Several younger quants have asked this question: “The culture of our quant group is very skeptical about new ideas. They are terrified of data-mining, and random factors. How can we innovate in such environment?”

What is the expected future return of a fairly-valued dividend paying stock?

I am inspired by this list, especially if I imagine the investing world without this knowledge.

1. Only showing the latest backtest versions without disclosing their out-of-sample degradation

2. Backtesting today’s static holdings (managers, asset allocations, sub-asset-classes) into the past - filled with look-ahead bias

It was at the beginning of 2008, at our downtown office on Pine Street in Manhattan. I was a young quant portfolio manager at AIG and I was standing in the office of one of my mentors.

What is the most significant risk in quant (and all active) investing today?

Having just attended a great AI conference in New York, here are some observations:

Can quantitative and fundamental approaches be successfully combined?

The short answer is: Yes

They can’t do each other’s jobs well.

In most decisions including investing, there are two ways to be wrong:

• Doing something that doesn’t work

• Not doing something that would have worked

In Finance, Asset managers often hit this wall: “Alpha Is So Hard”.

The market is impossible to beat. Alpha is dead…