Eric Sorensen - How Quant Evolves - [Invest Like the Best, EP.139]

My guest this week is Eric Sorensen, the CEO of Panagora asset management, which manages more than $46B for clients across a variety of strategies. Eric began his career serving in the Air Force as both a pilot and instructor in high-performance jet aircraft. He then accumulated 40 years of quantitative research and investment experience, with a Ph.D. along the way. Please enjoy our conversation on the changing landscape of quantitative investment strategies. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Show Notes 1:15 - (First Question) – His background in the Air Force 1:23 – Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War 3:18 – Training people on high-performance machines 4:47 – Traits that made for better pilots 5:51 – The evolution of quantitative equity research and its stages 7:56 – How his research led to becoming a practitioner 9:10 - The early feature sets in his research 10:44 – Tradeoffs in the spectrum of interpretability 12:08 – Early days of his practitioner career 13:24 – Risk Premia and the 5 C’s 14:28 – Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management: Modern Techniques and Applications 17:13 – Applying the 5 C’s to value investing 18:38 – Knowing when a strategy/signal is broken 21:24 – What does this strategy plan mean for his firm today 24:56 – Mixing expert systems and portfolio construction 30:07 – Natural language processing 32:00 – The cultivating the power and creativity to ask good questions 35:13 – The concept of a research graveyard 37:45 – State of risk premia today 40:04 – Active equity process 46:37 – Frontiers of research that he’s excited about 48:53 – Safe havens for non-quantitative investors 52:16– Advice for young quants 54:36 – Quants on the buy-side that he admires 55:41 – Kindest thing anyone has done for him Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag