When Lewis Carroll’s Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into a nonsensical new world, she relies on its enigmatic, but oddly astute, denizens to guide her. Down the rabbit hole of the Covid-19 universe, can the enigmas of machine learning prove a more astute guide than human instinct?

Proponents of machine learning (ML) believe so. ML’s promise for investors is that it can scout out hidden complexities when changes in one variable—a macro factor, say—alter the relationships between others. This