YouSaid · the spoken record

Gary Chropuvka

lines on the record: 50
first: 2021-03-26
most recent: 2021-03-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I would say besides buying monster beverage, which I think is up about 600,000 percent for the S&P is only up less than 1,000%. I would say... I would say there's really nothing I would want to know in advance, and it might sound a little weird, but I think it spoils the excitement. I mean, one of the great things about being in this quantitative business to really finance in general is just the exploration, the quest for learning. That's something that has driven me in my career that I've truly enjoyed. And knowing stuff would kind of spoil that journey. And so the hiccups that I've had across the years and the successes, I think, have made the journey awesome. And I'd say respectfully no thanks on the other pieces because it wouldn't have made the journey as fun.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say to those that are First of all, they're welcome. We'd love to see them. I'd say enjoy the journey, substantively network. I think you learned so much from asking a lot of questions about what people do and how they do it. Be a sponge. Surround yourself with some really smart people that are equally driven. And then the last thing I would say, particularly for quant investors, is marry the how and the why. And what I mean by that is, you know, a lot of people either have the correlation understanding or the causation understanding, correlation that they understand the math behind it. Causation, they understand the practical effect so it could work again.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So talk about a pretty packed life, but that book's called Outrageous Good Fortune. I'm in the middle of that, and it's pretty amazing.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So some of my favorites, especially since I had a decent amount of time between taking on the role at WorldSquan, I was able to read David Rubinstein's How to Lead, which I thought was just terrific Sati Natella had the hit refresh, which I thought was quite good. I was also able to read our books from our CEO who has two good ones, Finding Alphas in the Unrule. So I got to plug those two. Those were quite good and just interesting ways of thinking. And then the one I'm reading now, which I think is a pretty cool book, it's called Outrageous Good Fortune. It's about a guy named Michael Burke, football hero UPen, CI agent, overthrew a communist government, ran intelligence for Eastern Europe, Ringling Brothers Circus. He was the executive at CBS Sports, president of the Yankees and president of MS.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, I would say my dad had unbelievable work ethic. It was a six-day-a-week guy. One of my first bosses was a guy named Gus Economos, who unfortunately passed away in 9-11. But was able to balance enormous credibility or industry credibility with”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I would say I've been a fan of House of Cards. My daughter and I watch a million little things. Joe Rogan's interviews with Elon Musk are pretty impressive. And I would have to say one of my favorite videos is a four minute and thirteen second Jason Garrett speech as he talks about One World Trade Center. It's an amazing video that all my friends get a text from me on a pretty regular basis just level sets. It's a great video.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we're very action oriented. And so that's been some of the fun things that I've been fortunate enough to observe in my six months.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I will tell you I've had such a great time of walking out of meetings with action steps. It's been seeing people intellectually stimulated around again, where a lot of it is on Zoom. And so we sit there and just watching how people dialogue has just been so incredibly exhilarating a lot of the great ideas and watching how respectful people are to each other and challenging them in thoughtful ways and almost hearing them think right in real time has just been incredible in terms of the organization. It's just highly productive, highly collaborative. There's just a lot of great decision making that goes on. We just recently did a research off-site where we just walk through and have many, many decisions. We pride ourselves.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's a fair statement. Again, we want to see, as Biden institutes new policies, how that'll affect corporations. And frankly, that goes beyond tax policy, other types of policies. And so if there's international policies that will affect trade or any type of things that come out of Washington or frankly, any other government around the world, given we are a global organization, we're going to attempt to take that into account to try to understand it, understand what the ramifications are to companies, and being able to position our portfolios accordingly. And we do that whether it's a regulatory issue or an event that we talked about. Again, our ability to adapt and understand what's going on in markets, what's going to affect companies or particular asset classes is really one of the fun parts of the job as being a quantitative investor.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, the way we think about it, and I'm happy to spend some time on just generally tax efficient investings, I think it's a very useful piece and I've had some prior experience in it. But more substantively on kind of what we do now at WorldCond, if there is a change to tax policy, we're going to figure out how it's going to impact a particular company. Or corporate tax is going to go up or down, and how will that impact cash flow or something on a company statements? So that's really how we would tackle it. And we'll understand how we should update our accounting for those types of events and adapt accordingly like you would expect most investors to do. In the array of tax efficient investing, I'm happy to spend a few minutes there. But that's really not one of our core focuses at WorldPont.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just noise. And so part of our jobs as researchers and portfolio managers, as good quants at world quantities, is to kind of distinguish between the signal, meaning, does this have some value? Does it provide me insight? Or is it really just noise and not really worthy of allocating any investment to it?”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We certainly have not found that out yet. The nice thing about it is the amount of data, you know, is How do we ingest that? How do we come up with processes to be able to ingest it? How do we store it? How do we analyze it? Again, and that's really one of our integral parts of what we do and how we do it. And you're seeing this in the investment industry. You're seeing this in many different industries. But I think that's one of the exciting parts. And it's a lot of data. But again, I think that's really been waiting for these times for a long time to continue to have more and more data. It allows us a huge opportunity to drive an edge because we think we know what to do with that type of data to pair that with some of our smart researchers and figuring out what are the insights. So I think the other challenge that we face in terms of your comment about too much is, again, signal to noise. What's a signal, meaning what gives you insight and what's”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense of that company's fortune. So again, it's really about diversification and not thinking about these pieces of data in isolation. We had talked a little bit about value and other types of factors. Again, I think the approach that most quants take is really to think about diversification. As a really helpful way to produce consistent results for clients. And I think that's really the key to how most content and at World Quant, we think about diversification at pretty much every step of the way, whether it's our people, whether it's the expected returns that we try to generate or portfolio managers and how we go about executing and making that a reality.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it really is, and I think, you know, listen, we all have our phones, and I could kindly track my kids on Life 360 and figuring out where they are. This is happening. It's part of our everyday lives. And it could be insightful information. Certainly helped me with my kids and other parts, whether it's tankers or whether it's clicks. insights that can be potentially telling. Again, I would go back to my other comment about diversification. So in isolation, almost for certain will not work all the time. But if there's some level of insight that you can gain from a piece of this data or a way to look at this data, and then you marry out that with millions and millions of other things, you can have a pretty good.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exploding. And so whether it's social media, whether it's satellite imaging, whether it's clicking on getting vendors that provide some of this data all anonymized to be able to have a view of where companies' fortunes may be is certainly something that the industry is seeing. There's a massive amount of data vendors out there. There is some consolidation in some of those data vendors, but there's a lot of data out there to be able to employ not just social media, but other types of data that can be informative of a company's fortunes.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, Barry. I think you're touching on a really important component as you think about all this alternative data. What do you do with it and how do you utilize it? And I think a diversified approach of using things like satellite images, using things like social media can be quite impactful, some of which might be very, very short run. Some of it might have more longer term ramifications, things like credit card transactions, web clicks. I mean, there's so much alternative data out there that if you can think about how best to utilize it, again, that whole concept of marrying kind of technical acumen. And so you understand data. You understand something about putting data together to create some type of expected return, but also marrying that with some business acumen, I think is really...”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yay or nay very quickly. And I'm just, you know, I guess I'm surprised that that's not happening more and more in the investment industry. So that would be one of the, I would say, my biggest surprises, but I'm okay with that.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say one of the surprises is the adoption of more and more quantitative investing strategies in general, just given everyday people's thoughts on the use of computers and use of your phone to drive information. It's happening across most every industry. I guess I'm surprised, happily surprised, that more and more kind of investment folks aren't employing more and more quantitative strategy, good for us from where we sit. But I'm just surprised, you know, I think everybody wants to, you know, if you're at a dinner party, you're getting asked a question. It's got to be empirically backed that you're going to look it up as quickly as you possibly can. And you want to test that, whatever someone said, whatever hypothesis. And there's a lot of skeptics and they can be proven.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, Barry. I think the quant industry will continue to evolve in places like data and places like storage and places like analytics and the tools that one can use to try to figure out the fortunes of a company have increased exponentially. And so the amount of data that's out there, amount of data that can be stored, amount of data that can be analyzed, the simulations that one can run has grown like I said absolutely exponentially. And really for a quant investor, it's terrific because the world is kind of coming in our direction. The amount of data, we think one of our edges to be able to take data, synthesize it, and create information and drive returns. And we think here at World Point, we're extremely well positioned to be able to do that. And so, to be honest, I think it's an absolute...”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High positive returns, but when you don't, leverage is a very big challenge because people call up and ask you for money and you need to pay them. So I think that really was one of the biggest issues of 07. But I'd also say there was crowded traits, as you correctly point out. And so I think one of the goals that we have at World Quantity is continue to differentiate, continue to create unique ways of making money for our clients, investing in our almost 300 researchers to try to continue to innovate and be much less crowded than other people. Again, we want to be unique. We don't want to be susceptible to those large movements in terms of those quote-unquote crowded trades. And that's really a huge goal. And frankly, it was a big lesson learned for, I believe, the Kwan industry that happened almost 14 years ago.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crowded trades, yeah. So it was more than a decade ago, I think it was almost 13 and a half years ago. I think that was a huge lesson learned for quant investors. I think it was a period where there was some shops had a fair amount of complacency where they didn't continue to use their research. There was more into There should have been a lot more pushing in terms of research. And I think you look back and you saw events that, you know, for a number of reasons. One is there was a fair amount of leverage in the system. And so you're able to amplify your returns with leverage. And leverage is great if you're always going to have”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sharp moves. And so we aim to have a little bit more consistent persistent results. But to your point, you're right. It's been an unbelievable challenge for value. We have seen a little bit of a turnaround since the election. And so value has started to do a little bit better. But your point is well taken. But I think it just speaks to our philosophy of you want to have many different ways of looking at the fortunes of a company and diversification, diversification, diversification is key. And at WorldQuan, we do that with millions of alphas. We have many different portfolio managers, many different ways of combining our alphas. And so we kind of live and breathe from diversifying of our people to our alphas, to our portfolio managers, and then to our execution. So again, I think your observation is spot on.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it's very consistent with, again, thinking about it as a very diversified portfolio. And value investing over the long term has done reasonably well. I'm very impressed that you went back to the crisp database. So kudos to you. When I think about, you know, value, again, value on itself, we tend to take an approach where we want to be more diversified. We don't want to just bet on value. We want to have things that have growth attributes and really have some, you know, we call it idiosyncratic or some specific type of return where we think that's our edge in terms of other types of factors like value or growth or low volatility. Those are something that we want to have a very modest amount of exposure or we really don't want to necessarily make a lot of money on that particular aspect because it's very common and it's also subject to very”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's really where we see those effects. And I would say it looks like over the last twelve months it's been a pretty rocky rocky area. But we're pretty much back to kind of pre pandemic levels when I think about quote sizes, bidesque spreads for SP type names. So it looks like things are kind of getting a little bit back to normal in terms of market liquidity depth and spreads.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some pretty interesting data around that, I would say, for our purposes. We look at things like liquidity and depth of market and how that's being impacted. And I would say over the last 12 months, interestingly, the world of market microstructure has gotten pretty complicated to the extent you could trade ABC stock in 40 different venues in the US is interesting enough across 16 different exchanges or roughly about 16 different exchanges. And so we spend a lot of our time looking at things like volumes and spreads and overall liquidity.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, so I think we look at in terms of a liquidity standpoint what are the how is this affecting the amount of ability to trade our securities? We really do try to minimize, I mentioned earlier, we try to minimize the amount of risk we take from any particular factor and things like short interest is something that is a pretty common factor that folks like us would try to identify and minimize how much our stocks will move because of that. I would say big picture, thinking about liquidity, obviously there is a big retail input to liquidity. They tend to trade stocks that are relatively cheap in price.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'll take it up a step in terms of just in general how we think about it, but it's really about trying to identify things that will impact companies and what are the ramifications. And I think that's really the way we try to think about that. So in that specific case in terms of what would happen to particular companies, those events are relatively quick moves. We try to be very diversified in many different ways. And that's probably one of the first times I've used that term, but I would say the diversification point is so critical in investing, whether you're a quant investor or you're any type of investor, it's definitely an extremely helpful attribute when you have events like this occur.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Bitcoin when they announce, and what do you do about it? And so we think about the world in characteristics. So we call them factors. And so you can create these quote unquote factors and say, I want to have a portfolio that whether those factors do well or poorly, my portfolio will not be affected. So that's really the way we've thought about a lot of 2020 and 21. And our investment team has just done a terrific job of being able to navigate that and identify some of these risks that they haven't seen before. We try to codify it in a systematic way and then focus our attention on really where we believe we can make money. And that's a lot of these millions of alphas that we believe have been time-tested for years. So that's how we think about dealing with some of these unprecedented moves that we've seen in things like short interest and momentum and value.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have something like COVID, you want to think about companies that are going to be largely affected because of that. And there's two approaches. One is you can try to risk manage, which is usually what we would do, which is, listen, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Let's try to immunize our portfolios from those. So whether it helps or hurts stocks, let's try to immunize ourselves. And the other is to say, okay, let's try to get a sense whether there's going to be some type of trend here or there's some ability to create alpha or some excess returns when these events happen. You could think about binary events, so things like elections that have happened and what the ramifications are. You could think about things like trade. You could think about companies' exposure to, you know,”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Momentum we talked about before value. These have had some pretty unprecedented moves. There's been for value about fifteen standard deviation moves that were above two in twenty-one, just massive moves. When you think about a simple five standard deviation move means that that happens once one day every approximate 14,000 years. So to your point, there's been no shortage of massive moves, largely because there's been such a big shift. And so I think as quant investors, the way we try to approach it is to adapt as quickly as we possibly can for some unforeseen event. Obviously, we try to predict whatever we can in advance, but to the extent...”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Barry, that's a terrific question. That really separates the quote unquote and the quant investors. And so one of the things that makes our job so interesting, I find, is the ability to adapt and really to be market practitioners as well as quant. And I think that really makes great quant investors. So if we think about twenty twenty and also in twenty twenty one thus far, we've seen obviously unprecedented events, whether it's around COVID or other types of events that have happened over the last year, which ramifications have caused very large moves in kind of common, let's call them factors or expressions or buckets of particular stocks or characteristics of stocks. For example, things like”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So World Punt's investment philosophy is really pretty simple, global, leverage our people and provide them the tools and technology to make returns for our investors. I mean, that's really, in a nutshell, what we're trying to do. We have a very systematic way in which we do it. We try to leverage the law of large numbers and have millions of different alphas that we can leverage. We put them together in a portfolio and then we execute and make them a reality through trading. So the investment process is quite simple and straightforward, but the uniqueness of our philosophy is that we are extremely global in terms of our people. We do believe in playing the breath game. We have a lot of alphas. A lot of ways to look at companies, and we try to leverage that throughout our process and create portfolios that drive return for our clients.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For many, many years and decades to come, but he is someone who really does make decisions, takes in all the information, and has really built an unbelievable business here at World Mont.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I first met Igor, he was just so intellectually stimulating. I mean, a brilliant, brilliant investor, brilliant man, extremely charitable. Some of the things that he's done, I'll say we just are really spectacular, and you can see a lot of those on the web. He's written some really interesting books. And just his vision, his ability to articulate where we're going and collaborate very well. I'd say the other thing that is just very impressive is his decision making. And I think I've observed a lot of quants over the years. You kind of get into the analysis paralysis. There's always another test you can run on something. Igor, to his credit, is a decision maker. And it's just great to be able to partner with him for six months for the last six months and look forward.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having programs that continue to incentivize people and really create a collaborative and I would say competitive in a good way where people continue to be intellectually stimulated. I think that's really what really drives the firm, the collaboration. We just recently did a research tour, a virtual research tour and myself and Igor and a few other senior folks kind of did a did a tour around. And it's unbelievable when people can promote the collaboration. They're sharing with us some of the research. And the first thing they say is I'd like to acknowledge the four or five people that helped with this research project. And so, you know, just the idea around true collaboration, true appreciation for where you're getting assistance from, I think it was really makes this place a pretty unique. unique place to be.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think sometimes people may do this for to try to recruit people. And I've heard of people doing that, but putting it as a systematic way internally I think is something quite unique. I would say when we think about our group, and really one of the compelling opportunities that at least I had when I thought of joining and fortunate enough to join Worldwide is we've got over 600 people around the globe. We operate in 23 offices, 13 countries. So we've got unbelievable global diversity. And so I think that's one thing that makes us quite unique. So we operate in many different places. We have many different opinions. We've always promoted diversity, diversity of thought, diversity of alphas or drivers of return when we invest.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So we divvy up. We have several competitions around the firm with set incentives for each of them. And we kind of have a group of people that try to tackle this. And instead of it being relative to others in the firm, we're saying, okay, here's a particular strategy that we want to spend some time on. Let's see what you can develop. And so that's an area where we have projects that might not fit into the core research that we do on a daily basis, but maybe a little more out there. Maybe we're trying to look at a different asset class. And we want to uncover. So we realize the upfront R&D or the research is going to take a little bit longer. And so we want to incentivize them to go out and really think creatively about capturing. And we incentivize them accordingly because they're taking time out of their kind of core.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So we have many different ways that we try to incentivize our people in terms of what we do for our researchers. And so we have several different challenges that we have around the world to incentivize people's work. And so that's just yet another piece of the puzzle where we're trying to promote a particular activity or a particular research and be able to incentivize them, call them out, reward them for doing some really good work. And so we have many of these. And I think one of the unique things about this firm is that we have many different competitions where people, our teams can be incented to, you know, Different things and to use their mind a little differently and have the right incentive structure to be able to be rewarded for those.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making decisions, making sure things escalate very quickly so that we can continue our focus and our vision. And then the last thing I spend a decent amount of time on is talent. And how do we acquire talent? How do we promote a culture of collaboration, intellectual stimulation? A lot of quants in general. We like to be intellectually stimulated. So how do we continue to do that and create a culture where ideas can be shared and collaborated across the firm. So those are where I've been spending my time over the last six months.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great Barry. Yes. So as president, which I'm extremely fortunate to have joined such an incredible team, I'd say really three things that I focus on. One is overall business strategy, help with the operating of the firm and then add some leadership on the investing side. And I'd really, that breaks down into kind of four key elements in terms of my role and I work very closely with our CEO, Igor Tolchinsky, and really thinking about the following four things. One is vision. So where should we be spending our time? I would say interestingly, we've got roughly a little over 600 quantitative people. And so we feel like we could solve a lot of interesting problems. And really one of our jobs is to ensure that we're focusing on the right ones to solve. And so setting out that vision.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is going to negatively impact the environment. And so you can, you know, with Quant tools, you can figure out, okay, what are those companies or how do they fall into those categories, whether it's an industry or the percentage of revenues a company's going to get from, let's say, emissions, and then be able to create a portfolio to identify whether it's a factor between value or momentum and or different types of exposures that they want. So for example, things like tobacco or emission. So you can customize what your equity portfolio looks like relative to a benchmark or just an absolute.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it is an interesting topic, customization. I would say when we think about when you think about customized beta in the industry, there's really two things that are happening. One is what types of I'll call it bets would you like to make? So do you want to bet on value stocks? Do you want to bet on companies that have higher dividend payers and you're able to customize what you want to place a wager on? The other part of the customization, which continues to be a pretty interesting trend in the industry, is there are certain ESG factors that one may want to hold near and dear and want to have companies in their portfolios that express the beliefs that they have and want to express. So for example, I don't want to invest in tobacco stocks or I don't want to invest in something.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that tried and true works over time. And I think as the industry has evolved, the smart beta strategies, there's now more interesting other ways of evolving and utilizing things like big data to be able to similarly look at factors, so very similar to ranked companies. So quants always want to play the breath game, meaning spread out their bets, have a lot of different views on particular companies. But what the alternative data and big data allows us to do is really play the depth game. So know a lot more about a particular company as opposed to just their price to book. So, you know, back to your original question, the smart beta strategies, which are largely common, implementable, absolutely use large amounts of data. In a pretty academically proven, well thought out, but have been around for many decades.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I think you're touching on an important component. If we think about the quant industry really started with a lot of these kind of, let's call them smart betas or traditional measures of factors. So thinking about things like value or momentum, value being a cheap company relative to its book value, as an example, momentum. So if a stock is starting to trend in a favorable direction, will it continue that particular trend? The whole idea around analyzing all this data as quants or the original quants, you really wanted to play off the law of large numbers. And so you had a lot of data, you had information on each and every company, thousands of companies, and you tried to rank companies by these particular metrics, price to book or some measure of momentum, and you'd create a portfolio around those kind of quote unquote smart.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That not may not be coming out of a company's financials, but it's something that's happening around the company that might be impactful. So those are two examples of items that you'd constitute as big data because you're looking at massive amount of, whether it's research reports or news articles to kind of get a gauge of can I have a better picture of that company's fortunes? And I would say, you know, one of the things that we do at WorldPond is there's not just three ideas or five ideas, there's millions of ideas of ways to navigate and have a view on a company and big data affords us the opportunity big data along with some great analytical tools to be able to kind of have views on particular companies.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there's tons of data out there that one can we could take an example of looking through analyst reports. And a lot of people read analyst reports. And so things you can do is try to pick up on their sentiment. And so how we're analysts starting to change their mind about a particular company is a pretty common example.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to learn from it. And so there's just this massive amount every time we click on something, every time we move. There's all this data that's being captured. And really, one of the great things about being a quantitative investor is that we have tools and techniques to take all this awesome amount of data, which comes in many forms, and I could touch on that. But it comes in many forms and convert that into some insight or some informational edge that helps us predict companies or a particular asset class. So this whole concept of big data absolutely here to stay, I'd say it's much broader than the investing business. It's happening all of our lives. We're all sitting with phones in our pockets that have massive amounts of information. And so really the goal of all this big data is to create an informational edge, to know something that maybe somebody else doesn't, or to be able to leverage that in pursuit of.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say, you know, when I think about big data, and it's a large term, but I would say we're all consumers, not just in the investment or in the quant group, but this whole concept around big data is affecting each and every one of our lives. We're all trying to have an information edge. We're trying to make better decisions. We're trying to utilize as much data to make informed decisions of where we're spending our time, whether it's things like going on vacation or figuring out what restaurant you want to go to. And so the world has moved beyond things like Zaggetts and really trying to understand the idea of, there's a lot of things that will provoke what you want to do or where you want to spend your time and where do you want to invest in. And so this whole concept of big data is really to take anything and everything that may be applicable to a company.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would say I spent a little over twenty years in the same group. And it really drove what I love about my job, which is quantitative investing. It's something that I have a huge passion for. I love dealing with data and figuring out problems. And there was certainly a lot of investment problems that we dealt with in that group. And really compelled me to go and join WorldBond for even other opportunities. But while I was at Goldman, did a number of different things on the research side, on the portfolio management side, on the product development side, the client side. Learned a ton. And now I'm here at the World Font for the last roughly six months.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I actually I think I predated Emanuel Derman because I was in the program when it first started back in the early two thousands. I did follow Emanuel, I guess, to Goldman Sachs after he had he was there. But separate paths, but there's definitely a correlation among the two. I went to Columbia after I joined the Kwant Group at Goldman. There was, you know, looking around the space, there were a lot of folks with some pretty advanced degrees and decided to try to marry the computer science as well as the engineering with some of the business side to be better trained in the quant field.”
2021-03-26 · Masters in Business · Gary Chropuvka on Financial Engineering (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source