City investment firm Man Group appoints head of machine learning for Man GLG

William Ferreira appointed to newly created role to build machine learning tools for portfolio managers

Investment firm Man Group has appointed its first-ever head of machine learning in a move that is likely to be replicated across the City of London.

The organisation claims that Ferreira will be responsible for developing machine learning capabilities at Man GLG, one of five investment managers across the group, providing the firm's portfolio managers with tools and techniques with which to support their analysis and decision-making processes.

Ferreira will also work directly with Man GLG's teams on the application and interpretation of machine learning techniques in relation to topics such as analysing news and social media, market events and announcements, and the visualisation of complex data.

Ferreira isn't the only machine learning specialist across the investment firm. Man AHL, another of Man Group's five investment managers, has its own machine learning team.

This has been actively researching machine learning techniques and applying them within its client trading programmes for several years. Ferreira will therefore tap their capabilities in order to apply machine learning technology relevant to Man GLG.

"We believe that machine learning techniques present an opportunity for discretionary investment managers, providing them with analytical tools to complement, and further enhance, their decision making processes," said Teun Johnston, CEO of Man GLG.

He continued: "We are continually seeking to develop our offering for our clients and, as the amount of data available continues to expand, these techniques can supplement existing rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis."

Ferreira, meanwhile, suggested that he saw "many opportunities to utilise machine learning across the diverse data sets available to the discretionary investment business".

Before joining Man Group this month, Ferreira was a senior quantitative researcher at Florin Court Capital for just over a year, prior to which he was technology manager at Man AHL, another part of the Man Group. He has also worked at investment banks JP Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch.

He holds a degree in theoretical computer science from the University of Sussex and a Master's degree in computations statistics and machine learning from University College London, acquired only in 2015. At UCL, he focused on natural language processing of news article headlines.

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