By: Al Naqvi
This is quick snapshot of some thought provoking ideas
Marshall Wace uses MW TOPS trading system which collects investment ideas from over two hundred sell side institutions and independent research providers. With millions of trades conducted on the platform, the TOPS architecture allows for global, diversified portfolios with differing risk and trading profiles. With the TOPS architecture, the firm is able to offer both fundamental and systematic styles of investment and integrated them to alpha.
MW claims to focus on ‘Quantamental’ investment tools which find trading signals in complex data patterns. Marshall Wace says that the firm uses innovative dataset knowledge and systematic investment discipline to augment and improve its fundamental portfolio management approach. The firms also claims the development of entirely new strategies from data.
MW has now announced that it is raising a $1 Billion fund. It is expected to be part of the TOPS system. The real questions are:
- What would it mean to integrate ESG with quantamental strategies? In other words, in addition to fundamentals and systematic or market based strategy development, integrating ESG would add a third factor.
- The second question is what would an AI solution look like when ESG is integrated with quantamental?
Discovering and identifying investment strategies is a complicated business. Add to that the ESG component and the job becomes extremely hard.