The following extract is a Top Traders Unplugged summary of a conversation between the podcast hosts Niels and Alan with Kevin Cole, CEO and CIO at Campbell & Co..
Click on this link to read the Summary
Click on this link to hear the Podcast
Campbell and Company occupies a unique position in the systematic trading landscape. Founded in 1972, it runs one of the oldest continuously tracked commodity pools in existence. Kevin Cole joined as a researcher and eventually became CEO and CIO, steering the firm through a deliberate evolution from pure trend following into what it now describes as a systematic multi-strategy or quantitative multi-strategy approach. That evolution is the central thread of this conversation with Niels and Alan.
Cole explains how Campbell expanded its conception of what systematic trading could accomplish, moving beyond trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s into quant macro, equity market neutral, and short-term statistically driven strategies. The firm’s flagship programme now allocates roughly equal weight across four principal strategies and does not attempt to time their relative performance. The result is a programme whose return stream has increasingly decoupled from generic factor approaches and from most other CTAs in the space.
The conversation covers the tension between maintaining research-driven innovation and the behavioural challenge of getting clients to stay with a strategy through difficult periods. Cole argues the multi-strategy approach has an advantage here: it smooths the ride enough that investors are more likely to remain invested when their equity allocation needs a genuine diversifier.
For those interested in how complexity at the portfolio level can be deployed to serve investors rather than confuse them, this is a valuable discussion.
Related reading: Read: The Diversity Dividend: How Variety Creates Resilience (https://atstradingsolutions.com/the-diversity-dividend-how-variety-creates-resilience/)