[ C O V E R
S T O R Y
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N E I L
J O S E P H ]
“As the job changes, being able to innovate as
a group with different teams just makes every
day exciting. Every individual challenge met, be
it a small everyday challenge or something like
preparing for MiFID II and implementing that
the way we wanted and needed to, is a great
accomplishment for the team and the desk.”
implementing that the way we wanted and
needed to, is a great accomplishment for the
team and the desk.”
Ignore the noise
Joseph and his team give short shrift to much
of the noise around new and emerging tech-
nologies, the foremost of which in the asset
management world at the moment is artificial
intelligence (AI). Joseph says that while the
desk has adopted and used forms of machine
learning for some years, much of what is
currently available in terms of AI functionality
simply isn’t applicable for this kind of work.
As Joseph points out, there is still a lot of
value in specific facets of machine learning,
not just on the European equity trading desk.
In April, The TRADE revealed that JP Morgan
Asset Management’s Asia Pacific desk had
developed a new model based on machine
learning to make the execution of orders more
efficient and less expensive.
The model currently provides recommenda-
tions to human traders, but it is increasingly
taking over an automated role in executing
transactions and the Asia Pacific equity trad-
ing team is now targeting to have around 50%
of the notional value of all regional trading
activity automated with the machine learning
model by end the of the year.
28 // TheTrade // Summer 2018
Whether similar models are im-
plemented in Europe remains to be
seen, but Joseph underlines that the
business has been using machine
learning techniques for some time
already, particularly in the field of
performance-based broker distri-
bution for algorithms. The real chal-
lenge however is to now apply these
techniques around hard-to-define
rul