Acadian Asset Management To Use Bing Predicts Macroeconomic Indicators

Acadian Asset Management, global and international investing company, announced Thursday (March 9) that it is the first investment firm to use the Bing Predicts macroeconomic indicators, offered by Microsoft.

In a press release, Acadian Asset Management said it’s using Bing Predicts macroeconomic indicators to augment its investment forecasting frameworks, aiming to get greater potential investment returns. Acadian will explore the use of Microsoft’s new predictive signals of economic activity derived from aggregated internet search and social activity, the company said.

“For the last thirty years, we have used data to make objective investment decisions. Throughout our history, we have been early adopters of new and novel sources of data to help us make better decisions, and we are excited about the ways that new technology can help draw insight from large information sets,” said John Chisholm, chief investment officer of Acadian. “Microsoft is an ideal partner in this project, given its internet expertise and prediction capabilities.”

Bing Predicts is a prediction engine developed by Microsoft that uses machine learning from data on social media topics that are trending and sentiment toward those topics, as well as with trending searches on Bing. “We’re excited about the potential of Bing Predicts to improve investment results and eager to collaborate with Acadian as a long-term leader in quantitative investing,” said George Zinn, corporate vice president and treasurer for Microsoft in the same press release.

In January, Microsoft disclosed it’s acquiring Maluuba, a Montreal-based company that runs what Microsoft calls one of the world’s most impressive deep-learning research labs for natural language understanding. In a blog post announcing the deal, Microsoft said Maluuba’s expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help to “democratize AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone — consumers, businesses and developers.”