Machine Learning In Portfolio Modeling. What's The Value-Add?

Much ado has been made of machine learning recently. This article takes a look. It has been said that machine learning may one day make asset managers redundant. The emergence of the internet and the huge increase in the amount of digital information being generated, stored, and made available for analysis gave rise to big data. To make sense of such huge amounts of data, mathematical formulae have been developed to capitalize on "massively parallel programming systems" - hardware that do computations in parallel.