Institutional Investor (August 29)
“Now that investors can get factor-based funds on the cheap, they’re pushing quants in new directions.” This presents new challenges. “One is a move away from a heavy reliance on decades of historical data and back tests to tying this in-depth research to the realities of the current economic and market environment.” Another challenge is “getting the right people” to do this. “Many quant managers historically hired people with expertise in data,” but “now it’s the background in economics and finance that’s become critical.”
Tags: Back tests, Challenges, Cheap, Data, Economic, Economics, Factor-based funds, Finance, Historical data, Investors, Managers, Market, Quants, Realities, Reliance, Research
Institutional Investor (May 24)
Quants may be able to “fundamentally transform the ability of investors to find companies that embrace ESG principles.” Beyond crunching more widely available ESG data, some hope that unstructured data, ranging “from people’s comments on social media to data mined from online retailers,” can reveal “hard-to-measure issues like corporate culture or a commitment to the environment.”
Tags: Commitment, Corporate culture, Data mining, Environment, ESG, Hard-to-measure, Investors, Quants, Social media, Unstructured data
