services ecosystem; front-to-back, top-to-bottom and across the entire business segment spectrum. Any lingering gaps between technology strategy and business strategy are closing; making them indistinguishable from one another. And yet, for all the promise of the revolutions in artificial intelligence, cloud and big data, such attempts are met with unforgiving challenges. Most players in this ecosystem are still using dulled intelligence tools to navigate this rapidly changing and increasingly techno-centric landscape. Finding balance between the primary engines of productivity - information technology and human capital - continues to be conducted like a game of Marco Polo. Operational alpha - a kissing cousin of terms like digital transformation and process re-engineering - is a growing theme among the pantheon of new vernacular in this space that seeks to illuminate such challenges. However, despite its descriptive elegance, operational alpha remains an emerging and elusive concept. In the midst of an evolving supply chain, solution providers [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:17:52-04:00October 31st, 2017|Open|

Operational Clues: Asset Managers Shifting Strategies

You can track shifting asset class and/or strategy allocations over several years for a long list of asset managers, and then add it all up to arrive at a data-driven industry trend. Easier said than done. This is an extremely heavy lift without the aid of a database that has already aggregated such information - if at all.  But, we think there is another way to generate such a signal that yields a similar conclusion (if you know how to read the tea leaves). Hint: As always, it still comes down to the people... That preamble aside for the moment, we will spare you the geek-speak and give you the cart before the horse: In the exhibit below, based on US Securities and Exchange Commission Form ADV data for 181 large asset managers (w/ AUM >$10 billion) over the 5 years ending March 2017, Alphacution's newest analytic - assets under management per employee, or AUM/e - indicates, upon calculation of total weighted average AUM/e for all reporting funds per period, that strategy trade durations have been lengthening. Translation: On average, asset [...]

By |2020-08-17T07:14:09-04:00June 28th, 2017|For Subscribers|