MarketMuse update courtesy of Bloomberg Business profiles investment firm, Point72 Asset Management, expands its jobs to hire more employees in order to collect and analyze data. 

Steven Cohen’s investment firm is looking for an edge in public data.

Point72 Asset Management, the successor to Cohen’s hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, has hired about 30 employees since the start of last year to build computer models that collect publicly available data and analyze it for patterns, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The hires are part of a project to expand quantitative investing, dubbed Aperio, that’s spearheaded by President Doug Haynes, said Mark Herr, a spokesman for the Stamford, Connecticut-based firm. Point72 is in the process of hiring a manager to oversee the strategy, he said, declining to comment on the number of professionals the firm has brought in so far.

Cohen, whose SAC Capital shut down last year and paid a record fine to settle charges of insider trading, joins Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates in pushing into computer-driven investing, an area dominated by a handful of big firms such as the $25 billion Renaissance Technologies and the $24 billion Two Sigma. The money managers are seeking to take advantage of advances in computing power and data availability to analyze large amounts of information.

“Data used to come to you in a trickle and today it comes in torrents,” Herr said. “The amount of publicly accessible data can now be compared to a fire hose of information. People who can read the signals most accurately and analyze them are the ones who will generate returns.”

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