At the beginning of the twentieth century, Scott’s Porage Oats were marketed as being produced entirely through an automated process: “untouched by human hand”. Towards the end of the century, a new variety of asset management could lay claim to such a slogan – “quants” or quantitative managers fed mathematical models of financial markets into computers, which were then supposed to select stocks with none of the biases and fallibility of human stock selectors.
Investors were easily convinced of this concept, perhaps seduced by impressive technical descriptions of models, perhaps dubious about the possibility of traditional asset managers beating the market. Large amounts of money poured into quant funds, both long-only and hedge funds.
“Assets managed quantitatively grew phenomenally in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” says Martin Knowles, head of equity manager research at investment consultant Towers Watson.