Covid-19 tumult is testing AI fund returns

Some ML strategies have coped well, but others began to struggle as panic mounted

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into a nonsensical new world, she relies on its enigmatic, but oddly astute, denizens to guide her. Down the rabbit hole of the Covid-19 universe, can the enigmas of machine learning prove a more astute guide than human instinct?

Proponents of machine learning believe so. ML’s promise for investors is that it can scout out hidden complexities when changes in one variable – a macro factor, say – change the relationships between others. As