Matt Levine, Columnist

Robot Traders and Super Hedge Funds

Also entrenched managers, material adverse effects, security guards, bonus pools and mulicorns.

March 16, 2017 at 1:28 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Automating Steve Cohen.

Here is a fun story about Point72 Asset Management, Steven A. Cohen's almost-hedge-fund, and its efforts to transform from a classic hedge fund run by warring cliques of smart humans with ulcers into a quantitative hedge fund run by calm quiet rational computers. I feel like I read stories like that a lot: Point72, which is huge and famous and oddly institutionalized considering that it is technically a family office, seems to be at the forefront of the trend of human-driven hedge funds reinventing themselves as computer-driven ones (or at least talking about it). But what is new to me in this story is the description of Point72's plan for "parsing troves of data from its portfolio managers and testing models that mimic their trades":