“Do I think global macro funds will be a force in the markets like they were before the financial crisis? No,” said Nicola Ralston, co-founder of PiRho Investment Consulting in London that advises clients including pension plans on investing. “Investors are migrating to cheaper and easier-to-access products that use similar strategies to macro funds.”

Howard, who forged his reputation as an interest-rates trader, in March started his own fund, which is designed to be very volatile to achieve bigger profits. The AH Master Fund posted single-digit losses in its first few months of trading, the people said. The pool has about 10 investors and manages Howard’s own money, as well as some of Brevan Howard’s main pool, another person said.

Howard isn’t alone in taking matters more into his own hands. Andrew Law of Caxton Associates plans to start a fund in January that will also make riskier bets than he did before, while Paul Tudor Jones this month said he’s going to manage most of the money at his Tudor Investment Corp.

As its fee-revenue dwindles, Brevan Howard plans to offer fund services to other money managers, family offices and banks, putting to use infrastructure that once supported billions of dollars in assets. The initiative, led by Chief Operating Officer Jev Mehmet, would involve offering functions such as trade support and compliance, one of the people said. Brevan Howard also gets revenue from its stakes in other hedge funds run by Ari Bergmann and former employees Chris Rokos and David Warren.

Single-Strategy Funds

Brevan Howard is also starting a slew of single-strategy pools that trade markets including interest rates, volatility and Greek stocks in an attempt to retain its best-performing managers and become less dependent on its main fund. Alfredo Saitta opened his fund this year, while the firm’s co-founder  Trifon Natsis is set to begin two money pools in 2018. The offerings come after the firm liquidated more than half a dozen funds in the three years through 2015, saying running multiple pools was a distraction.

Howard, who in August returned to his home town of London after spending more than seven years in Geneva, wants to keep the assets in the firm’s main fund at less than $10 billion, the person said. They’ve slumped almost 80 percent since 2013 to about $6 billion as of the end of October.

The company has joined other funds seeking to adopt AI for trading. It invested in SparkCognition, a Texas-based tech firm that counts Alphabet Inc.’s Google as one of its partners, according to the firm’s website. Brevan Howard hasn’t yet applied the technology for trading, the people said.

Read more: Hedge Funds Face New Era as AI Becomes a Master of the Universe

Howard has been beset by a spate of difficulties since at least 2012. Rokos, a co-founder and top-performing trader, left that year after losses.