Investing in a biotech company, or anything that has a physical "product" is very different from investing in a quantitative fund. Anyone should be allowed to invest in companies with real products (or doing research into creating a new product) and not productless quantitative funds that run closer to ponzi schemes.

QuoteOriginally posted by: ArthurDentQuoteOriginally posted by: harrisont Great because? You can make money off the suck-er investors, who fancy mathy shit and think a bunch of Phd's are going to make their money grow when little do they know that investing in this kinda fund can have a negative payoff and you "pay" investor fees to a fund whose strategies are purely martingale.There is nothing robust about taking two partials and stitching them together into a joint distribution using an arbitrary assumption about their relationship. As for correlations, there are so many magic numbers and fudge factors in such an analysis that it is barely better than technical analysis. Both of these are just sophisticated / hidden forms of curve fitting....I agree with that, the only thing that could be truly robust is if you do your resimulations of market data in a non-parametric way, capturing all the dynamics, which is very hard when it involves multi-dimensional random variables (i.e. a portfolio of multiple assets). Using parameters leads to curve fitting, and thats what most of continuous time finance and parametric stats is about. So in theory if we agree that there is no robust way of resimulation, then a truly quantitative strategy (using only multiple stock price histories, without any fundamental data) does not exist.

QuoteOriginally posted by: harrisontInvesting in a biotech company, or anything that has a physical "product" is very different from investing in a quantitative fund. Anyone should be allowed to invest in companies with real productsOh, this is very nice. You will ALLOW me what to do with my money? Thank you comrade

QuoteOriginally posted by: AbhiJThe second type you are talking about are the Quantitative Strategies fund managers. why do they have to be quantitative? Soros and Buffett do not go around broadcasting their trade recommendations on tv. there are many others like them, stealth quiet types who just bring home the bacon quietly. They are type 2.

QuoteOriginally posted by: harrisontQuoteOriginally posted by: ArthurDentQuoteOriginally posted by: harrisont Great because? You can make money off the suck-er investors, who fancy mathy shit and think a bunch of Phd's are going to make their money grow when little do they know that investing in this kinda fund can have a negative payoff and you "pay" investor fees to a fund whose strategies are purely martingale.There is nothing robust about taking two partials and stitching them together into a joint distribution using an arbitrary assumption about their relationship. As for correlations, there are so many magic numbers and fudge factors in such an analysis that it is barely better than technical analysis. Both of these are just sophisticated / hidden forms of curve fitting....I agree with that, the only thing that could be truly robust is if you do your resimulations of market data in a non-parametric way, capturing all the dynamics, which is very hard when it involves multi-dimensional random variables (i.e. a portfolio of multiple assets). Using parameters leads to curve fitting, and thats what most of continuous time finance and parametric stats is about. So in theory if we agree that there is no robust way of resimulation, then a truly quantitative strategy (using only multiple stock price histories, without any fundamental data) does not exist.Alpha exists, but if you are winning, you must have a clear understanding of who is losing, otherwise you are the sucker at the poker table... For instance, commodity producers are willing to lose money in exchange for hedging away price volatility. If you are willing to bear their risk you can make the money they are willing to lose. Once you have this economic thesis, you can devise a quantitative strategy (or a structured product) around it.Doing it the other way around is fashionable but prone to blowups.

QuoteOriginally posted by: ArthurDentQuoteOriginally posted by: harrisontQuoteOriginally posted by: ArthurDentQuoteOriginally posted by: harrisont Great because? You can make money off the suck-er investors, who fancy mathy shit and think a bunch of Phd's are going to make their money grow when little do they know that investing in this kinda fund can have a negative payoff and you "pay" investor fees to a fund whose strategies are purely martingale.There is nothing robust about taking two partials and stitching them together into a joint distribution using an arbitrary assumption about their relationship. As for correlations, there are so many magic numbers and fudge factors in such an analysis that it is barely better than technical analysis. Both of these are just sophisticated / hidden forms of curve fitting....I agree with that, the only thing that could be truly robust is if you do your resimulations of market data in a non-parametric way, capturing all the dynamics, which is very hard when it involves multi-dimensional random variables (i.e. a portfolio of multiple assets). Using parameters leads to curve fitting, and thats what most of continuous time finance and parametric stats is about. So in theory if we agree that there is no robust way of resimulation, then a truly quantitative strategy (using only multiple stock price histories, without any fundamental data) does not exist.Alpha exists, but if you are winning, you must have a clear understanding of who is losing, otherwise you are the sucker at the poker table... For instance, commodity producers are willing to lose money in exchange for hedging away price volatility. If you are willing to bear their risk you can make the money they are willing to lose. Once you have this economic thesis, you can devise a quantitative strategy (or a structured product) around it.Doing it the other way around is fashionable but prone to blowups.There are hedgers and there are speculators. Hedgers lose small and win small. Speculators win big and lose big. As you said, it is crucial to to see how money is re-distributed in this zero-sum world.