The Next Generation of Hedge Fund Stars: Data-Crunching Computers

Every five minutes a satellite captures images of China’s biggest cities from space.

Thousands of miles away in California, a computer looks at the shadows of the buildings in the images and draws a conclusion: China’s real estate boom is slowing. Traders at BlackRock, the money management giant, then use the data to help choose whether to buy or sell the stocks of Chinese developers. “The machine is able to deal with some of the very complex decisions,” said Jeff Shen, co-chief investment officer at Scientific Active Equity, BlackRock’s quantitative trading, or quant, arm in San Francisco. The future star of the hedge fund industry is not the next William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn or George Soros. Rather, it is a computer like the one at Scientific Active Equity, which sifts through data like satellite images from China every day.

Math whizzes have long dominated the hedge fund universe, but until recently, only a handful of well-known firms like Renaissance Technologies, the D. E. Shaw Group and AQR Capital Management used mathematical models and computers to plot out trading techniques. And other than the occasional blowup, as when Long-Term Capital Management went bust in spectacular fashion in 1998 after its models failed to factor in the possibility of a Russian government debt default, the world of quantitative trading has remained out of the limelight.

Now, as the financial world faces dismal returns and investor criticism over high fees, hedge fund managers are turning to computers to make decisions that used to be left to humans about which stocks to buy and sell, for example.

Celebrity investors like Mr. Ackman are slowly being replaced by teams of Ph.D. holders who develop mathematical equations for trading and systems to scrape huge sets of data for patterns. For instance, the billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, who runs the Tudor Investment Corporation, needed to make changes after investors pulled more than $2 billion from his firm, which now manages $10.6 billion.

So he cut staff and brought in mathematicians and scientists to build up an analytical team. Other hedge funds have made similar moves. “We’re seeing a kind of bifurcation among hedge funds, with some moving towards more quant-driven or automated style, while others are turning towards a more ‘long-only’ model, where they are judged on longer-term investment performance,” said Craig Coben, global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Big institutional investors are also diverting more money to the hedge fund firms that use computer-driven hedge fund strategies. While the hedge fund industry in recent months has suffered the biggest quarterly outflow since the financial crisis, investors continue to allocate money to hedge funds that use computer-driven strategies. Investors have put $7.9 billion into quantitative hedge funds this year, and the universe of hedge funds devoted to these strategies has more than doubled, to $900 billion from $408 billion seven years ago, according to Hedge Fund Research.