Mark Gilbert , Columnist

The Hedge Fund King and a Technological Arms Race

A whole industry is watching whether Man Group CEO Luke Ellis can successfully integrate humans and machines.

Machine learning.

Photographer: Chris Goodney
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Luke Ellis, the CEO of Man Group Plc, exemplifies the challenge facing the whole of the investment management industry: how does the world's largest publicly traded hedge fund win a technological arms race that's roiling the entire business?

Hedge-fund managers are in agreement that alpha is becoming more elusive as both the data and the techniques used to sort through the numbers become more widely available. The business is undergoing a Darwinian thinning of the herd, with a decline in both the number of new firms opening and the number of shops closing their doors.

The surge in money flowing to passive investment strategies suggests investors have a newfound awareness that they've been paying elevated fees to funds that are closet index-trackers. A proper bifurcation between cheaper products that only pledge to deliver beta and more expensive offerings that maintain they can generate true alpha should kill off the pretenders. And that seems to be happening.