David Bush arrived at quantitative trading by an unusual route. He spent his twenties as a professional musician and drummer before pivoting to the financial markets, first as a discretionary trader and eventually as the creator of STRATVERSIFY, a systematic long and short equity portfolio strategy focused on mega-cap US equities. He is a first-place winner of BattleFin’s Sharpe Ratio Shootout, an international quantitative finance tournament with over 3,000 competitors, and has been featured in the New York Times and Hedge Fund Alert.
The musical background is not incidental. David draws a direct connection between pattern recognition in music and in markets, the ability to hear structure in apparent noise, to identify recurring rhythms beneath the surface irregularity. His approach to mean reversion is grounded in that sensibility: not just identifying statistical deviation from a mean, but understanding the underlying market dynamics that cause prices to oscillate around reference levels in recognisable ways.
The conversation covers risk management in mean reversion trading, the design of a hedging strategy that activates when primary strategies enter a difficult regime, and the transition from discretionary to systematic trading. David also discusses his exploration of cryptocurrency markets, where he applies the same quantitative rigour to a different kind of price behaviour. His backtesting tools of choice are RealTest and Norgate Data, both of which he references specifically.
Related reading: Read: The Birth of Trends: The Counterintuitive Role of Noise