article thumbnail

What If Google Had a Hedge Fund?

Harvard Business Review

Acutely aware of the competitive edges timely data offers sophisticated investors, the company's ever-entrepreneurial cofounder once proposed that Google launch a hedge fund. The world's biggest and fastest search engine can't help but generate terabytes and petabytes of actionable investment intelligence.

Hedge 15
article thumbnail

Designing the Machines That Will Design Strategy

Harvard Business Review

LTCM was founded, in 1994, by some of the best minds in finance theory, including two Nobel Prize winners. It has at least 21 data science systems , which include several supply chain optimization systems, an inventory forecasting system, a sales forecasting system, a profit optimization system, a recommendation engine, and many others.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

The Brighter Side of Decades of Disappointing Investment Returns

Harvard Business Review

Sheelah Kolhatkar, in a cover story (and what a classy cover it is) in the new Bloomberg Businessweek , argues that the great alternative to plain-vanilla equity and debt investing — the hedge fund — is more or less over, too. An important engine for economic growth is the creation of new enterprises.

Bond 8
article thumbnail

Who Killed the GE Model?

Harvard Business Review

Unlike a pure holding company or a modern hedge fund, the GE model intended to create value by actively sharing capabilities among its disparate businesses, which, with one important exception, were all rooted in manufacturing. But the GE model is dead — and there’s a long list of possible suspects.

Welch 8
article thumbnail

Could a Four-Year-Old Do What Carl Icahn Does?

Harvard Business Review

After using borrowed money in the 1980s and 1990s, then opening up a hedge fund in 2004, he has since 2011 basically just been managing his own money. His response: “While I think using 13Fs to track hedge fund stock-pickers works great, in my mind it works less so for the activist guys.” Apple Finance Skill vs. luck'

Hedge 8
article thumbnail

Corporate Strategy Is a Fool's Errand

Harvard Business Review

Take Philips Electronics with its lighting, medical equipment, and consumer electronics divisions; ThyssenKrupp with its steel, elevators, and engineering services units; or smaller companies such as Trinity Mirror, which offers newspapers, printing, and digital services. First, corporate C-suite executives are portfolio managers.

article thumbnail

The Danger of Turning Cynical About Silicon Valley

Harvard Business Review

Startups are an engine of prosperity, albeit a highly imperfect one. Tech-world denizen Jesper Andersen tweeted a similar sentiment: “Change ‘startup’ to ‘hedge fund,’ ‘ecstasy’ to ‘cocaine’, and ‘douche-bag’ to ‘douche bag’ and you too can see SF is just another Wall St.” This equivalence is too cynical by half. trillion.