A recent Northern Trust survey found that fundamental active managers are quickly taking up data science as part of their investment process, but it still remains fairly disorganized industry-wide, reports Institutional Investor.
Northern Trust surveyed 300 asset managers, with 98% of them reporting that they are either interested in, planning to use, or are already using data science tools in their firm’s investment approach. Data sets are used to inform advisors on risks and opportunities when making adjustments to a portfolio, as well as executing trades automatically in response to trends or signals discovered.
Data sets are being used more often to evaluate performance, such as that seen within environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. Most of those who responded to the survey reported their use of ESG data sets from sources such as MSCI, Wolfe, and Axioma to formulate and maintain their investment processes. These data sets are used by active managers to formulate ways to build alpha within a fund exceeding the returns that a passive management fund would provide.
“There is a trend in the industry of moving away from an analog investment process to one that takes more advantage of data and technology,” Marc Mallett, Northern Trust’s head of strategy for asset servicing, told Institutional Investor in an interview.
The biggest challenge these days in data analytics is finding a way to filter and process all of the data available in a way that is productive and efficient. 57% of those surveyed said that their firms lacked a central platform for processing and consolidating data, despite 83% reporting that they anticipated the investment capital going to investment data sourcing would either stay the same or increase over last year.
“Today, everybody has access to more information than they can possibly analyze,” he said. “So what we’re seeing now is managers asking themselves the question: how do we best use the information that we have?”
T. Rowe Price has more than 80 years in the investment industry and touts over 70 funds with four to five star Overall Morningstar Ratings. The firm has more than 700 investment professionals, all working to use the latest field research and data for their active management funds. They currently offer five different actively managed ETFs, guided by portfolio managers averaging 17 years with the company.
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