[Photo: by Adam Jeffery / CNBC.com]

While the financial services industry seems to focus on automation as a means of dealing with mundane tasks, famed billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen has a larger prize in mind. He’s like to create a new generation of robo-portfolio managers.

How’s He Managing That?   Bloomberg News reports that Point72 Asset Management, which oversees Mr. Cohen’s $11 billion fortune, is parsing troves of data from its portfolio managers and testing models that mimic their trades.

• Using analyst recommendations as an input, the effort involves examining the DNA of trades: the size of positions; the level of risk and leverage; and, whether an investment was hedged. It also entails looking at the timing of trades, assessing pricing and liquidity in the market, and the duration over which managers build positions.

• The model will identify patterns and relationships based on those analytics and seek to replicate bets.

• Point72 is also experimenting with automating the work of its execution traders.

While typically viewing the ‘sky as his limit’, Cohen readily admits that it will be quite some time before AI and technologies can displace people.