Man Group’s once-in-a-decade revamp of its quant research platform
Man Group
Project name: Condor
What it is: Rebuilding a key platform for Man Group’s systematic-trading business to take on more data and asset classes
Lead executive: Barry Fitzgerald, cohead of front-office engineering
The world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund is in a multiyear rebuild of its systematic-trading and quantitative-research platform.
The new platform, called Condor, was initially designed to serve Man AHL, the firm’s systematic-investing arm. But Fitzgerald has bigger plans: more asset classes, more investing styles, and more data.
“The worst thing we could do with this is build something that fulfills our need for exactly today,” Fitzgerald told BI, adding: “We don’t know how we will trade in two years’ time, but I would hope this platform runs for 10 years or longer. It is a big multiyear project, so it should get the payback.”
Fifteen years ago, Man AHL was known mostly for its systematic futures trading, but the firm has expanded to other asset classes, like equities, corporate bonds, and options, with varying holding periods. Over time, Man built different systems to trade them all.
With Condor, Fitzgerald aims to bring those together — the research, the trading, and the logging — into a single platform. Because Condor will replace what is now a bunch of different systems, a variety of workers will use it: Quant researchers could develop investing strategies, tech teams could add features, and risk and operations teams could support trading systems. He said that having one platform for all these uses would help provide a cross-asset view of its risk exposure, conceptualize allocations across all assets, and do more analytics.
Work on Condor began about 18 months ago, and Fitzgerald expects it’ll be another two or three years until it’s fully integrated. Quantitative researchers are already using it to experiment with statistical models. He added that some calculations for big multiasset research graphs now take 30 minutes instead of 12 hours. Over time, he said, it’ll hopefully expand to encompass all of Man’s asset classes and trading styles.
