Aladdin: The Black Box of Finance
The largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, is a financial behemoth with trillions of dollars' worth of investments under its control. A less-than-secret weapon, however, sits at the center of this financial behemoth: Aladdin, a supercomputer so potent and intricate that it has been dubbed the "black box" of banking. What is Aladdin? It's not just any supercomputer, Aladdin. There aren't many noisy devices crunching statistics in this space. Rather, it is a massive software platform that is layered over Microsoft Azure, the company's cloud computing platform. Aladdin is an intricate network of linked systems that gathers, examines, and processes information from several sources, such as: Market data: Stock prices, bond yields, economic indicators, and more. Client data: Investment portfolios, risk profiles, and investment goals. Internal data: BlackRock's own investment strategies, trading algorithms, and risk models. Aladdin uses this data to do a ...