Alpha in every episode

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” That line, usually pinned to Einstein, fits this article rather well. In trading strategy research, we can spend a long time counting the wrong thing: like, as Martyn Tinsley says - whether the single best in-sample parameter set survives out-of-sample…

“Even if you have skill, you can look wrong for a very long time.” – Cliff Asness A backtest (or even many of them) can tell you whether a strategy survived a historical test. It cannot tell you whether you were testing the right idea, in the right way, for the right purpose. That gap…

What does a quantum physicist & inventor bring to quant trading? He thinks differently and is purposefully anti-alpha - instead focusing on risk management. After years of trying conventional risk models, Samir’s conclusion was not that risk is impossible to model. It was that most people are solving the wrong problem. They try to predict…

Do not watch this podcast. This is Part 1 with Samir Varma, and in Part 2 we go into great detail about his quantitative trading. In the Collective, he gives our members some specific instructions on how to measure risk differently – this stuff isn’t fluff. But in Part 1, I got derailed into quantum…

Crypto might attract the same kind of attention a chainsaw gets at a dinner party, frequently handled by people who should not be touching it. That is exactly why it remains so attractive to systematic traders. The usual retail approach to crypto is painfully predictable: find a coin, fall in love with a narrative, survive…

In this primer we’ll lay out the common position sizing methods, comment on how different types of traders (futures vs. stock, short‑term vs. long‑term) use them, and share a simple mental framework for thinking about sizing from a risk and statistical perspective. Throughout we’ll lean on the mathematics of the Kelly criterion and its cousins…

I know we all want “quick, actionable take-aways”, but the reality is that foundational principles of a strategy development process is at the core of successful trading, and you more than likely do not have half of this in place like you should. So, while this is ‘foundational’, and can only be covered briefly, don’t…

In today’s competitive trading world, many retail traders fall into the trap of hunting for that elusive “perfect strategy”—the one signal or indicator that will turn everything around. But as Tom Starke, an institutional quant trader, highlights, this approach is fundamentally flawed. To build truly robust and successful strategies, traders must adopt a mindset and…