I’ve been asked by my esteemed colleague @goodalexander to write a thread on recent industry trends within Quant Trading. My background is mostly within the mid-frequency space, so I’m likely to miss hugely obvious points to those in parallel industries. Apologies: 🧵

The easiest way for a fund manager to improve their performance is not by finding outright alpha (the space is too competitive now), but rather, it’s the ability to use existing knowledge in new spaces.

New spaces can mean newer asset classes, or different timeframes, resulting in two independent but closely related paths with relatively less competition: these paths have driven trends in recent years.

Intraday trading is well known but over the past few years, the barrier to entry has really lowered, and with that, there’s been a big push towards these higher performance strategies. A lot of systematic infrastructure can lend itself to intraday models (due to being built on…

generally evenly spaced time intervals), but more importantly, banks have been pushing more intraday index products which IMO, aren’t the smartest/best/worth buying, but it’s a sign. To me, it signified the mainstreaming of fast strategies.

Likewise, and parallel to this, newer geographical regions make for good progress as traditional strategies like momentum/carry/value etc work kind-of-OK everywhere, so when certain regions open up their domestic markets to international traders…

the results are often (initially) robust. Usually, there’s much less competition, less arb’ing, and as such, more alpha to take. The perfect combo is where there’s a structural block that pertains long-standing alpha (say, a high domestic retail participation).

The majority of asset classes are still pushing ahead with quantification & automation. Concepts like using optimisers for optimal position sizing & factor neutralisation are becoming more important in less quant-y spaces (think Equity L/S, Macro / Commods etc) because…

alpha is richer if you remove certain factor exposures, or balance your risk better. Becoming a bit more technical offers higher rewards. Unfortunately though as well, some mutli-strats now penalise PM’s for factor exposures!

There’s also been developments in other asset classes. Systematic single name credit trading has really pushed forward with most (high quality) teams making an effort in this space. Trading these names is difficult though because the market isn’t the most liquid, prices…