Friday, August 7, 2015

BlackRock Betting Big Data Can Provide Boost

BlackRock Inc CEO Larry Fink is betting that a trillion points of data can help revive his firm's ailing stock-picking business.

Even though BlackRock replaced many of its fundamental active equity managers over the past few years, a number of the firm's stock-picking funds are underperforming.

Investors have pulled $7.5 billion from the funds over the past year, according to Morningstar.

To address this, the world's largest asset manager is taking the secret data sauce of its team of quantitative managers, academics and data engineers and feeding it to all of its portfolio managers, including its fundamental active equity team.

The goal: to arm its portfolio managers with data to give them an analytical advantage.

The information ranges from satellite images of cars in retailer parking lots to shipping trends to word search analytics in company earnings calls."

More at BlackRock betting big data can help revive its active equity funds