The following extract is a Top Traders Unplugged summary of a conversation between the podcast hosts Niels and Alan with Nigol Koulajian & Mike Harris of Quest Partners.
Click on this link to read the Summary
Click on this link to hear the Podcast
Quest Partners was founded by Nigol Koulajian in 2001. Koulajian brings an unusual background to systematic trading, with a degree in electrical engineering from Notre Dame and an MBA from Columbia Business School, followed by roles at Deutsche Bank designing computerised risk management systems. The firm is headquartered in New York and trades across more than 50 liquid markets in commodities, equity indices, currencies, and fixed income.
What differentiates Quest from many of its peers is its explicit multi-timeframe approach. The flagship AlphaQuest Original programme combines short-term and long-term systematic signals, with average trade lengths ranging from a few hours to over a year. Koulajian’s conviction is that positively skewed return sources tend to be more stable as market regimes change, and the programme is deliberately constructed to deliver positive skew rather than to maximise the Sharpe ratio.
In this conversation, Koulajian and Mike Harris discuss the philosophy behind building a strategy that focuses on what investors actually need rather than on pursuing a theoretically elegant but practically uncomfortable return profile. The discussion also covers the distinction between trend-based and non-trend-based alpha sources, and how Quest thinks about blending them to serve different allocation objectives.
For allocators who want to understand how a research-driven CTA can construct genuine diversification across time horizons as well as markets, this episode is worth reading alongside the full podcast summary.
Related reading: Read: The Diversity Dividend: How Variety Creates Resilience