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Even before Burton Malkiel popularised the term in 1973, investors had begun taking random walks and applying other theories supporting diversification of their portfolios. Yet today, the investment community, in particular the decision-making community, might be observed to be concentrating.

Noviscient, a Singapore-based alternative investment shop, is crowdsourcing independent systematic traders and packaging them into a hedge fund.The aim is to use APIs and a computerized risk model to create a vehicle that strips out almost all of the costs associated with hedge funds, while providing a business opportunity for quants with clever ideas.“I’m not paying portfolio managers,” said Scott Treloar, founder. “They only get paid if they perform.”He says Noviscient is not a matching service: it’s a “platform fund”. He’s not putting fund managers together with institutional investors. “The value is in selecting who has got alpha,” he told DigFin. “We allocate to managers doing well and weed out those doing poorly. ”There is plenty of talent out there, people coming out of investment banks or other funds who want to apply their quant expertise to portfolios, but the high capital requirements to start a hedge fund tend to strangle most of these efforts.