Rob Huisman: Nowadays computing power and data availability are longer limiting factors
Rob will be set to speak at Quant Strats on the panel NLP and large language models application – successes and lessons learned. The panel discussion will take place on the 24th of October at The Park Plaza Victoria, London and he will be joined by Stefan Zohren, Deputy Director, Oxford-Man Institute. You can find out more information about it by downloading our agenda!
1- Please give us a little introduction on your current role and what you do
Rob Huisman is Quantitative Researcher at Robeco’s Quant Equity Research team. His areas of expertise include portfolio optimization, machine learning, NLP, and bottom-up stock selection research. He is also responsible for recently launched Quantum strategy, part of Robeco's Next-Gen quant effort. He joined Robeco in 2018.
2- What do you consider your biggest professional achievement to date?
In 2022 we launched our innovative equity fund ‘QUANTUM Equities’ that contains mostly machine learning signals, alternative datasets and novel optimization techniques. I'm the lead researcher for this strategy.
3- What has been your/your firm’s top 3 priorities for the coming year?
i. Alternative and unstructured datasets
ii. Natural Language Processing for investing, including Audio
iii. Sustainability Investing and alpha from sustainability
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4- What do you think are the biggest challenges facing data scientists/AI experts/quantitative practitioners for 2023 and beyond?
Nowadays computing power and data availability are longer limiting factors. The real challenge lies in having good original investment ideas, and then in identifying which techniques and datasets might be of use to action your investment idea. We need to be increasingly critical on which opportunities are worth exploring (quality of idea), and how is it carried out (quality of execution). Both are super important.
5- What is your advice to funds hoping to get new systematic strategies into production quickly and more often?
Failing fast, and launch and iterate. Use paper or/incubator portfolios to quickly learn about shortcomings of your initial idea. The only true validation test is a live out-of-sample run of your portfolio.
6- Quant investing in other asset classes such as corporate bonds is increasing – what do you think has caused this shift to look at quant investing outside of equities and where do you see this going?
Robeco has a longstanding track record of quant investing in corporate and government bonds. Our track record proves that quantitative investing in these asset classes can also be very attractive. Now that rates have gone up, these asset classes as investment category have become more attractive hence also attracting attention from quantitative practitioners.
7- Are you seeing quant investing being used in new geographies/where are you expecting some interesting quant stories to be emerging from?
China in and of itself is an enormous quant market in terms of investment opportunities ánd uniqueness of data. The amount of alternative datasets and success stories achieved with these datasets will very likely continue to increase. Besides China, we also see EM in general and India as having opportunities. The fact is, India and other EM countries have a long-term demographic advantage, and data is becoming increasingly available in these countries. They are a frontier in next-gen quant investing.
8- At Quant Strats, we always discuss the challenges nad opportunities of blending quant and fundamental strategies and this is always a popular topic – why do you think this is? What do you think is the most important questions for quants when considering this strategy?
Being able to combine the best of both worlds – quantitative and fundamental – is a very appealing proposition. This year we will be launching a quantitative thematic fund that uses NLP techniques to identify the hot themes and trends in the market. The most important challenge is getting the balance between man and machine right.
Furthermore, we believe that Robeco has a particular advantage when it comes to combining quant and fundamental. Robeco is in a unique position of having roughly equal sized quant and fundamental teams, and the two parts of the investment team all report into the same CIO. So, there is a lot of nice cross-fertilization and collaboration.
Quant Strats London
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