Quant stuff that’s helpful

Most professional investors can pretty easily hop on the quant bandwagon.

Systemize: Quant has the urge to code up decision making. Coding up parts of our research process frees up time — and helps scale.
Sharpen: Math to clarify, verify and sharpen an idea we are working on.
Data Shrinking: Quant can make certain massive data sets simpler.
Data Gathering: Quant can help us scour the web and other obscure data sources quicker — just to speed up and simplify the what we are already doing.
Prediction: Quant can predict things like company sales or weather.

Most of these require adopting a quant mindset and collaborating with someone technical. But not all require us to hire a full internal quant team.

Start with systemizing

Systemizing is the easiest way to adopt quant without being one. There are only two steps.

Adopt quant optimism.
Hire a python coder.

Temporarily adopt the ebullient optimism about science, math, and coding as a tool to enhance every task and decision. For a quant, every decision is an opportunity to construct a decision-making system. Then you can code up that system to let the team move faster and the company scale bigger, as the team will constantly try to “solve” one aspect of the business and move on to the next one.

The only secret is we have to break down our thinking process into something well-defined. Be optimistic and embrace it. It won’t work for everything. So embrace what can be done. Also, skip any cost-benefit calculation. Just do whatever you can.

If we have that enthusiasm we help the coder attempt to code up every aspect of our investing process that we are willing to reveal. Some will fail, but the successes will make us faster and help achieve scale.