“There still needs to be a level of humanity as an overlay to provide a sanity check in terms of what the data science is predicting,” she said.
Regarding the EAM portfolios, Mullaney expects to add EAM model portfolios to its platform from firms other than its own and Pegassets. And he said he has agreements with two third-party marketing firms. Last week, Melius announced its EAM portfolios have been added to Smartleaf’s tax-overlay management platform to be available to its clients.
For his part, Tull said he’s having discussions with some ETF issuers about bringing the EAM concept to that market. And he noted they’re working on bringing EAM to the fixed-income investment world.
“It’s not ready for prime time; maybe in January 2021 we’ll be past the major challenges [posed by fixed income],” he said. “There are probably 380,000 components of the debt market in the U.S. versus 6,600 listed securities.”