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Ex-Barclays Quant Wants to Clean Up the $11 Trillion Index Boom

  • Laurence Black goes from making market gauges to rating them
  • New firm sees trouble in complex and concentrated products
Reflection of stock readings in window

Photographer: Hiroshi Watanabe/Getty Images

After spending most of his career helping indexes take over the investment world, these days Laurence Black deals with the fallout from the $11 trillion monster he helped unleash.

As a creator of complex quantitative gauges at Barclays Plc, he contributed to a benchmark boom that critics say has spun wildly out of control, with around 3 million in existence globally compared with about 45,000 listed stocks.