Isaac Newton may have been one of the finest minds of all time, but he turned out to be a miserable investor. “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people,” he lamented after losing a fortune in the South Sea bubble.

Increasingly, however, technology-savvy investors think they can harness mathematics and bleeding edge computer science to predict the ebb and flow of financial markets. Some of the most advanced asset managers are turning to artificial intelligence techniques, with investment algorithms that can autonomously learn, adapt and scour vast data sets for tradable patterns.

But some “quantitative” financiers (quants) are sceptical that these tools are any more than a somewhat better mousetrap, and argue that areas such as “machine learning” are overhyped and AI used as a marketing gimmick.