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One might probably mention Yale's Endowment under David Swensen which generated returns of 13% per annum over the past two decades (as compared to the 8 or 9% average return of college and university endowments). Now, I would not label Swensen's approach to portfolio management with a pure absolute return strategy tag but he definitely uses some insights ...

That's a tough question to answer. The "quant business" is a business. Some quants sell low-grade/low-volatility results, some sell fast-moving/unpredictable results, some sell industry targeted results, etc. It depends on what the buyer wants to buy. There's a market for everything. Haven't we all met people that think they're going to win the ...

I believe the reason no one has been able to come up with an example of a quant fund employing the academic factor-based approach with stellar performance is because there aren't any (at least not any with decent sized AUM). For a while, now, there has been a debate amongst institutional investors and quantitative professionals as to whether quant is dead. ...

One simple way to approach this question is to look at what quantitative hedge funds did well during the crisis, and try to understand what strategies they employed. As an example, you can look at the Barron's 100 from 2009. The top performing fund was RenTech's Medallion. Their strategy is not publicly known. There were only two broad hedge fund ...

If it was possible to simply pick up some papers and adapt them and produce returns that trade would quickly disappear since it would be an inexpensive way for firms to produce excess returns. If you have a factor that produces alpha you had best not publish it or all returns associated with it will disappear. I have found most of the value in the academic ...

There are hedge funds out there that actually only make money when markets go down a lot. I think the strategies they use are what you are looking for and i must tell you i found it very interesting. There is this hedge fund called Universa, its run by Mark Spitznagel and advised by Nasim Tallib the writer of the book "the Black Swan". This hedge fund ...