Robert, I am not sure if you are a student or a professor at UVA, but congratulations on being affiliated with a great school. And to respond to your comments, in short, you are explicitly making our points.

The Netflix Prize is such a perfect example of how Ensemble Methods has successfully transformed predictive analytics that we built out a full Appendix on the topic (Appendix I, near the very end of the paper).

Your refence to Moneyball’s transformational impact on baseball is likely the best industry analog for what should occur to investment management. You probably do not know, but Billy Beane is on Turing’s Board of Advisors, and when we last spoke I asked him if a professional baseball team can compete today without substantial Moneyball-category analytics. His answer was an emphatic “not a chance.”

So we fundamentally agree that EAM is nothing more than translating best practices from other industries to that of investment management. There are a host of reasons why the investment industry has been slow to embrace these tools, while as you accurately state “real world practitioners moved on many years ago.” But the good news is that EAM is now in the domain of active management, and a growing body of performance data is validating the concept.