It was a whirlwind week. After attending two big conferences, I landed in Vancouver Friday where I presented at the International Metal Writers Conference. Markets continued to close at record highs, even as political uncertainty remained and the threat of terrorism loomed large over Western nations. Last Monday, gold flashed a bullish signal we haven’t seen in over a year.
There’s much to talk about! Below are five things you need to know from the week now behind us.
1. Quants Now Control Wall Street
A special report by the Wall Street Journal last week confirmed what I’ve been saying for a while: Wall Street is now run by the quantitative analysts, or quants. Numbered are the days when traders and fund managers picked stocks on gut instinct. Today, a decision is made only after whole oceans of data have been processed using sophisticated algorithms.
And yet quants’ role has even further room to expand. As the WSJ reports, quant hedge funds now represent 27 percent of all U. S. stock trades by investors, up from 14 percent in 2013.
To get some idea of the type of analysis quants conduct, take a look at the matrix below. Of course, their methods are far more sophisticated, their data crunched in a matter of nanoseconds, but it’s helpful to see how they might codify many points of data.
This post was published at GoldSeek on Wednesday, 31 May 2017.
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