Quant Strats as an event focuses on quantitative strategies. Once a year this happens in London. And, today, the big day has come. We are all here in a beautiful conference venue next to Liverpool Street in London. There are portfolio managers, data scientists, innovation officers, financial engineers, quantitative researchers, and many more. Representing some of the biggest and most influential investment companies in Europe, Quant Strats is back. And it remains the place to be for the Buy Side and Sell Side.
Topics that will be covered today will include ‘elections, wars and the usual periodic instability…’ and ‘portfolio optimisation under discrete constraints’. However, there are many more topics that will be explored at the various talks and panels. There will also be interactive discussions in the afternoon.
As in 2023, the editorial team of DisruptionBanking made its way to meet the movers and shakers of Europe’s buy side and sell side. We met many of them last year. Quant Strats is one of the flagship events of our editorial calendar each year. And there are several of our connections from the last event in action this year.
Michael Koegler, Managing Principal at Market Alpha Advisors welcomed the audience by outlining some of his thoughts. Michael regularly chairs the New York Quant Strats event too. His presence at the London event made it all the more memorable for attendees.
Michael shared how top-of-mind for trading firms today is the macroeconomic outlook, or more specifically, inflation. He added the geopolitical outlook and how certain outcomes influence trading strategies. Next are data challenges and how to address rising costs, poor data quality, and the lack of standardization. Finally, Gen Ai and data governance, and whether this technology can be leveraged responsibly.
Digesting Data into the machine of Man
The first keynote speaker of the day was James Munro, Head of ArcticDB at Man Group. ArcticDB is a high-performance data-frame database that is optimised for time-series data, data-science workflows and scales to petabytes of data and thousands of simultaneous users.
James holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics. In his current team he explained how python is the second language after English. Half of his colleagues can code too. There are over 675 in the technology team at Man Group today. There are many more across all the divisions. Man Group, across its investment managers, manages US $178.2 billion. Of this, institutional investors contribute approximately 78%.
ArcticDB was one of the main topics of interest. James shared 10 years of investment and refinement with delegates:
Evolving Arctic 1.0
Arctic 1.0 is open-source with over one million downloads and -3,000 GitHub stars to date
Arctic 1.0 is praised by quants for its beautiful, easy-to-use Python interface
…into ArcticDB
ArcticDB offers the same user-friendly Python interface with a brand new C++ engine
ArcticDB offers world-beating performance at petabyte scale with full enterprise support
Real world excellence
ArcticDB is used by 400+ quants and engineers at Man Tgoup to manage over $170 billion AUM
ArcticDB is widely used across finance, from leading banks to asset managers
Elections, wars and the usual periodic instability…
James’s keynote is promptly followed by a panel moderated by Igor Yelnik, CIO and CEO of Alphidence Capital. Igor is a stalwart at Quant Strats, he was also a key panelist at the 2023 London event. But this year his topic is different. And his panel is not an easy one.
Igor asked some challenging questions. About how geopolitical events affect quant strategies? How to diversify in the face of uncertainty? Whether quants use discretionary thinking enough, or if they are too reliant on complete automation? The panel also went into details about covariance metrics.
Amadeo Alentom, Head of Systemic Equities at Jupiter Asset Management, shared on the panel how market neutral strategies had performed the best in the last few years. However, when pressed about machine learning, Florian Ielpo, Head of Macro and Multi-Asset Portfolio Manager at Lombard Odier Investment Managers shared valuable insights. He is concerned that the rise in reliance on machine learning was also a bad thing for quants. Many quants today are completely reliant on this type of technology. A bit like how people are reliant on Google Maps today, making it hard for younger people to read maps.
The biggest takeaway from the session was the need to continue to diversify. And how to balance the risks investors face in today’s market.
There are more panels and keynotes to participate in today. These topics are just a taster for things to come.
Quant Strats continues to grow
There are two Quant Strats events each year. One takes place in New York, whilst the other is in London. DisruptionBanking has been a media partner to the New York event, but our editorial team attend the London event. And compared to the 2023 London event things have moved forward.
The venue is much brighter and more vibrant than it was last year. There seems to be more attendees too. And, as usual, the content is best in class. As are the speakers.
Author: Andy Samu
See Also:
How Reinforcement Learning can be Revolutionary for AI-driven Alpha Strategies | Disruption Banking
