Hedge funds and asset managers are scrambling to poach talent from Silicon Valley and attract computer scientists fresh from college to capitalise on the investment industry’s hottest frontier.

So-called quantitative financiers, or quants, have for years come up with innovative, complex ways to analyse and trade on company earnings or economic releases. But thanks to huge gains in computing power and algorithmic research, they are now pushing into “unstructured data” such as internet searches, social media, satellite images, earnings calls or weather patterns to find market signals and overlooked trading opportunities.

To do so they need to deploy innovative, increasingly powerful quasi-artificial intelligence algorithms, ratcheting up demand for computer scientists to do coding that is beyond mathematicians and physicists.