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Wall Street's Research Jobs Are the Most Likely To Be Upended By AI (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Research analysts are the most likely employees on Wall Street to find themselves working with -- or being replaced by -- robots, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates. By next year, some 75% of banks and financial firms will either explore or implement artificial intelligence technologies, harnessing a variety of digital services to extract insights from mountains of data. While AI is probably near the peak of its hype cycle, several factors have helped it gain traction in recent years, according to Greenwich. Billions of images and documents are now available online for training computers to spot patterns and other high-level tasks. Advances in graphical processing units, which are adept at the kind of data crunching required by AI, are making sifting through daunting datasets much easier. The cloud has also made it cheaper for researchers and startups to boost their computing power to service sophisticated AI-enabled systems. AI makes sense for financial research, as machines can crunch reams of data more quickly than human analysts and, with the right data, identify obscure correlations and patterns.
And they play off the general rise in the stock market as their ability to make people money.
That is one way, but another trick is to launch dozens of funds, and shutdown those that lose money. So if you start 32 funds, and purely by chance half beat the market after a year, so you shutdown the other 16. After two year, you have eight left, after three years, you have four, ... and finally after 5 years, you have a fund that beat the market five years in a row, which you can then promote as obvious proof that you are smart at picking stocks.