> In 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported on the difficulties faced by the firm. At that point, Voleon had an annualized return since inception of 10.5%, below the S&P 500 index return of 10.7% over the same period. One of the problems encountered was that financial markets were chaotic, and machine learning systems were best applied where patterns were more repeating in nature. In addition, patterns that are found can be easily made redundant after investors notice them and take advantage on them. Gary Smith writes that patterns discovered by the algorithms are often simply coincidences rather than actual correlations.[2][3][7]<p>> In 2018, Voleon had a return of 14% during a market turndown where the S&P 500 index dropped 6.2%. However, in 2019, its returns dropped to 7%, below the returns of its hedge fund peers of 9.2%. In 2020, Voleon's flagship fund lost 9%.[6][8]<p>Given their returns, how do they have 7.6 billion AUM?