In fake data, quants see a fix for backtesting

Traditionally quants have learnt to pick data apart. Soon they might spend more time making it up

It wasn’t a surprise that videos of Tom Cruise playing golf and doing magic tricks should rack up millions of views on TikTok earlier this year. The real surprise was that the clips didn’t feature Tom Cruise at all. They were fakes.

The technology behind these ultra-realistic ‘deep fake’ videos, now common on social media platforms, has already found a home in finance where quants are using it to create parallel universes of data to test investment strategies.

Experts say this synthetic data