People can’t get enough quant. Investors want in to the exclusion of essentially everything else. Hedge funds are throwing stupid money at completely financially-untested nerds with the right Ph.Ds. And everyone else is becoming a quant. Shipping giant Maersk is a quant. Steve Cohen’s a quant. Ken Griffin and PTJ, too.

Or are they? Are they really? Or did they just invent a terrible new compound word to hide the fact that they’re all basically still doing the same thing they’ve been doing for decades with some better computers?

A middle ground has recently emerged: "quantamental" investing, a merger of computer and human-based decision making…. They’re typically fundamentalists at heart who borrow ideas from quantitative funds. They might hire data scientists to develop machine-learning techniques, which can then scour massive data sets for trends in order to better inform human stock-picking. Or they might use quantitative analysis to better manage risk. It’s a way of leveraging the power of technology and today’s flood of data to further the ability of investors in their bottom-up evaluation.

The Hot New Hedge Fund Flavor Is ‘Quantamental’ [Bloomberg BusinessWeek]