There’s lots of news troubling financial professionals. Billionaire trader Steven Cohen is experimenting with ways to automate his best money managers. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is developing systems to eliminate hundreds of hours of human labor in initial public offerings. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is using machine-learning techniques to take over work from lawyers. (Its CEO, Jamie Dimon, said in an interview published Monday that people are massively overreacting to the threat of technology.)

For investing professionals, the fear isn’t just that firms may need fewer of them to perform tasks -- it’s that they’ll be competing against low-cost rivals. Hedge fund managers, for example, traditionally charged clients 2 percent of assets and 20 percent of profits. It’s harder to justify if automated platforms can achieve decent results without a big bite. Such has been the case with index funds.

But according to Visser at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, a $1.7 billion hedge fund in New York, human investors still have a big advantage when it comes to recognizing patterns and connecting the dots: intuition.

“The good thing about computers is that they don’t have emotions,” Visser said in a phone interview. “The bad thing about computers is that they don’t have emotions. Computers can’t detect human sentiment. They can’t identify the usual suspects who typically attend crowded conferences when markets are at a top.”

Visser is particularly skeptical about all the money being spent on finding profitable trading strategies by testing them on historical data, or so-called backtesting. While that helps reveal how portfolios will likely perform under various market conditions, computers aren’t yet adept at forecasting what people will do in the future, he wrote in a June paper.

The industry’s survivors will be the ones who imbibe technology into their processes, Visser said. The trick is to use a combination of human judgment and models, “while artificial intelligence tries to catch up to the power of the brain,” he said. His hedge fund also returned 1.3 percent this year through May.

‘Team Effort’

Hintze at CQS, a $14 billion hedge fund based in London, concedes that quant-driven strategies are here to stay, and that they’re good at taking advantage of anomalies in markets. While engineering and mathematics are intriguing, successful investing is based on an understanding of fundamentals, technicals and investor sentiment, he said.

It’s better to pair technology with human insight and imagination to generate alpha, he said, referring to the profit made over a benchmark. His hedge fund returned 3.2 percent this year through May.

“Models are a great place to begin, but not necessarily a good place to finish,” he said. “It is a team effort and you need the analysts, traders and portfolio managers with the skills, experience and judgment to use and understand sophisticated financial models.”