Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
I've often joked that this show should be called, this is who you're up against. Because I am so often having conversations with brilliant people across the investment landscape who are effectively my competition and yours. This week's conversation fits that description because it gives you an inside view of how things work among some of Wall Street's most competitive investment firms. My guest is Leigh Drogen, who has worked as a statistical arbitrage portfolio manager and who founded and now runs Estimize. A data company that works with some of the world's largest hedge funds. Our conversation centers on the massive shift, from what we call discretionary portfolio management, basically stock-picking. To a landscape that is increasingly dominated by quantitative investors of various types. We talk about how any investor might hope to earn alpha and how doing so is harder and harder. There are so many great stories in this episode told by someone with the perfect career experience to know how the system actually works. After many episodes where I've been learning on the fly about topics like venture capital, permanent equity, or even health.
All right, Leigh. Well, I've been really excited about this one because I have intentionally avoided most discussions of quantitative investing on the podcast. Just because I spent most of my 10 years of my career doing this. And I thought it'd be fun to branch out a little bit, but I'm not ready to dip my toes back into the water. And we met very briefly at, I think it was a Quant Conference, actually. And we started talking about Favor, and we started chatting about something very specific, which we'll get to in a minute. But then I also came across a piece that you wrote on LinkedIn. Which I thought was one of the most thoughtful pieces on the current state of the investing spectrum between traditional, deep fundamental work and quantitative investors. And how that balance might look in the future. And that's really where I'd like to focus today. Because I think it is a fascinating shift that we're watching in real-time. And that a lot of big people, even famous people are being left behind by this move towards quant.