Active management is about having an informational advantage in the market, and we believe that today, data and technology can be major differentiators. A quantitative approach is inherently scalable. With the right infrastructure, experience and knowledge, we can unlock the power of data to uncover potential investment opportunities. We believe quantitative investing can be highly objective and transparent, with a clear, defined investment process.
Decisions are based on empirical evidence, not gut feelings. Such an approach could potentially lead to more risk aware, explainable and repeatable investment results, as well as consistency across different asset classes and markets.
Our Quantitative Investment Strategies team within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, or QIS, takes a data driven approach to investing. With a proven and tested 35 plus year track record, we aim to stand at the forefront of innovation in seeking consistent and differentiated returns in a risk managed manner across asset classes. We manage over $200 billion in assets with a global team of over 100 investment professionals and data scientists, supported by more than 100 engineers. As a boutique style team powered by the breadth and depth of Goldman Sachs, we are able to capitalize on major investments from the firm in infrastructure and technology in order to digest massive amounts of data and extract investment insights through the most sophisticated methods, including artificial intelligence.
The firm is a golden resource for data sourcing, but also for data processing, as computing power is incredibly important. Our edge comes from our ability to synthesize information from massive amounts of data across asset classes. We seek to know more, see better and act faster as we process over a trillion data points to form investment views.
Innovation is in our DNA, and over the last 45 years, we have consistently grown and refined our investment models with the latest technologies. We are fortunate to serve clients globally and deliver tailored alpha solutions that seek to solve each and every one of their objectives.
Within our equity platform, we consider each company within our 15,000 stock investment universe as a potentially attractive investment opportunity, and we seek to truly understand and evaluate each one. We leverage data to build a 360° view of each stock and its place within the broader market. Over the last 35 years, we have built a huge repository of investment signals that have continuously been tested.
We have a real data advantage, and we make the most of it. We dig into everything from traditional data sources to completely new and innovative ones to help generate unique investment ideas.
While Goldman Sachs affords us far reaching access to a wide range of diverse datasets, that alone is not sufficient.
In order to capture the most value, we believe creative, human driven, economically rational and complex computational abilities are also critical.
Markets are constantly evolving. As such, we rely on data to help us evolve with them. There is a dynamic cohort of key players in the market, and we inform our investment process by understanding how other market participants are allocating capital, from hedge fund investors to retail investors.
Applying sophisticated analytics to this structured data, we seek to interpret investor sentiment to better navigate market conditions.
While this structured data informs our investment decisions, we also incorporate massive amounts of unstructured data, which requires considerable experience, expertise and infrastructure to analyze and extract valuable insights. For example, we process an abundance of text data, including hundreds of thousands of analyst research reports, earnings call transcripts, newspaper articles and even patent publications from all over the world.
When digesting all of that text, we get a better sense of the sentiment around companies and the broader market themes that may impact stock prices.
In addition to text, we have built an extensive library of audio files equivalent to half the size of the global Spotify library.
So now we are even able to listen in on earnings calls to understand not just what a company’s management team is saying, but also how they are saying it. This further deepens our ability to forecast the prospects of a given company.
All in all, we are talking about trillions of data points. This scale means that we can utilize all those different pieces of information to inform ourselves about the forward trajectory of stocks, helping our clients capture those micro trends within their portfolios in a risk managed way.
Having that informational edge allows us to be quicker, more dynamic and more adaptive to different kinds of market situations, and helps us deliver consistent long term outperformance for our clients. Our expertise is not limited to public equities. We are also seasoned professionals in liquid alternatives. With 15 plus years under our belt, we were early pioneers in the field of hedge fund replication, with a strong track record.
Our secret weapon is our unique database, which covers roughly 20,000 hedge funds. We aim to capture what drives returns across the hedge fund universe, with four key categories and 25 investment styles.
This gives investors access to a wide range of investment strategies that could adapt well through changing market environments.
At QIS, we continue to conduct research and strive to ensure we maintain our edge as the investment landscape evolves.
We are constantly listening, learning and evolving with our clients. That is why we are dedicated to proactively expanding our expertise and capabilities, ensuring we can nimbly address their evolving needs. We are committed to being there with you through every step of your investment journey.