If you’re anything like FT Alphaville, you too will be being pushed to your limits by the entirely mind-melded rhetoric coming out of the future of finance space. (Especially if you attend as many fintech panels as we do.) The problem is that the once cutting-edge claims of fintech — which first started doing the rounds in 2011/2012 — have become so established in executive and management consulting circles, they’ve begun to resemble catechism. It’s a self confirming feedback loop unlike any we’ve ever seen before, with little questioning or challenging of the now excessively entrenched assumptions.
But there is one reason not to despair entirely.
It came in the shape of Geoffrey Duncombe, CIO at Two Sigma, one of the world’s most successful quant hedge funds, which counts Renaissance Technologies and DE Shaw as its competitors. You’d think a fund famous for showing the prowess of its quantitative and algorithmic modelling techniques would be firmly on board with the narrative that big data is king and computers are better than people. But here’s the shock. It wasn’t. Duncombe, to the contrary, was fixated by the herding risks being posed by everyone being in on the same big data and AI ideas.
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