I’ve been with bank and seen the rapid automation of tons of work that people used to do before. Bank is heavily investing in technology and trying to streamline pretty much everything that they can do. Technology jobs have flooded the career section but still hard to see AI related jobs. I also expect in near future that some aspects of my work will be automated but the communication part won’t so that’s good. I also know one firm who is trying to replace excel but haven’t gone so far in order to be acquired by a bank.
What future holds for analysts? I think writing reports and building models can easily to automated so we are going to see job cuts there although I still believe industry specific knowledge will be valued. What new skill sets are you guys developing to offset this wave of automation?
Right, this is happening and massive jobs have/will be eliminated. Especially low/mid level.
Naw. People like me are perfectly safe. At the top there will always be a need for strategists and model builders. So called “AI” is dumber than hell, it’s crude “narrow-AI”. No computer can build the stuff I do; requires analysis, synthesis, intuition, out of the box thinking. If it’s just some computer built model, then it sucks, because everyone can possess that (exception being some specialized quant stuff).
Can’t argue with that. Assigning a fair value for the S&P 500 of 1387 on Sept 1st, 2015 is truly out of the box thinking. LOL. Not only could automation/AI do what you do way better than you, a blind monkey throwing darts would be better at this point.
And then I beat the market from that date to present, case in point.
My assessment of fair value stands, the S&P500 is a death trap, much better places to be (CSI300). A computer model CAN NOT synthesize all the factors I have in this case. If the moron writing the model were capable of doing so, he wouldn’t be wasting time writing the model.
Truly you are above all of humanity in all ways, PA. We should all bow down to such a superior being and sacrifice our bodies and souls so that he may achieve everything he desires.
i’ve easily been able to capture more arb profits over the years due to mindless HFTs and algos than dumb human traders. humans trade with emotion and it is difficult to read through that emotion, at least in the short-term. HFTers/algos trade on rules. sometimes those rules can’t deal with new information.
on several occasions i’ve been able to buy ETFs at less than NAV and see low-to-mid single digit risk-free profits in major size in a matter of minutes. even humans can’t make it that easy.
if you can make money doing it, you’ll get paid to do it. that’s the bottom line. how many ongoing QA testers and CS support people will be required per algorithm? automating our industry is expensive and often incomplete.
experience trading against algos is how i am adapting to algos.
There are opportunities to exploit with all this automation of stuff. There is already a huge “asleep at the wheel” trend in America, and this will make is worse. When things change suddenly, humans who have actually been awake and paying attention (seems very few of us) have the edge, we can act before the robots and their maintenance crew figure out what happened. Also in these situations their simple rules-based systems can end up creating mispricings instead of exploiting them. See “OMG China” a few years ago, and the vol meltdown a few weeks ago.
If your job doesn’t need much interactions with stakeholders then it doesn’t matter how much analysis you put into model because machine can do that as well and maybe better than you. Being said that, even though you are in BO but you constantly interact with internal and external stakeholders and use that as an input for your work then automation would be of limited use.
Agree…Just as it was for blue collar workers in the 70s-present…it is the lower end of the pyramid where it gets wiped out…but this is the case for everything right? There are other reasons but automation was one of the reasons why I jumped ship from equity hedge fund to PE fund - venture fund and real estate. When you’re thinking about investing at the seed level, there are no public information…it’s all direct talk with the mgmt and doing the work on foot…same can be said of real estate. Hopefully this will buy me some time until my retirement while the equity research and trading gets wiped out (90%) by automation…A lot of the hedge funds are already automating in some way…annual barclays hedge fund survey has it that 69% of funds use automation of some sort ie no more humans needed…
I’m working on a model for some VCs guys right now. As infinitybenzo says above, ain’t no dummy-AI gonna do this type of work, not in our lifetimes at least.
But yeah, ER is totally made up nonsense anyhow, a computer can spit that out (or minimum wage India), or just turn it all off.