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Carson Boneck, Chief Data Officer, Balyasny Asset Management

Describe your career to date

I started my career at a time when quantitative research and investing was becoming a transformative investment strategy. Early in my career I was a quantitative researcher building stock selection models for asset managers and hedge funds.  

Later, I had the fortune to be asked to build data science, data collection, and quantitative research organizations at fintech and sellside start-ups and within large Fortune 500 companies, under the tutelage of some amazing mentors over the last twenty years. Over that time, I have managed organizations of 3,000+ and teams of three.  

These roles have given me experience in managing commercial organizations, quant and investment research teams, technology teams, and corporate strategy. As Chief Data Officer at BAM, I lead the firm’s global data organization, named the Data Intelligence Group, which is a centralized team of data scientists, generative artificial intelligence (AI) leads, data sourcing experts, QC analysts and data platform architects and engineers who service all of BAM’s PMs and investment strategies, in addition to our technology org and business side teams. 

How are you developing the data literacy of your organization, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders? 

Our organization’s mission is to provide our investors with a competitive advantage through data, insights, engineering, and generative AI (genAI). We do this by being laser focused on our investors’ needs, leveraging new technology, and constantly questioning our status quo to ensure our efforts align to value creation and innovation.  

We deliver value through tradable insights and predictions; building scalable data products; education and training; using the latest tech in our platforms; and aspiring to have a level of partnership so strong that our portfolio managers and stakeholders would say they could not imagine working without it. In the early days of our organization, we were focused on core data architecture, platforms, and discoverability, building products like a firmware data catalog. Our stakeholders are data savvy and part of our group’s job is to help them find an informational advantage through data.  

Our firm leverages traditional financial and market data, all categories of alternative data, and we have a large proprietary data collection effort. Like the financial markets we operate in, data is constantly changing the impact of certain datasets can degrade over time as they become more commoditized. We are constantly looking for new information sources that our competition has not yet discovered or that our scale allows us to process smarter, faster, and better. 

What role do you play in building and delivering conventional artificial intelligence solutions, including machine learning models? Are you also involved in your organization’s adoption of generative AI? 

BAM’s Data Intelligence Team includes an applied AI team which is charged with AI enablement across the firm. Led by data scientists from the top tech firms, we spend a significant portion of our time on providing education and frameworks that allow our technology and investment team to leverage AI themselves.  

We do not want to be the holder of the 500 best AI ideas at our firm; rather our approach is helping to federate the use of AI within all our development and research teams.  

We use machine learning in many parts of our organization from data quality to enrichment and meta data tagging, to strategy development. 

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function? 

All centralized teams are challenged with linking their work to value. In data and analytics, there can also be asymmetrical feedback, such as you only hear about things when they break.  

We have established specific financial impact goals for our team and spent a lot of time working with our key stakeholders to ensure that our work is aligned with the largest opportunities in the firm. As an example, we created bitcoin-like tokens for certain services, like web scraping, which our stakeholders can use to underwrite, prioritize and fast-track urgent requests or projects.  

Transparency across both our strategic and operational priorities and attribution frameworks are additional ways we look to link our efforts to value and monetary impact. 

Carson Boneck
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2022 (USA)
  • 100 Brands 2024 (USA)

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