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Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

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Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#111
It's not good enough to be the best hedge fund manager. You need to make more profit that investing in a boring index fund, including the additional overhead of moving money around. And the research seems to show that most fund managers do not.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/04/469247400/epis...

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. It works if you're a bear. You get in early, you sell in 2006 while shaking your head. Maybe you leave a bit in with extra exposure to volatility so you win either way, maybe not. Then when 2009 hits you pile in again. It's pretty easy to make way above average returns on the stock market. Just look for the classic signs that it is peaking (low unemployment, high P/E, high leverage, bad demographic trends, etc).

2 things about this. 1) if you are a fund you just cant' sit out 3 years. Your fund will shut down as everyone will yank their money,. if its your own money then people will leave as you won't pay bonuses. 2) If you went short in 2006 then you wouldn't have survived until teh crash of late 2008. > It's pretty easy to make way above average returns on the stock market. This is just an absurd statement along the lines…

The limitations of fund structuring aren’t my concern. I’ve been investing for decades and it’s trivial to beat the market if you’re patient and knowledgeable about tech.

The fact that funds do worse than indexed etfs says more about fund incentives and investor savviness than it does about the effectiveness of this strategy.

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#113
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with AQR, I would say they are more HF + coupled with some tend following than anything else. What makes you say they are not?

FWIW, Cliff Asness disagrees with you: > we are not high-frequency traders https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/High-Frequency-Der...

I understand he does, but our definitions are different. Firstly, they are not a buy-and-hold sort of fund. Their strategy is more momentum based, and in my experience, to be good at that you need a deep understanding of HFT in current market conditions. I'm not saying they're market makers, but I will say that they employ some sub-minute strategies - to me, that is high frequency (not super high frequency, but high frequency nonetheless).

Also, they seem to hire a fair few ex-HF guys in senior positions (e.g. https://nypost.com/2015/07/31/aqrs-head-of-trading-on-paid-l...)

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#114
post #94

Isn't all Warren Buffet & Charlie Munger do for a good portion of the day, like 6 hours is 'READ & THINK'. Then do nothing else.

that's basically what any analyst or researcher does, right. then, I guess an analyst writes a simulation to test his theories & a report. these hot shots likely just have other people their theories, indeed, but still likely write some amount of reports

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#115
post #51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you keep up with that project or move on to something else? It's humorous to me that most people who end up selling data to hedge funds more or less "fall" into that industry by accident. Your story is exactly how it typically happens: you develop a new data-enabled product for one market, then a bunch of hedge funds find it and realize it's useful. Most companies pivot from their original market once they realiz…

We moved on - my friend was in business school at the time, and thought that continuing on with the project would be detrimental to his job search (he was looking at joining a hedge fund). Yeah, it was a very sudden shift. We always knew they were potential customers, we just didn't realize how quickly they would take to the product (as opposed to legal firms which you can imagine are significantly more bureaucratic…

Anything I've ever wanted (within a certain cost) has always been signed off immediately/practically did not require approval. It's very easy to sell a relatively cheap (compared to some of the other subscriptions sold to hedge funds) service to an organization that's extremely flat.

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#117

In other news, students who study the most for SATs will post the best scores.

it's like this: if you were in a super performant class where everyone read all the teacher's material supposedly until they knew it perfectly, then you would expect that there would be no correlation between the number of times the public class into is read and performance, as you expect everyone to be really performant and read it enough times. You would expect that for such super performant students, the only relevant info would be what they get elsewhere, because that's less obvious than studying the class material, which everyone is expected to already know perfectly.

Turns out maybe the students aren't actually that good at knowing if they read the material sufficiently well, and you can get information about who will do better at the test just by looking at who looked at the class material the most.

The surprise is that the students are worse then we thought.

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#118
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS, Google, Microsoft, all have lots of customers. Why are those customers not strange but FB would be?

In my mind, if technology is a big part of your business then running on other people's computers only has one upside: might be cheaper. Everything else is downsides. Therefore, A) companies that operate at a scale where the only upside disappears, and B) companies where the cloud saving outweights their expected liability cost, both will have their own datacenters. Facebook is clearly in category A, RenTech is clear…

Public cloud is not cheap. Public cloud is really expensive. The value of public cloud is that it's flexible (my current employer, which is massive, uses AWS in part because it has poor governance of leased data centres) and has hosted offerings that save time and operational overhead - it's quicker and easier to use SQS and DynamoDB than to host Kafka and Cassandra. Cheap it is not, however.

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#119
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked for one such secretive hedge fund in the past, and has for a long time been very interested in Renaissance, I'd be curious to know what your source of this information is. Any chance you could share some more insight?

Sure. 1. I'm friends with multiple people who used to work at Renaissance, and I've directly spoken with folks who are currently there (among other, similar firms). 2. I've read the research published by professors and post-docs before they were hired. 3. I have first hand experience developing forecasts for various market research firms and many hedge funds. I've seen first hand what the difference is between the fi…

Would things like “dimensionality reduction” and other cutting edge ML techniques at least help? As in, help you become a better “manual” quant researcher or help you develop shitty (relative to RenTech), but still profitable strategies?

Do you have any other keywords? “Learning from few examples” comes to mind...

Re: Hedge-fund managers that do the most research will post the best returns

#120
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renaissance Technologies has completely automated the process of signal discovery.[1] They don't hire researchers to manually derive novel insights or trading models from data, and they don't really bother with exclusive sources of data. Instead, they hire researchers to improve methods for automatically processing vast amounts of arbitrary data and extracting profitable trading signals from it. When most funds say t…

As someone who has worked for one such secretive hedge fund in the past, and has for a long time been very interested in Renaissance, I'd be curious to know what your source of this information is. Any chance you could share some more insight?

Do you mean G Research? Not sure that one really qualifies as “secretive”, they’ve been recruiting from my Masters programme at Oxford years ago (albeit under a different name).
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