Man GLG strengthens machine learning focus

By Reporter

— 1 minute read

28 April 2017

Discretionary investment manager Man GLG has created a new role to further develop its machine learning capabilities.

William Ferreira, formerly of Florin Court Capital, has been named as the company’s head of machine learning to oversee the development and application of the technology.

“Machine learning is an area that Man Group has been researching and investing in for a number of years, including via the Oxford-Man Institute, a collaboration with the University of Oxford,” said Man Group managing director for Asia-Pacific Hersh Gandhi.

“We believe that introducing machine learning techniques will provide our discretionary investment managers with an enhanced toolkit, complementing their existing rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis.”

In his new role, Mr Ferreira will support the development of Man GLG’s machine learning programs, as well supply portfolio managers with new tools and techniques and work alongside the business’ existing teams to apply machine learning technology to news and social media analysis.

Mr Ferreira told InvestorDaily that machine learning techniques were becoming increasingly relevant to discretionary investment management and as such it was an important avenue for businesses like Man GLG to explore.

“Discretionary investment management involves distilling a large and heterogeneous collection of data-sets, including numeric, textual and unstructured data to form a view,” he said.

“The types and complexity of data relevant to our business are growing exponentially, and we view machine learning as the ideal toolkit to help us address this complexity, and enhance our informational capabilities.”

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