HedgeCo.Net (New York) – Blake Grossman, the head of Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco said “We didn’t set out to be a hedge fund giant,” Nevertheless, BGI managesalmost $1.7 trillion in assets and has a stake in 65 of the world’s 100 largest pension plans, making them one of the most powerful forces in money management today.
New technology goes into the picking of the shares, such as computer software called Optimizer, which crunches corporate earnings data and dozens of other variables for almost every stock in the world. Ph.D.s, mathematicians and other quantitative analysts, or quants, spend their time at BGI designing investing strategies for thousands of stocks, bonds and currencies and then use computers to pick which ones to buy and sell.
Grossman has used his quants to transform a firm built on index investing into one of the world’s largest hedge fund managers. In an article by Bloomberg, it was reported that Grossman is converting corporate and public pension funds into what BGI calls a scientific approach to hedge funds.
