Flirting with Models

“Keep an open mind. But not so open your mind falls out.” My guest in this episode needs little introduction: Cliff Asness, co-founder and managing partner at AQR. Cliff has done dozens of interviews, podcasts, talks, and fireside chats over the years. He is also a prolific writer. So, my goal in this conversation was to try to find the questions he hadn’t been asked before or had not answered himself already. How did his formative experiences in the dotcom bubble shape his perception of markets? Why should we stick to factors like grim death? Which of his dozens of papers have been woefully overlooked? Where has he changed his mind over the years and what is he most confident in going forward? Cliff is fountain of knowledge of quant history, research, and practical experience and tells some fantastic stories along the way. Please enjoy my conversation with Cliff Asness.

Today I chat with Euan Sinclair, Partner at Talton Capital Management and author of the books Options Trading, Volatility Trading, and the up-coming Positional Option Trading. We begin our discussion with Euan’s experience as a market maker as I try to get a better understanding of what a market making operation really looks like from the inside and how it has changed over the last 15 years. Of particular interest to me, given how much market makers have been villianized in recent years, were Euan’s comments on misconceptions about market makers. We then turn to the buy side, where Euan has spent recent years and is largely the subject of his new book. We discuss common mistakes, sources of edge, thinking about directional versus volatility bets, and the seemingly overwhelming degrees of freedom that options trading offers. I know I walked away from our conversation with both an increased appreciation of the nuance in these topics, but also several new ideas for both edge and risk management. Please enjoy my conversation with Euan Sinclair.

Today I am speaking with Omer Cedar, CEO and co-founder of OmegaPoint. One of the significant trends in quant equity over the last decade has been the attempt to better control for unintended bets and idiosyncratic risks. At OmegaPoint, Omer comes at the problem from the opposite direction: helping fundamental managers better focus on their idiosyncratic risk and recognize the factor risks they may be unintentionally taking. We discuss how quantitative investors have impacted markets, how fundamental managers should think about factors, the low-hanging fruit for optimization, and surprising lessons Omer has learned in evaluating fundamental portfolios. The idea of embracing idiosyncratic returns is, arguably, the antithesis of traditional quant investing. But in discussing the lessons learned about unintended bets from the opposite direction, I think there are important ideas that quants can take away. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Omer Cedar.

My guest in this episode is Sandrine Ungari, Head of Cross-Asset Quantitative Research at SocGen. Sandrine cut her teeth in the industry as a fixed-income pricing quant, but made her way over to sell-side, investment quant research in 2006. Her early research focused on credit and macro, but since 2012 has been heavily focused on equity and alternative risk premia. Our conversation begins with equity factors and Sandrine provides insight both into how factor construction has evolved over the last decade as well as her thoughts into where the field is headed. We broaden our discussion to include alternative risk premia, and Sandrine provides a useful mental map for categorizing this broad range of strategies. We discuss the risks of crowding, latent beta risk in levered factors, and the influence of macro economic factors. More recently, Sandrine has focused her research in the application of machine learning in strategy construction. We discuss one particular example – the application of a recurrent neural network in trend following – and Sandrine shares her views as to how machine learning might affect factor investing going forward. Sandrine also shares some interesting ideas about where future risk premia might emerge from – but you’ll have to tune in to hear! Please enjoy my conversation with Sandrine Ungari.

In this episode I speak with Dr. Michael Hunstad, Head of Quantitative Strategies at Northern Trust. Our conversation centers around the four key trends Michael is seeing among institutional allocators in the factor space today. These trends are (1) the adoption of factors to manage concentration risk in market-cap weighted benchmarks, (2) a move from single- to multi-factor implementations, (3) using factors to de-risk equity exposure, and (4) a tactical tilt towards value. But Michael isn’t afraid to get in the weeds. He discusses the risks of unintended exposures at length and at one point even explains the importance of matching decay speeds of different factor signals within multi-factor implementations. For those interested both in the macro trends and the micro details of factor investing, this is not one to miss. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Michael Hunstad.

In this episode I chat with Mads Ingwar and Martin Oberhuber, co-founders of Kvasir Technologies, a systematic hedge fund powered by a full-stack application of machine learning. By full-stack I mean every layer of the process, including data ingestion, signal generation, portfolio construction, and execution, which gives us a lot to talk about. Our conversation covers topics ranging from the limitations of machine learning and hard lessons learned to how to keep up in a rapidly evolving field and thoughts about managing model risk. Given the niche knowledge in a field like machine learning, some of my favorite answers came when I asked how they might perform due diligence upon themselves or where they think other adopters of machine learning go wrong. For allocators, I think these answers are priceless. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mads and Martin.

My guest is Eric Crittenden, founder and Chief Investment Officer of Standpoint Funds. Eric has spent his career with trend following strategies, first at BlackStar where he managed a fund-of-funds, then at Longboard, and now at Standpoint Funds. This background makes him not only a fountain of knowledge on trend following theory, but also the operational logistics and practical considerations. In this episode our conversation ranges from the source of the trend-following premium to novel concepts for stress-testing managed futures programs. We discuss the struggles the space has faced, the evolution of CTAs, how to think about dispersion among managers, and how Eric thinks about solving for client behavior. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Eric Crittenden.

In this episode I speak with Jeffrey Baird, managing partner at Merritt Point Partners. Merritt Point Partners seeks to build diversified portfolios of convexity exposure through the commodities market. With that in mind, we talk about what makes the commodities market unique, who the players are, and the types of trades that Jeff looks for. Stepping somewhat outside of the theme for this podcast, Jeff actually employs a heavily fundamentals-driven process. But what fundamental means in the commodity space is different than what it traditional means in the equity space, so Jeff walks us through how this concept applies in markets such as gold and natural gas. With so many markets and corresponding derivatives to trade, the opportunity set seems overwhelming. And so does the risk of managing a portfolio. Jeff talks us through his framework for managing risk and the seemingly backwards idea that being profitable in a position can actually introduce more risk for portfolios seeking convexity. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jeff Baird.

Dr. Ernest Chan, founder of QTS Capital Management, talks about his use of machine learning as a risk management layer on QTS's Tail Reaper program, a tail hedge strategy. He shares the success and unique approach of the tail reaper program, discusses the limitations of deep learning, and explores the challenges of adopting machine learning in the process.

In this episode I speak with Jim Masturzo, Head of Asset Allocation at Research Affiliates. In his role, Jim oversees the research and publication of the firm’s capital market assumptions as well as the implementation of those views into a suite of tactical portfolios. We begin our conversation discussing the foundational assumptions behind the capital market assumptions. Like most firms, Research Affiliates takes a long-term view on return and risk. In line with the firm’s guiding philosophy, they also introduce long-term mean reversionary effects. Not surprisingly, these assumptions have been relatively bearish on U.S. equity returns for a large part of the last decade, and we discuss how to view the dispersion between these model forecasts and realized results. We then shift our conversation to the application of tactical views. With capital market assumptions serving as the strategic backbone, Jim and his team develop a number of regime-based model portfolios that can be blended to express different tactical views. But the team does not take a purely quantitative approach. Jim proactively acknowledges and seeks out model blindness. Rather than try to force idiosyncratic fixes into the models that might bias results, however, he and his team adopt qualitative trades to adapt the portfolios. From strategic to tactical and quantitative to qualitative, this is a wide ranging conversation all about asset allocation. I hope you enjoy.