(Harvest) The first investors to take advantage of computers to process data and make investments were ‘quant funds’ that continue today to be successful at scale. The tools at their disposal were statistics and linear models – limited by the computational capacity and the availability of structured data to apply statistics to. Today – the successful quants have become enormous, managing $30+ billion and the smaller players moved towards high frequency trading. At their core, traditional ‘quant’ strategies are based on statistical correlations: i.e. linear models.

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