FatKat to use quant investing to help you pick stocks

FatKat is the latest company aiming to make sense of the exploding amount of information on the Web and elsewhere to help you make better investment decisions.

It has yet to launch, but the Wellesley Hillis, Mass. company is worthy of mention because it builds on work by technologist Ray Kurzweil, who has given substantial thought about future trends. It is also backed with $2 million from some well-known investors, including Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former Nasdaq chairman Michael Brown, according to PEHub.

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That said, there is no evidence that Kurzweil and his backers can apply his prolific inventiveness to push things forward in the already advanced field of “quant” investing, which is the area FatKat is targeting.

Quantative investing is already applied an estimated trillion dollars of market funds, and the trend is expected to grow, the company says on its Web site. Such investing consists of using math and science to recognize patterns in stock market developments, and then using algorithms to make investments based on those patterns. Here’s the company’s summary of quant investing to date. FatKat appears to want to pull big names and minds together, and build a technology that boasts just enough of an advantage that it can convince investors to use it.

The latest investment is part of a $2.4 million third round of financing by the company, according to a regulatory filing. Other backers include Teradyne co-founder Alex d’Arbeloff, funds controlled by Revolution Health exec and nanotech expert, and Zyvex CEO James Von Ehr, PEHub’s Alex Haislip reports.