Having surged for years, quant hedge funds dominate stock trading.
Quant-focused hedge funds – they specialize in algorithmic rather than human trading – gained $4.6 billion of net new assets in the first quarter, and now hold $932 billion, or about 30% to the $3.1 trillion in total hedge-fund assets. At the same time, investors yanked $5.5 billion out of non-quant hedge funds. This comes on top of last year when investors had yanked $83 billion out of non-quant hedge funds and had poured $13 billion into quant funds.
Trading by quant funds has soared to 27.1% of all stock market trading, up from 13.6% in 2013, according to a series of reports by the Wall Street Journal. These trades can last from minutes to months. Quant funds are different from algo-driven high-frequency trading (HFT) where trades last only milliseconds. And they’re different from ETFs which also use algorithms.
This chart shows the soaring share of trading by quant funds (red line), compared to the largest other types of investors – traditional asset managers, non-quant hedge funds, and bank proprietary trading. Another 25% to 27% of the trading is done by other investor types, including individual investors, not shown in this chart:
This post was published at Wolf Street on May 22, 2017.
Follow on Twitter
Recent Comments