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Raffaele Savi

lines on the record: 54
first: 2025-08-12
most recent: 2025-08-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“They're so kind. They are so creative. And I just think we're going to be fine. I think that as this cohort makes its way through the workforce and in society and they shape what the world would be, I don't think that we can be worried. And probably there's been like that for every generation, but I'm feeling very optimistic about every time, you know, I talk to someone sub 30, I'm like, yeah, the world is going to be a better place. They're going to make the world a better place.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was thinking about something similar a few weeks ago. And, you know, it seems to me that the world, people are really worried about a lot of things. And of course, you know, you go online and, you know, the things that happen around us are very scary. But every time you spend time with someone young, the interns come in for a summer internship in the team, youngest team members, you know, my kids, their friends, they are so smart.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Family. So I wish, like, you know, the things I like to do the most is spend time with my family, do a little bit of exercise and play guitar. And, you know, in a time series sense, I do all.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This idea that you find a really smart, cool, very practical way of generating investment success and you share it with the world, I find it spectacular. And we draw the dead book, made a lot of millionaires in this industry. And sometimes I meet people, competitors, firms, adapting to say, oh, you work with Ronald Kant. Say thank you because I've implemented a lot of those ideas and they work.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As modern and as, but they shared it. And to me, in a world where sometimes, you know, there's a lot of secrecy because you find out a way, you build a piece of code.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that was like mid 90s, late 96, until like that, yeah. I went to the bookstore in New New Square where there was the NYU secondhand bookstore. I mean, back then there was no Amazon and, you know, it wasn't like, yeah, I like this book. I'm going to download it from the internet or order it. And I remember browsing the shelves and I picked up active portfolio management, the 1985 edition, blue and purple. And fell in love. I read it cover to cover. And I've implemented a lot of that in my first job. And then, you know, life is crazy. I ended up working with Ron and with Richard. And what I think that is very special about that is that not only they figure something out like a way to think about investment problems that stood the test of time 30 years later is still”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned Rachel Grinnold and the wrong kind a few times, but I gotta tell you this little story about them. So one summer when I was finishing my dissertation, I did a six weeks Greyhound bus tour of the US. And my last stop was New York City. It's the first time I was in New York City.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That if you don't take your work seriously, you can't expect other people to do so. And so I When I was younger, I loved ideas. I still love ideas, and discipline has been what I've been working on every year to try and be more and more disciplined about finishing things and delivering. And the older I get, the more discipline becomes. It's the necessary twin of insight.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really think I'm only okay at this because I work with fabulous people. And that makes me think that investment seems to be an industry where a lot of the myth of the lead investor, the person that makes the enormous call. So I listened a lot. I want to learn from the people that I work with and they're fabulous. So maybe relative to other folks in my seat, I do listen a lot and so I use more of the insights that the people I work with have. And I think that's a big strength.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the mid 90s, it was a combination of sort of MATLAB and C++, and I was so proud. And, you know, people in my team today would laugh at me if they saw it, but back then I was so excited about it. That's cool. Yes.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, well, I got two stories for you. So, the Italian part, I remember doing back then there was no open source. And so you had to code it all up from scratch. And so I remember building Eris model from scratch.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the two shall not cross. And we've built a bit of a hybrid. When you actually look at our team, we're this weird 50-50 sort of blend. And the first few years in moving from a pure finance, accounting, economics to computer science, statistics, math, what wasn't easy? So the 2008 to 2012-13 were interesting years culturally for the team, but then we ended up hitting on this very nice blend. I was about to say perfect. It's perfect for me, but”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not always true, but by and large, the impact of macroeconomic change on the next five minutes is zero. You don't need to think about rates. You don't need to think about GDP. Now, of course, if your time horizon is one year, a lot of things happened over the next year. And a lot of things happened also over the next six months. And so I think it's interesting that when you're looking at incredibly successful, talented firm, when they're trying to move beyond their national time horizon, they struggle. And then you're trying to say like, why? They have this incredible system. Or on the other side, they have these incredible insights. And I think it does come down to... You'll see to this day that there's this very big dichotomy versus the harsh sciences heavy firms and the economics and finance heavy firms. That's interesting.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a friend, DFA, GI, AQR, Barra, Axa Rosenberg, the Panagoras, the Acadian, a lot of those tend to be much more about starting, at least from Risk Premium, starting from what today we call factor investing, looking at these anomalies. And these firms ended up dominating in Long Only. You know, when you think sort of why that could be, I think that if you have fast, I like to say nothing really happens in the next five minutes”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economics, theory, finance, accounting, corporate strategy, none of that. And that turned out to be the dominant model in hedge fund space, and that's where the DE shows and the Renaissance and the two sigmas and sort of some of the best in that space are coming from. Then you have the, and I call that the East Coast because of the New York origin. Actually, you can trace a lot of those people coming exactly from investment, you know, maybe having their formative experience on the desk of an investment bank and then starting their firm. Then when you're looking at what I call the West Coast University of Chicago,”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so this is a little bit along the lines of we shape our destiny, but it also matters where you're coming from. And when you look at quantitative investors, systematic investors, and half jokingly, I say that if you could do like a genetic test of everybody in our industry, us, all our competitors, the new entrants, the big ones, the small ones, you essentially find two routes. One is trading desk of investment banks, and that's where sort of the first start strategies are born from, that's where modern HFT comes from. And it was from the origin long short, was from the origin numerical, and it attracted people with computer science background, hard sciences, physics, math. It had investment in data and technology from the very beginning. It was also interestingly devoid of”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's various ways of being successful. You know, when I was younger, I really thought that there was this sort of top cognitive abilities, peak speed was everything. And, you know, I still think it's very important, especially for certain parts of what we do of the investment process and the forecasting process, building systems. I think you have to match that with curiosity and open-mindedness. And so I found some of the best people, the smartest people, I know the most accomplished people I know are bizarrely open-minded on topics they know all about. They've written the books. They've trained generations of sort of professionals. And yet, you know, they can have a discussion on that topic, listening to a new opinion, inviting new opinions. To me is remarkable”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're doing cutting edge work. They develop organizations with great cultures. And, you know, to try and be additive to that, win business, you need to raise your game. And I think that type of interaction is absolutely necessary. And yeah, I love every second of it.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, you know, I know it sounds a little sappy and my team jokes about the fact that sometimes I'm a little cheesy and sappy. But, you know, this is true. Anyone that is in this industry knows that you get smarter every time you have a client interaction. There's never, I never had a client interaction where I didn't learn something, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, some are very pleasant, some are less so, but they own the use case. Ultimately, we manage money is not our money, it's theirs money. And many times their ultimate principle money. And that's one big advantage. They really understand what they're trying to accomplish. The second is they see everybody. And no matter how good over a year you had and how sophisticated your team is, there's a lot of really smart people out there that are doing really well.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That made me think about sort of safety first. You know, if it doesn't feel right, if you don't have all the facts, there's always another day. Our clients have very long time horizon. People are saving for retirement. People are saving for college. You know, if you have a team and an infrastructure and systems that Good at forecasting, are good at delivering outcomes, you want to have a chance of using them tomorrow, in a week, in a month, so never do anything that will prevent you from doing that, right? And so I think that those choices, as technology becomes better and better, what's going to shape risk management sort of processes and philosophies is more what you want to do, what you think is right”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know, if you're worried about your fund sort of having a big drawdown, then trying to avoid a small drawdown is a good way to start. And that to me means dynamic, action-oriented. I think sometimes there's some sort of more dogmatic approach in the quantitative industries that we don't subscribe to. Our view is like, hey, what happens happens? Our job is to deliver alpha to our clients in any market circumstances. So dynamism is important. And then, you know, recently I was talking with a pilot and he said something along the lines of it's better to be on the ground wishing to be in the air than to be on the air wishing to be on the ground.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're investing in making your tools and your infrastructure better and better so you can pick up things, you can design products that have certain behaviors with a higher probability, but what behaviors are you after, right? And there's two quotes, I like this little quote. One is Richard Greenold that I quoted earlier one day told me the best way.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's very numerical, and how much do you invest? How sophisticated are they, how multifaceted are they, how much environmental awareness you're working to build in this system, how intelligent these layers are. But then there's also a philosophy. So how do you feel about trading off, for example, Alpha in the Good Ears versus drawdown protection? Those are design choices. And I think that the better desistance become, the more sophisticated these models become, the more the philosophical part becomes important.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have any of the shocks happening in the 90s or the 2000s, we would have read about hedge funds going under and massive disruption and very little happened, right? But I think this move of the last five to six weeks is a good reminder that there's never good time to be complacent in our industry. And you got to be worried every day. You got to work every day to make your strategies better, to sort of fulfill the promise you made to clients.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and I think when you look at sort of some of the technical signals that we sort of develop to try and follow this, again, they weren't particularly loud up until July 15. And then they start picking up that kind of behaviors that again tends to be signaling that we entered the last legs of this move. To your point also, I think what's interesting is, and I'm an optimist, as you probably figured out by now, it's been interesting how many shocks we've seen over the last five years and nothing happened. And so I was actually thinking, we all gotten so much better in risk management, COVID, the inflation shock, you had that big one day down 14% moving Nikkei last August.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There will be another one. I mean, you made a really interesting point, which is during this period if you're in a drawdown and the markets rallied 10%, you have to make handically degross just to hit a leverage to have constant leverage. And so you could be just seeing the duration of this be the result of a number of what might be an absolute term small degrowings, but in aggregate terms quite consequential.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Down positions, closing shorts, that usually happens towards the end of these moves. It's very hard to say, it's inning six, it's in inning seven, but usually you have a shock, positions adjust, and then sort of markets find an equilibrium. Could there be another shock along the same dimension that happens? Yes, but I think if you just go by history, it does seem that we are towards the end of this move. Yesterday, today, Friday as well, were much better days. You know, I hear people have recovered a third to half of that drawdown and you think you've seen everything. And then something new happens.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seemingly unconnected high vault names that have done really well. And I think for a variety of reasons, the length of time in which that happened created correlation between slower players and faster players that have been trying to get in on that trade with reversal strategy. And so by mid-July, by July 10 and sort of the 10 days after, the second decade of July, a lot of people were on the wrong side of this high vault names ripping for whatever reason and usually those events tend to lead to risk management. Sometimes it's mechanical. You might have some leverage limit, you might have some stop losses, sometimes it's an overlay where people say, whoa, we don't want to lose that much of the year-to-date alpha. And so I think what you've seen in the week before this one was more easily described as sort of selling.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way we're thinking about it now, and I think one way to do so is to say what is the primary feature of this drawdown, right? So if we were sitting back here a year from now, if you invite me again and we look back now, you know, however painful, however long resolved, how would we describe it? I would say that the key feature is this sort of high vol names that have been ripping. People have been losing money mostly on their short positions or underweight. It's been a bit of a collection of some fundamental beats, some meme stocks, some technological breakthroughs, some deregulation hopes, but sort of there's been a high number of”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Raj, I thought you had the better seat. And that's what we talk about, these things. So I'm trying to think, what's a good way to share?”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I think as we are, as more and more investors and investors have private assets in their portfolios, it will become a more interesting and a more sort of rewarding challenge to figure out how to build an optimal public-private portfolio, you know, what kind of risk models we can build that tell us how the whole portfolio will behave relative to a certain shock. What's an optimal deployment strategy? And how do we optimize liquidity profiles while investing across all these asset classes and these are problems that quants are very well positioned to attack? And so I think you have, it's more relevant in clients' portfolios and from a data and an AI perspective, you can build models that are as information rich as the ones you have on public is just that the data is of a different nature.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we have products that we developed with colleagues in BlackRock that are in the private equity team, that have a traditional fundamental investment approach to private equities, and we've been able to partner and build something new. I think we'll see much more of that in the market in the next.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Language and text and images, and AI is a great way to extract information out of these sources that are directional or not tabular. That is what we have in spades for public companies, but we don't have it for public.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think that as the models become more data rich, you can build forecasts for any companies, including private companies, right? Then I think the second aspect, again, is there's a lot of interest in portfolio construction and risk modeling challenges that I think are very exciting about what you can do in private. If you think about the arc of development of these strategies, again, quantitative strategies started in equities, short-end for institutions, right? So it was a sophisticated strategy in liquid instruments for institutions. And I think where systematic is going is going equities and fixed income and is going for longer duration assets.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think it's one of the most exciting areas, and I think it's an area that over the next 10 years is going to become the big market. And, you know, it's interesting because in the earlier generation of quantitative models, the basic ingredients used for these models were prices, volumes, returns, fundamentals, and analyst estimates. And none of them is readily available for a private company, right? But you fast forward 15 years and the state-of-the-art models today are using a lot of different sources, like product reviews and search trends and Instagram posts and interviews and various forms of sort of human capital network. And all this data is actually readily available for every company. Actually, we realized that we were filtering out a lot of private companies out of these new data sources that we sort of acquired.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the other obligation of AI. That's fascinating. So what I heard is scale, safety. And then that second element is moving into less liquid asset classes. Can you just maybe elaborate a little bit more on how systematic approaches to investing are going to be applied to private markets and private investing?”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, as soon as we find a new data set or as soon as we find a better algorithm, our first instinct is, you know, can we generate more alpha, right? But there's also, can we build portfolios that are more resilient to shocks? Can we build portfolios that get closer to client desired outcomes no matter what markets throw it at us? So I don't think AI will get us any closer to the crystal ball, but I think it will create layers of safety so that events will be what they are. They're ultimately unpredictable because the world is beautiful, because it's unpredictable, but you give me some money today, you want more money one year from now, three years from now, five years from now. How can we solve that problem better? That's the other application of AI.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what AI in this generation in the future architectures will do will sort of open the door for a systematic approach to investing in longer time horizon and in less liquid asset classes. So I think we'll see systematic in private. We're already doing a lot of work systematic in credit. We're using systematic to sort of translate from macro insights to micro insights. And that's a big trend for me. And the third one I like to think about it as safety engineering. If you're thinking about cars, automotive industries or aeronautics, the cars today aren't any faster than 20 years ago. Airplanes aren't any faster than 20 years ago, but they're much safer. And so here you have two industries that used all the technological innovation in the last two decades to create more safety. And I think sometimes...”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe the results were better, but the beauty of this language model is that they are interactive and sort of they speak our language. I can prompt them, you can prompt them, you can get a visceral sense for their capabilities. And that, I think, has broadened the appeal and the applicability. And so you can use them in way more parts of your investment process. It isn't just about building a signal. But also you can have a lot more people, a lot of more smart people with great domain expertise. They didn't know how to put it in numbers, but they can do it with an LLM, right? So where I think this is going is that we've seen systematic succeed, you know, the more liquid the asset class and the shorter the time horizon.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scale. The second part that I think is also interesting is I'm a big fan of generative AI and large language models because I find that they are universal. And if you're thinking about deep learning in its previous pre-sort of GPT moment, it was by experts for experts. Even if you have a business person that wanted to apply deep learning in their teams, it was difficult for executives to really feel it. You would ask someone and they would do something complicated and then maybe...”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think this concept will play out over the next sort of decade. And that's, to me, the first thing about AI is it's bringing scale as a big driver of success in the investment industry.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and that's true to it, right? At the same time, what I think is very interesting are maybe three concepts. So the first one is this concept of scale. There's a great paper that's called The Bider Lesson that basically tells you, hey, you can spend so much time trying to understand everything about a particular problem, maybe it's linguistic, maybe it's predicting sort of company's fundamentals. And then you just realize that, you know, if you double the amount of data that you're training your models on or you multiply by 10 or 100, you can beat any sort of smart sort of adjustment to your model. Just more data, more compute leads to better outcome. That's something that I think has to be kept in the background. I think our industry relative to many other industries still does not understand this concept in full.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, I think, I mean, if you hang out with a lot of the people, hang out with and there's a fair amount of all-time practitioners that are embarrassed by the hype around AI. And so this would be the graph people in your team, they will tell you, oh, this is statistics or this is optimization.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a broader aperture, and it took us a while to sort of fully understand that and use it. But when I look back now, it's a very different type of sort of thinking and behaviors for the strategies we run.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say more of the latter It's interesting in some sense. Sometimes when you use a new approach, whether it's these days is large language models or in the old days it was when big data appeared on the horizon. The first way you convince yourself that you're not delusional is to actually try to replicate prior generation strategy and improve them a little bit. And it's only after you gain that conviction that you start really using technology in a freeest form and you realize that you can do so much more than build a better value signal or a better quality signal or a better momentum signal. Those effects are prevalent. We call them common factor for a reason. They're common in markets. They're common over time periods. They're common in investors' portfolio. But some of these newer technologies”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that second wave, when post the acquisition by BlackRock, how would you characterize that? Would you say their refinements to the first set of factor strategies, or was there a new class of quantitative strategies that you guys built?”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it definitely has a place in investors' portfolio, definitely has a place in long term allocations, but sometimes it doesn't have the dynamism to navigate what could be crowding periods like 2007 or a crisis like the GFC. And one thing that we've been focusing on with the team was, okay, how can we make these strategies less dependent on long-term risk premium, more dynamic, ready for at least to try and take on any environment that one finds himself in. And then that was, if you want, the defense part. The offense part was the explosion of big data, machine learning, predictive analytics. You know, the excitement in the team to sort of move in that direction in 2009, 2010 was hard to contain. And so that's what happened.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Race control and solo diversifying insights did really well in the dot-com bust and in the years after. And so they enjoy tremendous growth up until 2006, 7. I think a lot of the first version of Quantum Vesting at BGI is what today you would call factor investing. Sure.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's interesting. I joined January 2nd, 2006. So at late innings of the first big sort of growth decade for quants, you know, if you think about some of these strategies, our strategy, are all the strategies you were mentioning with the four years was launched in August 1985. So there's a big celebration coming. But this strategy, in fairness, didn't really have a lot of tremendous commercial growth for 15 years. When the 90s were the years of sort of highly concentrated portfolios, the dot-com boom, definitely not quant strategy, traditional quant strategy material. But then this strategies that were based on...”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Industry and work with Richard and Ron that sort of, you know, Ron has been a mentor ever since, he's still the head of research of BlackRock Systematic. It's like not even in my wildest, wildest dreams. And when Black Rock acquired BGI in 2009, in the middle of a lot of change, there was this incredible energy at the front that is still the same, if not more intense these days. And I think what's special about Blackrook is the firm that constantly reinvents itself, constantly brings together different way of looking at investing, active and passive, public and private, fundamental and systematic. And I think if you do investment research and you're trying to figure out how markets work, there's no better place to be.”
2025-08-12 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Searching for Signals: BlackRock’s Raffaele Savi on the Future of Systematic Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT