Fundamental Investors Looking For Places To Throw The Word ‘Quant’

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]