Alejandro Portugal Rocha

Podcast review 2

1) List the name of the podcast and episode.

Masters in business: Kenneth Tropin on quantitative hedge fund strategies

2) Provide a brief biography of the person interviewed in the episode (what is their
job/career, what are they known for, where are they from, and any other relevant detail).

Ken Tropin is the founder and chairman of Graham Capital Management, one of the
largest and most successful commodity trading advisors in recent years. He founded
the company in 1994 after serving as president and chief executive officer of John W.
Henry & Company and previously was head of managed futures at Dean Witter
Reynolds.

He is perhaps best known in the industry for being one of the first to develop a
guaranteed fund, in which investors were guaranteed the return of their entire
investment after a certain period, even if the trading strategy produced a loss.

3) Describe three things you learned from this podcast

- Quantitative hedge fund strategies rely on quantitative analysis to make

investment decisions. Such hedge fund strategies typically utilize
technology-based algorithmic modeling to achieve desired investment objectives.
- Quantitative Analysts will not perform detailed, “bottom-up” fundamental analysis
of stocks or other individual securities; rather they may try to get a sense of the
relative attractiveness of dozens or hundreds of different assets simultaneously.
- Quant Hedge Funds will rarely employ macro-driven analysis like those found at
a Global Macro Hedge Fund, such as monetary policy and its impact on bond
markets or currency exchange rates, or assessments of political stability or labor
relations in a given market. For Quant Analysts, this data is most likely too
subjective.

4) What additional question would you ask the interviewee if you had the chance?

-How do quantitative hedge funds differ from mutual funds?