Defined contribution plan sponsors are facing a world of disruption, from artificial intelligence and big data to the Great Resignation and the shifting of power from employers to employees. The ones that thrive will be those that flip old narratives to move forward, said Shawn Kanungo, a disruption strategist and partner at Queen & Rook Capital. […]
With a rise in big data and artificial intelligence, institutional investors are starting to look for staff with different skills. Much of the success in the investment management industry depends on managers’ abilities to analyze information in a systematic way and generate actionable insights, says Jason Stefanelli, director and head of Canada at William Blair […]
There’s a crisis in financial research because of statistical shortfalls, says Marcos López de Prado, a professor of practice at Cornell University’s school of engineering and chief investment officer of True Positive Technologies. “When a journal receives a paper, they don’t know how many experiments the researcher has conducted and, as a result, they cannot […]
Traditionally, all finance students had to learn statistics, and, in the future, this will likely shift into finance students requiring machine learning, said John Hull, professor of finance and Maple Financial Group Chair in derivatives and risk management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “It’s not that our students are actually going […]
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.” Opening the keynote address at the Northern Finance Association Conference in September with this quote by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase, Campbell Harvey, professor of finance at Duke University, spoke about the challenges of using data empirically. He cited being careful about data selection, delegation, […]
How can search terms help predict elections? Do parents secretly favour boys over girls? For Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google and the author of Everybody Lies, the answer to these questions isn’t found in traditional polls commonly used in most sectors, but rather in the billions of Google searches people make every day. Exploring choice […]
Across the entire asset management value chain, data is helping traditional managers improve, a new study by McKinsey & Company found. Data can improve investment performance by helping eliminate bias in decision making, discovering new sources of alpha through alternative data sets and enhancing the research process, the study said. But big data isn’t just […]
The industrial revolution has shaped the world, demonstrated by three dimensions: communications, energy and transportation, according to one futurist. However, the lifeblood of a new industrial revolution will be data, says Nikolas Badminton, futurist speaker, researcher and chief executive officer of Exponential Minds, noting all industries will be touched by the momentum this has created. “The signals of […]
While estimating the longevity of a pension plan’s membership isn’t a new concept, developments in using big data and new tools in predictive modelling could go a long way to making predictions more accurate. “Traditionally, most benefit plans were using standard mortality tables and not really differentiating how much longevity risk they had,” says Manuel […]
While the role of data in equities management is important, human expertise is still key, according to speakers at the CFA Society Toronto’s 2019 equities symposium on Jan. 22. “If you want to beat the market as an active manager you have to believe you know something that the market hasn’t incorporated into prices,” said […]