Business
My guest is Artur Sepp, Director of Research at Quantica Capital AG in Zurich. In 2008, Artur was working on structured credit products for Merrill Lynch, giving him a front-row seat to the ensuing credit crisis. We use this experience as a jumping off point for our conversation, with Artur providing both pragmatic and philosophical lessons learned. One of those key lessons was the role of liquidity, which Artur argues is the key factor behind many premia we see in the market. Artur’s focus on liquidity grew as he transitioned to London in as an equity derivatives quant, where he was responsible for building models to hedge options on illiquid underlying assets. Here we get into the nitty gritty, discussing a paper Artur wrote about the practical realities of delta-hedging options under a framework of discrete hedging and transaction costs. In 2015 Artur moved to Julius Baer’s advisory solutions group in Switzerland where he served as a client-facing advocate for alternative risk premia strategies. Here Artur had to learn how to translate his deep quantitative knowledge into client understanding. He shares with us some techniques and tricks he learned for effectively communicating what can be rather complex ideas. Today Artur works at Quantica Capital, whose flagship product is a Managed Futures strategy. I ask Artur for his opinion on recent struggles in the managed futures space and what he thinks the future for trend following managers will look like. You definitely won’t want to miss his answer. Artur is a fountain of quant knowledge and offers the unique perspective of someone who has both spent time deep in the weeds and time trying to explain the esoteric. There are lots of gems in this one, so stay tuned.