Client Advisory
Acadian’s Client Advisory team produces research on key topics relevant to systematic investing, offering insights and guidance for investors. The team regularly discusses topical themes with investors. Current presentations of interest include:
For more information, please reach out to your Relationship Manager or sales contact directly.
A discussion of why concentrated or “high-conviction” discretionary equity investing proved so compelling—and where the intuition went wrong. This talk focuses on concentration and recurring behavioral biases in investing.
Asset owners are increasingly demanding more from their active equity portfolios, namely consistently positive returns and greater stability of outcomes. This discussion explores why the traditional long-only framework may be ill-suited to meet those objectives. We then examine a more effective—and often overlooked—approach: the disciplined use of leverage and shorting within portfolio construction. This added flexibility can enhance alpha generation or, perhaps counterintuitively, reduce risk by more precisely aligning portfolio exposures with underlying investment insights.
As systematic strategies have gained popularity, investors have questioned whether there is risk of “quant crowding.” While the focus is understandable, the term is often used imprecisely and the underlying concept is often unclear. This discussion considers what crowding actually means, how today’s environment differs from the 2007 quant crisis, what current crowding indicators do—and do not—tell us, and why efforts to avoid crowding should not come at the expense of long-term investment efficacy.
Modern AI extends a longstanding progression toward more flexible analytical methods in systematic investing but also represents an important break from the past by changing the analytical architecture underlying the investment process. Agentic AI is accelerating the transfer of analytical responsibilities from humans to systems, changing—but not diminishing—the role of human judgment and expertise. This discussion explores why long-term advantage will depend less on access to AI itself than on the organizational foundations supporting its use, particularly a manager’s people, tools, data and culture.
This discussion offers a clear conceptual framework for addressing geopolitical risk, one of the most prominent yet ambiguous topics in investment management. The conversation includes behavioral evidence on how markets respond to unexpected events, how investors cope with uncertainty, and practical ways of measuring and managing exposures to transient themes.
This discussion explores several themes in emerging markets investing, including the case for active EM small-cap strategies, the implications of concentrated EM benchmarks for active portfolio construction, the evolution of the China A-share market, and changes in the active opportunity set across EM.
Presented by the Client Advisory team
Ram Thirukkonda, CFA, CAIA
Senior Vice President, Senior Investment Strategist