Insights

July looked calm on the surface, but strange beneath it. While index levels stayed steady, the return profile flipped: lower-quality, heavily-shorted stocks surged, while defensive factors that anchor many stat-arb and equity ...

Executive Summary August 2025 was constructive for QIS. The average composite gained +0.62% MTD, with 30 of 42 (≈71%) strategies positive. Cross‑sectional dispersion narrowed to ~4.5 ppts (top minus bottom), a step tighter than July. ...

Trend following has long been part of the allocator’s toolkit. Its appeal lies in its asymmetry: modest losses in sideways markets offset by strong gains when trends persist. Yet many widely used benchmarks—typically CTA peer groups or ...

As discussed in our previous blog post, dispersion trading is a correlation trade built with options: typically sell index vol, buy single-stock vol (short correlation), or the reverse (long correlation). Depending on sizing, it can be net ...

Institutional investors and family office CIOs know that not all “absolute-return” vehicles are created equal. Hedge funds, UCITS liquid alternatives, and bank-provided QIS products can all deliver alternative strategies – but each comes ...

Liquidity is often thought of as simply “liquid” or “illiquid,” but in reality it exists along a continuum. It represents how quickly and reliably an asset can be converted to cash without significant loss in value. At one extreme, cash ...

Position sizing and sell discipline rarely get the same airtime as asset allocation or manager selection, yet they influence long-term portfolio outcomes just as much. In many investment processes, these decisions sit in a grey area—left ...

The “Magnificent 7” era of hedge-fund positioning peaked in mid-2024, when Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla together sat inside almost every long/short portfolio. By June that year prime-broker crowding indices ...

For two decades “quant” and “discretionary” sat in different chapters of the hedge-fund playbook. Yet in the wake of crowded factor premia, shrinking bid-ask spreads, and a brutal war for talent, the sharpest electronic-trading firms are ...