Odd Lots · Thursday, July 9, 2026
Man Group is developing systems where AI agents handle various stages of the quant research process, from ideation and academic paper analysis to code generation for backtesting. This approach aims to provide a significant multiplier for their quant and research teams, with at least 15 models having successfully gone through this AI-driven process and been approved for trading client assets.
“Well, we have the ability to think about systematizing the way that we build systematic strategies to begin with, and in effect giving a big force. Multiplier, big leverage multiplier to our quants, our researchers.”
“So what we've been doing there for well over a year, actually a year and a half is building a system that can actually take all of those different parts of the quant research process. So the idea formation part looking at academic papers, looking at carefully labeled data sets, reasoning about the content of those papers, the content of those data sets, are the economic hypotheses in there that could be real or at least could be worth testing out, and then having other agents build the code to encapsulate those ideas, get the right market data, run the right back tests, etc. And then further agents that evaluate the output of the prior agent.”
“There's been a bunch I think fifteen twenty models at the last count that had gone all the way through. They started off as models that were ideated by AI, went all the way through the signal construction, the validation process, were reviewed and validated by a human investment committee and deemed fit and proper to trade our client's assets with.”