CASE STUDY
HAVING SOMETHING AS FLEXIBLE AND
EXPANDABLE AS FLASHBLADE IS WHAT
OUR BUSINESS DEMANDS.
T
hirty years ago, stock markets
around the globe suffered their
greatest one-day losses ever. It’s
also the year (1987) the investment
management firm AHL (now Man AHL) was
founded to deliver a revolutionary approach
to hedge fund management. Man AHL
is a quantitative systematic investment
manager, with more than US$19 billion in
assets under management.
‘Quantitative’ means all of the firm’s
investment decisions are based on
mathematical models (algorithms);
‘systematic’ means those decisions are
made solely by computer, without
human involvement. Given this business
model, Man AHL has attracted two
extremely valuable sets of resources:
the roughly 50 quantitative researchers
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INTELLIGENTCIO
(‘quants’) who formulate the ideas driving
the investment models and the 60-plus
technologists who both develop the
quantitative research platform and turn
those ideas into trading strategies that can
be executed by a computer.
One of the firm’s highest priorities is
delivering a robust and ever-more-
performant technology platform as a
means of optimising the performance and
productivity of its quants and technologists.
“Our technology is key in giving the
quants an environment in which they can
explore and test their ideas, as well as a
production environment that will faithfully
implement the models they create,” said
Gary Collier, Co-CTO at Man AHL in London.
Man AHL is part of Man Group, whose
five investment management businesses
manage over US$95 billion.
Legacy storage fails to keep up
with demands
The demands on technology infrastructure
at the firm are significant. “In the
development of our trading models, we
need to look at large amounts of data to run
experiments and sift through all manner of
possible ideas that might make money for
our investors. Only those models in which we
have sufficient conviction will then be put to
work in the production trading environment,”
Collier said.
In 2016, the technologists at Man AHL had
concerns about the ability of its legacy mass
storage infrastructure to meet the demands
of the quants and developers.
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