A Quant’s Approach to Building Trading Strategies: Part One
Recently, Quandl interviewed a senior quantitative portfolio manager at a large hedge fund. We spoke about how she builds trading strategies--how she transitions from an abstract representation of the market to something concrete with genuine predictive powers. Can you tell us how you design new trading strategies? It all starts with a hypothesis. I conjecture that there ought to be a relationship between two instruments, or maybe there’s a new instrument in the market that’s gaining popularity, or maybe there’s an unusual macroeconomic factor I’ve discovered that drives micro pricing behavior. So I write down an equation – a model,...