BlackRock Quants Sustain Record Losses in Setback to Fink Plan

Like so many fund titans these days, Laurence D. Fink is betting on machines to turn around BlackRock Inc.’s beleaguered stock-picking business. BlackRock’s main quantitative hedge-fund strategies — which use computer models to sort through vast amounts of data to pick out patterns — were on track for losses in 2016, according to a monthly client update sent out in late December.