Ryan Willson, formerly the CEO of Lateef Investment Management, has joined Creighton AI as Partner & Head of North America to help build the firm’s business in the USA and Canada.Creighton AI (CAI) was founded by Jim Creighton, who has previously worked with Richard Brignoli and Harry Markowitz (Nobel Prize winner – Modern Portfolio Theory) on minimum variance excess growth strategies in Canada before going on to become global CIO of Barclays Global Investors, Deutsche Asset Management and Northern Trust.
Increasingly disappointed in the way Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning was being adopted by the investment community, Creighton decided to set up on his own in order to develop an innovative approach to predictive factors and the use of machine learning to make financial market predictions.
CAI uses a unique set of factors to encode market behaviour and conditions, then uses this encoding to identify previous periods over the last 30 years where similar behaviour was observed. CAI believes that individuals will respond to a given set of circumstances today in much the same way as they did in the past. Information from relevant periods is selected and assembled using highly customised machine-learning techniques to generate predictions that are then used to create an optimised portfolio. The strategy is fully systematic, thereby removing the risk of human intervention, emotion, and irrationality. However, despite the use of advanced machine learning techniques, the decisions made by the algorithm are understandable and the drivers of decisions can be individually traced.
The firm is based out of San Francisco and London and includes six investment industry professionals from some of the world’s most successful quantitative investment firms, including Barclays Global Investors (Jim Creighton, Paul Holthe), Goldman Sachs (Roddy Orr), Morgan Stanley (Ryan Willson), Winton (Alex Thomas) and Aspect (Iain Buchanan).
