Displaying items by tag: quantitative

High-net-worth (HNW) investors often face challenges when managing concentrated stock positions, whether from stock grants, inheritance, or long-term holdings. Envestnet's new Options Strategy Quantitative Portfolio (QP) provides HNW clients with customizable strategies—covered calls, protective puts, and collars—to hedge against volatility while gradually reducing exposure. 

These options-based solutions help mitigate downside risk, generate income, and spread-out taxable gains, preventing large, sudden tax liabilities. Additionally, liquidity constraints on large holdings can make it difficult to sell shares without affecting market prices, making structured unwinding essential.

Envestnet’s strategy offers a scalable yet tailored approach, leveraging quantitative modeling to align with each investor’s risk tolerance and goals. 

Finsum: This offering enhances portfolio flexibility while preserving long-term wealth and could allow advisors to better target the needs of HNW needs. 

AQR is one of the leading quant funds, and they had a difficult 2021, but they are bouncing back big with a new idea in ESG. Their new Sustainable Long-Short Equity Carbon Aware Fund will pick U.S. and foreign equity on a variety of ESG criteria with a net-zero carbon emissions target, but it will also short funds that aren’t meeting ESG standards. Most funds have stayed only on the positive end of things but CEO Cliff Asness believes shorts selling is a key tool that can be leveraged to reduce carbon emissions. Asness will be a portfolio manager on the funds, and his unique perspective on ESG will be critical in how the fund performs in the upcoming years.

FINSUM: Value quant funds like ESG suffered the last two years relative to the market but so far in 2021 AQR has seen huge inflows and its ESG strategy is part of that.

The low yields in the bond market have made it relatively uninteresting to the average investor, but there is a revolution underway. The bond market has been dominated by traditional techniques and old school investors, but many of the quants and hedge funds that overturned the equity market are eyeing the bond market. Systematic corporate bond investing is expanding and firms are taking advantage of trends in government debt or pricing anomalies in bond derivatives. Driving this trend in the bond market is swaths of data that are a part of how trades are now realized. Companies like Blackstone Credit are prepared for the shift into a more systematic trading environment in bonds, and other companies are ramping up their tools to accommodate this shift. FINSUM: Hard to acquire data, and a less liquid market have made bonds less desirable for quants, but the information age is rapidly changing that standard. 

Science and technology have only recently begun to disrupt the active fixed income asset management industry, as they have so many industries before it...see the full story on our partner's site

(New York)

There is a big development happening in fund management. That is change is that fundamental and quantitative approaches are merging. Often, funds are no longer purely fundamental or quantitative, but instead merge the two, creating a whole new category which is starting to be referred to as “quantamental”. In its most simple form, quantamental often looks like a multi-factor ETF that also includes some continuous “human” intervention, such as reducing statistical quirks. However, more sophisticated approaches truly blend the two, using human skill to analyze stocks which are sending promising technical signals.

FINSUM: We are pretty fond of the principles which underpin quantamental approaches as they seem to take the best aspects of both philosophies. Time will tell if the approach is a winner in a broad sense.