Wall Street Unleashes Quants in Race for Private-Market Billions

Wall Street is turning to its biggest brains as the battle for supremacy in the world of private assets heats up.

Quantitative analysts — more usually found in data-heavy parts of the financial ecosystem such as stocks or derivatives — are being deployed by firms like Ares Management Corp. and BlackRock Inc. as they race for an edge in private equity and credit.

These opaque markets have grown fourfold over the past decade to command $10 trillion, according to data from alternative-asset consultancy Preqin. But systematic players typically haven’t been heavily involved because private assets lack the reams of numbers where quants can hunt for profitable patterns and dislocations.

That’s changing as the likes of Los Angeles-based Ares find other uses for data...