Equity value managers in the Warren Buffet mould could benefit enormously from the latest data analysis technology, says Elsen's chief executive Zachary Sheffer.
Mr Sheffer was in Sydney last week talking to clients about his company's collaboration with Thomson Reuters called QA Point.
The technology behind QA Point will allow fundamental equity managers to run equity analysis in minutes that would have previously taken hours (or days), he said.
Mr Sheffer worked for Credit Suisse developing financial models until he realised they (and much of the financial services industry) were "two decades behind where they needed to be".
Many boutique funds management businesses are still using Excel to conduct analyses of data, said Mr Sheffer.
"The initial problem that we wanted to solve with Elsen was: how do we remove all of the legwork behind the scenes so clients can focus on the things that matter – creating ideas, assessing strategies an making better decisions?" he said.
Part of the solution was to replace the coding language SQL with a protocol specially designed to crunch equity data, Mr Sheffer said – which can make quantitative analysis 50 times faster.
"We take a Warren Buffet-type and help them do better security selection, including the ranking of instruments as well as testing of those ideas," he said.
"We enable a fund equities manager – even a completely non-technical person who's never written a line of code – to create very sophisticated multi-factor models that they can back-test and apply to their workflow in 10 minutes.
"We see a number of of our users creating smart beta products, or creating new ETFs for helping their [main] managed fund. QA Point allows you to do all of that stuff in no time at all."
