Have a final interview scheduled for Quant Research Intern position with Head of Regional office, and want to know some specific info about their characteristics beforehand. Excuse me for the ignorance, as I only have a sell-side trading/risk management experience, and have no great knowledge about Systematic Hedgefunds:) Here are some things I want to know/clarify on, and would be great if someone could shed some light on some of these questions. (TLDR)
- It says MLP is the parent company of WQ, and can see the founder of WQ was a former PM of MLP. By being a parent company does that mean WQ as a whole company can be considered a PM for MLP, meaning it could leverage the same platform/data/structure that MLP has constructed throughout the year? The question may sound lame, but I think it is important factor to consider, given that I consider leveraging every good resource/platform possible for education vital when going through the early stage of the industry.
If that's not the case( = WQ is actually independent from MLP and they do not share the similar platforms for the quants, s.t. WQ have less competitive/abundant resources), it would be disastrous to mention this for the motivation, and to my personal career. This got me because I read from the article that among $9B that WQ manages, only $5B is from MLP while the rest is kept secretive.
- ALthough there are some options/macro teams, I heard WQ is mainly Equity L/S fund. During this market environment, I think some poor equity L/S funds would suffer, assuming they are vulnerable toward this equity-hostile condition. (Plz correct me if I'm wrong. This is just my simple intuition) So I was wondering how WQ has been doing recently. The most recent returns I found is 2020, where they had about 20%, which I think is great for systematic funds. If someone know how they have been doing it would be great if you could share some info.
Thanks in advance:)
Why would you expect MLP, a general hedge fund that does many things, to have better a better platform/resources for quant, than Worldquant which specializes 100% in quant? Also its not clear to me why quant equity L/S should be generally vulnerable to market drawdowns, as they are running market neutral most likely.
Thanks for your comments. I appreciate it.
I think you have a point. I thought of this part quite lightly in terms of resources. For the resources I meant data, so some other fundamental/macro/products related data that WQ did not accumulated could be used in the research? This assumption is purely based on my ignorance in how MMHFs work, so please excuse me if this sounds totally wrong.
And I meant the equity L/S who are not well-hedged due to poor management and research. I assumed there might be some exceptions for the quant equity funds who are losing significantly in these conditions. Seems systematics equity funds are performing in wide variation, (ex: some quants like AQR and CIG flagship portfolio are performing well while Fort is suffering), so was wondering where WQ stands.
I wouldn't worry about worldquants resourcing. If they are running billions of dollars it's safe to say they will have what they deem is needed.
AQR and worldquant are not that comparable. AQR trades a lot slower and their business model isn't producing alpha its asset gathering. I think these are more important distinctions to think about. Frequency/style (technical vs fundamental)/business model/organization (end to end pods that do it all vs. each part of the production process is handled by a different team)
I was told that all of WQ starting capital was from millenium. If they have non MLP basis, I'm assuming it's their own reinvested money now. FYI they don't charge management fees to MLP. Only performance fees. So if you want to relate WQ to MLP, think about it as basically the literal best pod at MLP by far to the point they could spin off on their own
They do run their own infra from my understanding, and are expanding outside just equity asset classes. Honestly the only downside for some people who want to do stats based alpha research, it's that they commoditize quant research. Not sure from the outside looking in how much comp scales below PM seats
I didn't know the WQ would be considered the best pod at MLP.
If you don't mind could you explain a bit more, what it means to "commoditize quant research"?
Thanks for the comment!
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