The world of financial investment is run by two types of investment managers: the systematic ones and the discretionary ones. Technology can help both achieve better results, but you’ll need to automate your systematic trading processes to get the full benefits.
Systematic Investment Managers vs Discretionary Investment Managers
There are plenty of adjectives used to describe investment managers, but the two that give you the best idea of how they handle their portfolios are ‘systematic’ and ‘discretionary’.
- Systematic Investment Managers use a data-driven, disciplined approach to build and manage their portfolios. In other words, they require plenty of data to be able to do their job.
- Discretionary Investment Managers tend to be more old-school, using their experience of the market and gut feeling to manage their portfolios.
Do Only Systematic Investment Managers Need Automation?
As humans, it’s easy for us to assume that Systematic and Discretionary Investment Managers are as unalike as the sun and the moon, black and white, or one and zero. But the reality is that many of their processes overlap.
While you’d be forgiven for thinking that only the Systematic kind requires software that can conduct complex modelling, data analysis, or data processing, the reality is that the Discretionary Investors still require knowledge of the market. Indeed, data can help them build their expertise or even automate parts of their investment processes.
So, while strategy automation is at the very core of the systematic investment model, discretionary managers can still make use of event processing software.
So, Why Don’t More Discretionary Investment Managers Automate Their Systematic Trading Processes?
We’ve spoken to hundreds of investment managers from both fields, but two things that Discretionary managers tell us are that:
- Most commercial solutions are not capable of automating the tasks they need done in the way they need to do it; and
- Even when they can automate part of the process, it doesn’t really make sense for them as they can manually cover up to 80% of the tasks, markets, and data collection they need, so why spend money on software?
We understand the first point perfectly, but we can’t say we agree with the second. After all, if you can do and be better, then why would you choose not to?
The Benefits of Automating Systemic Financial Processes
Stop reading this and give yourself half an hour to analyse your clients’ project goals and ask yourself what processes could be done better, and whether automation would help with that.
We guarantee that, apart from your experience and intuition, software can make some of your most time-consuming, boring, and difficult tasks a breeze.
We’re talking:
- Automated data collection from multiple sources;
- Automated data analysis and grouping;
- Automated market and exchange alerts directly to your phone;
- Automated reconciliation; and even
- Automated trading based on your preferred parameters.
Are You Ready To Get A Lot Of Your Time Back?
That, you’ll be surprised to know, is just the tip of the iceberg… But there is one thing that you’ll need to do: trust the machine to work on your behalf.
Does that sound like a scary prospect? Well, it shouldn’t.
We trust machines with everything from autonomous driving to flying, and this is no different. In fact, for strategy automation to work, what we will do is translate your preferred parameters, preferences, and expertise into code that decides when to sell, buy, or hold on to securities, as well as what data to collect and crunch, who receives it, and how.
What Are You Waiting For? Automate Your Systematic Trading Processes Today!
All of this is available because, together with our partners TIBCO®, a leader in enterprise data, we have software that can be tailored to your specific style of investment, and which will automate your processes and implement into your existing system.
Plus, as we’ve been exploring during this series of blogs, strategy automation helps you with financial remote working and adds connectivity in financial services, which means that the benefits are huge!
So, get in touch with us to find out how we can help you achieve even higher levels of success!