This article isn’t very good or informative. Many, maybe even most, of these “black-box” strstegies are derivarive of work done over 40s years ago at Chicago. C

This article isn’t very good or informative. Many, maybe even most, of these “black-box” strstegies are derivarive of work done over 40s years ago at Chicago. Certainly there are a few firms doing truly innovative work such as RenTec or 2 Sigma. But a lot are like AQR: just using publically available academic knowledge but doing it better than everyone else. Also I think this article is overstating the prevalence of quant strategies and funds. At my old portfolio analytics firm, we had hundreds of hedge fund clients and not a single one was doing fully automated trades. Of course they had optimization engines and tech to squeeze a few bips here and there, but the fundamental ideas were still generated the old fashion way (through sleep deprived analysts).