An inside look at Winton, the $27 billion British hedge fund that’s decked out with fossils, statues of Paddington Bear, and a chart-filled room that’s basically paradise for finance nerds – Finance

Data governs everything in the financial markets.

Although this view prevails in 2018, many in the financial industry soon grinned at the idea that computer models and data might be more effective ways of making money than old, old-fashioned intuition.

Winton Group, a hedge fund founded in 1997 by David Harding, a British physicist who turned into an investor, was one of the pioneers of data-driven investment, basing his philosophy on the belief that “a scientific method can be applied in the field of investment. "

Harding first developed an investment system, known as a trend, in which trends and patterns in markets are identified and used to inform about a long-term investment strategy.

Winton had assets of about $ 27 billion. USA (20.6 billion pounds) at the end of 2017, becoming one of the 10 largest hedge funds on the planet.

Business Insider was invited by Winton in September to get an idea of ​​the fund's offices, as well as the recently completed chart.

The chart room is a painstaking culinary tribute to financial history, which also serves as a guide for fund staff when considering market trends. Charts are crucial to Winton’s philosophy, and Harding calls graphic representations "the only reasonable way to interact with economic history."

Take a look inside the room, which looks like the statistical garden of Eden, below:

Winton's idiosyncratic approach to peace extends to the choice of the location of his London headquarters. While most investment companies choose either the bustling City of London or the gorgeous Mayfair district for their offices, Winton is based in West Hammersmith, 40 minutes from the city.

Before we get to the room with the diagrams, let's look at the rest of the Winton office. Like many hedge funds, Winton usually avoids the spotlight. This media presence is minimal, and this is by no means a last name. The office itself is also somewhat unfavorable from the outside. Located near the main road, easy to miss.

However, the inside is what you expect from a company working at the intersection of technology and finance, and wants to attract talent from both sectors. Its elegant and minimalist design is combined with the features you expect from a modern modern office. The hotel has a barista …

Plenty of breakthrough areas for staff members to hold informal meetings or just to quickly communicate …

And, of course, there is a preliminary ping-pong table.

The office is also home to an audience, where Winton often hosts events for both staff and customers.

Perhaps the coolest feature of Winton’s office, besides the chart room, is the broken column.

At first it looks like some builders had an accident, but with a closer approach you will see that it contains a fossil found during the last renovation of the building.

The works are dotted around the site, including this pair of statues of the iconic British children's character Paddington Bear, one of which was designed by legendary architect Zaha Hadid.

There is also this sign, brought from a DIY store, which was founded near the first Winton office in Kensington, London, after the company moved to offices. All this, however, simply warms up the room for the charts, the jewel in the crown of Winton's offices.

Before you get to the chart room, you are reminded that Winton is focused on data. In one corridor there is this five-meter chart, which follows the history of the yield of bonds of the UK government …

And this historic stock ticker. But now it's time to enter the financial botanical sky – a room with a chart of the Winton Group.

A partial museum, a library of reference materials, a room with diagrams – the result of several years of work by Winton employees led by James Holmes, the company's senior vice president. The current incarnation of the chart took eight months of solid work by Holmes and his colleague, analyst Nick Levin.

The focus in the graphic hall is a series of charts that track the long-term price movements of 80 different asset classes throughout history. They range from soybeans to sugar to the British pound.

Holmes wrote a book called The Pit & Pendulum, which presents the main speculative bubbles and panic on history, and some of them are visible in a room with diagrams. The table below shows the hyperinflation of sugar prices in the 1970s:

There are charts all over the world. The data on the graphs are presented on a logarithmic scale, which makes it easier to refer to the main price movements in history.

Along with the graphs, the room with the diagrams is filled with all sorts of interesting trinkets and historical objects from the world of finance. This includes numerous esoteric currency forms, including plastic coins and 3D metal coins from Somalia (both depicted below)

Before digitizing, this is how stock prices were recorded – painstakingly hand-made in giant books.

This comptometer, which is considered the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. It was first released in 1887 and marked a major leap forward for the market, allowing traders to perform calculations at much higher speeds.

Like a small piece of paradise for financial nerds, a room with diagrams serves as an important practical purpose as a reference library for Winton staff. It contains hundreds of books, many of which are rarely found, talking about hundreds of thousands of data points. Most of this data was digitized by Holmes and Lewin, which allows analysts and scientists to access it without spending hours trawling through paper resources.

“The Winton chart is a resource for our quantitative researchers and other investment professionals,” said Holmes Business Insider.

“With charts of financial securities, commodities, and currencies stretching over three centuries, the room provides an intuitive visualization of how financial markets evolve over the long term.”

“His collection of books and artifacts helps set specific price movements in an appropriate historical context, reducing the risk that financial markets will be viewed simply as an abstract set of numbers,” he added.

The charts also have stacks and stacks of financial games that, according to Holmes, at some point were played by Winton employees.

В списке любимых предметов бизнес-инсайдера был этот американский сертификат военной войны. Нарисованный с мотивами всех ваших любимых персонажей Диснея, он был выпущен во время Второй мировой войны как забавный способ дать детям небольшой инвестиционный портфель, а также помочь военным усилиям США в Европе и Тихом океане.

Перенос текущих рыночных движений в исторический контекст является ключом к философии Уинтона, поэтому неудивительно, что в зале заседаний есть множество книг, посвященных крупным финансовым событиям, в частности, авария 1929 года, которую многие считают самым разрушительным событием в истории рынка ,

У некоторых есть более захватывающее обложка, чем у других …

Существуют даже старые рекламные объявления для различных товаров, в том числе для бензина

К сожалению, комната с диаграммами не открыта для публики, поэтому любой желающий увидеть больше комнаты должен начать инвестировать в фирму.