How Do You Think About Using Historical Data?

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The fundamental manager playbook always has that upside down pyramid, right? Where you're screening the stocks down into the end portfolio. So to me, those concepts seem a little bit at odds. It's like where one stops and the other one sort of begins. How do you think about marrying these concepts together? I'm going to call bottoms up. They originate typically from a thesis, a change in the environment, some real sort of what I'm going-to call exogenous kind of variable that typically is not easily sort of quantified using historical data.

After March 2020, a growing research interest of mine was the question, “how do strategies reflexively impact the markets they trade?” Beyond crowding risk, can adoption of strategies fundamentally change market dynamics.

In Season 3 Episode 11, I spoke with Omer Cedar, who argues that equity quants have done precisely that. The mass adoption of factor models, whether for alpha or risk, fundamentally changed how baskets of stocks are bought and sold. For a discretionary manager to ignore this sea change is to ignore a fundamental shift in the current of the water they swim in.

In this clip from the episode, Omer discusses how quants have changed the market and how fundamental managers should use this information to sharpen their edge.