Speaking at the Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association (SIAA) conference this week, Armina Rosenberg, co-founder of Minotaur Capital, explained that the firm’s flagship Global Opportunities Fund utilises a technology-driven, AI-led approach to investing.
The global equities fund, launched in May 2024, integrates fundamental analysis with proprietary AI and large language model (LLM) tools to enhance market analysis, idea generation and portfolio construction.
“We use AI for absolutely everything at Minotaur Capital,” Rosenberg said.
“Part of that is because those plug-and-play tools are not available right now, so what we’ve had to do is build our own. Our tool is called Taurient.”
Its proprietary AI, Taurient, uses several LLMs to identify quality-listed opportunities across the globe, she explained, scanning some 35,000 news articles a week to locate such companies.
“Taurient does everything – if you think about the first problem that a fund manager faces, it’s a search problem, so there’s 60,000 listed companies in the world. There’s 10,000 if you limit that to $1 billion+ companies, and most fund managers deal with that search problem either by narrowing it down … or using what we think are rudimentary quant filters,” Rosenberg said.
“What we’ve used Taurient for is to solve that idea-generation problem first. We scan 35,000 news articles a week looking for companies that are undergoing a strategy change – that’s a thesis that we hold as portfolio managers, of a good time to look at a company because it could be mispriced.”
After its software compiles and interrogates the articles, it then provides a rapid assessment of whether the fund manager should look into the company in further detail or not. This process, which would previously take five days to complete, has been reduced to a couple of minutes, according to the co-founder.
“It basically provides a report that says what the company does, its revenue and earning drivers, the bull and the bear case, what makes it interesting, can it double in three years or 10x in 10 years,” she said.
“That’s a report that we used to get our junior investment analysts to create and it would take them maybe five days to do. Now that five-day report takes us a couple of minutes to run with Taurient, so getting huge time efficiencies in doing that.”
Looking at AI adoption in the investment management industry more broadly, Rosenberg compared it to the rapid use of Microsoft Excel in the 1990s.
“I think AI, people are quite scared of it, but it’s kind of like Excel in the 1990s. We used to do discount and cash flow models using pen and paper – now we use Excel. It’s going to be the same thing with AI, so we’ll do investment management using AI as part of the process,” she said.
A report from the World Economic Forum earlier this year found financial services employees worldwide are at the forefront of embracing digitisation and automation.
Namely, it revealed that while 86 per cent of employers across all industries expect AI and information processing technologies to significantly transform their business by 2030, the financial services sector leads the way, with a staggering 97 per cent of employers anticipating similar changes.
“Increased digitalisation is seen as the primary driver of transformation in the financial services and capital markets sector over the next five years, alongside adaptation to climate change and slower economic growth,” the World Economic Forum said.
