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Human Insight, Computer Power: What is Quantamental Investing?

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Quantamental Investing

What is Quantamental Investing?

The world is awash in data like never before. From a person’s morning Uber ride and favorite coffee spot, to the emails sent from their office—all these activities create massive amounts of data, but also behavioral and investment insights.

Warren Buffett’s investment style exemplifies the fundamental approach: “Which companies offer the best returns?”

On the other hand, hedge fund manager James Simons of Renaissance Technologies is a notable example of the quantitative approach: “What is the best way to predict returns?”

Both techniques have one thing in common—they seek excess return from the marketplace, or what is known as “Alpha”.

Quantamental: Combining Quantitative & Fundamental

Today’s infographic from GoldSpot Discoveries outlines quantamental investing as the blending of these two styles, human insight with computer power.

Despite both methods seeking excess returns in the market, there are some key differences:

Quantitative Analysis Fundamental Analysis
  • Seeks to understand behavior by using mathematical and statistical modeling, measurement, and research
  • Aims to represent reality in terms of a numerical value
  • Can measure or value a financial instrument, and/or predict real-world events
  • Trading focuses on broad market factors (data)
  • Attempts to measure a company’s intrinsic value based on its earnings outlined in its financial statements
  • Can identify securities that are not correctly priced by the market
  • If the fair market value is higher than the market price, then the stock is undervalued and a buy recommendation is given
  • If the fair market value is lower than the market price, then the stock is considered to be overvalued and a sell recommendation is issued
Cons Cons
  1. Takes financial data at face value to assume an economic reality
  2. Lacks in offering unique insight
  1. Analyzes a small subset of the investment universe
  2. Chasing glamor stocks or holding on to losing stocks which reflect behavioral biases
Pro Pro
  • Analyzes the investment universe, quickly
  • Offers deep, proprietary insights

The arrival of advanced sensor technology and computer processing power is creating huge opportunities for capturing the complexity of human activity on a larger scale.

Could these two distinct methods be fused together?

A New Frontier for Data: Combining Man and Machine

On a larger scale, tracking and storing data can reveal economic patterns over long periods of time. For example, satellite images of a mall’s parking lot can determine the mall’s sales volume. In the finance world, software can track sentiment in earnings call transcripts, and detect word patterns of executives.

The applications of sensor technology stretch across various cases, and could improve overall performance in different industries.

Case #1: Sabermetrics

Picking a winning baseball team is a lot like investing: with limited capital, one needs to optimize player selection and performance to beat the competition. That is why the Major League Baseball Association installed StatScan in 30 ballparks for 3 seasons (2015-2017).

These radar and camera systems captured the raw skills of players in ways that were previously available to or only understood by the baseball scouts.

Scouts are the stock pickers of the baseball. They know the ins and outs of a potential major league player, and consider health, family history, body mechanics and even personalities.

Team managers can use a scout’s insight, against the vast amounts of data collected during a baseball season, to uncover the exact metrics to predict the success of the next great home run or strike-out king.

Case #2: Mineral Exploration

Resource companies spend huge amounts of money on exploration to collect data. However, the volume of data generated is too much for one geologist, or even a team to sift through in a reasonable time.

Machine learning in mineral exploration can take in training data to help identify prospective land for a mineral deposit.

Computer Power with a Human Touch

Quantamental investing seeks to understand the depth and the breadth of the investment world. The goal is to produce superior returns in the marketplace by answering two questions.

  1. What are the best metrics for predicting success?
  2. Which are the companies performing the best on these metrics?

Quantamental investing harnesses the raw power and scale of data, coupled with human insight — increasing market returns by finding the next great investment.

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Personal Finance

Charted: Retirement Age by Country

We chart current and effective retirement ages for 45 countries, revealing some stark regional differences.

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Charted: Retirement Age by Country

The retirement landscape can look completely different depending on what country you’re in. And charting the retirement age by country reveals a lot of differences in the the makeup of a labor force, both for economic and cultural reasons.

This graphic delves into the current and effective retirement ages across 45 nations in 2020, based on comprehensive data from the OECD 2021 report.

Defining Retirement Ages

Before we dive into the numbers, let’s clarify the measurements used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD):

  • The current retirement age is the age at which individuals can retire without penalty to pension after completing a full career starting from age 22.
  • The effective retirement age refers to the average age of exit from the labor force for workers aged 40 years or more.

Many countries have seen workers effectively retire earlier or later than the current retirement age. This variance can arise due to a multitude in factors including differences in career start ages, some industries offering earlier retirements or benefits for later commitments, or countries facilitating different workforce exits due to market demands and policies.

Some people also choose to retire early due to personal reasons or a lack of available work, receiving a smaller pension or in some cases forgoing it entirely. Likewise, some people choose to stay employed if they are able to find work.

Retirement Age by Country in 2020

Here’s a snapshot of the current and effective retirement ages by country in 2020:

CountryRetirement age
(Current)
Retirement age
(Effective)
Retirement age
(Women, Effective)
🇦🇹 Austria656261
🇧🇪 Belgium656160
🇨🇦 Canada656463
🇨🇱 Chile656561
🇨🇴 Colombia626760
🇨🇷 Costa Rica626762
🇨🇿 Czech Republic646362
🇩🇰 Denmark6664N/A
🇪🇪 Estonia646465
🇫🇮 Finland656364
🇫🇷 France656061
🇩🇪 Germany6663N/A
🇬🇷 Greece626158
🇭🇺 Hungary656260
🇮🇸 Iceland676664
🇮🇪 Ireland6664N/A
🇮🇱 Israel6765N/A
🇮🇹 Italy626261
🇯🇵 Japan656867
🇰🇷 Korea, Republic of626665
🇱🇻 Latvia646665
🇱🇹 Lithuania6463N/A
🇱🇺 Luxembourg625960
🇲🇽 Mexico656663
🇳🇱 Netherlands666463
🇳🇿 New Zealand656866
🇳🇴 Norway676563
🇵🇱 Poland656260
🇵🇹 Portugal656563
🇸🇰 Slovakia6360N/A
🇸🇮 Slovenia626261
🇪🇸 Spain656160
🇸🇪 Sweden656665
🇨🇭 Switzerland656564
🇹🇷 Türkiye526159
🇬🇧 United Kingdom666463
🇺🇸 United States6665N/A
🇪🇺 European Union (Average)6463N/A
🇦🇷 Argentina656263
🇧🇷 Brazil626259
🇨🇳 China (People's Republic of)606661
🇮🇳 India5867N/A
🇮🇩 Indonesia5769N/A
🇷🇺 Russia626260
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia4759N/A
🇿🇦 South Africa606056

Three countries had the highest current retirement age at 67 years, Iceland, Israel, and Norway, but all had slightly lower effective retirement ages on average. On the flip side, Saudi Arabia had the lowest current retirement age at only 47 years with full pension benefits. Only Türkiye at 52 years was close, and notably both had much higher effective retirement ages on average.

Discrepancies between different regions are clear across the board. Many Asian countries including China, India, and South Korea have official minimum retirement ages in the early 60s and late 50s, but see workers stay in the workforce well into their late 60s. Meanwhile, most European countries as well as the U.S. and Canada have more workers retire earlier than minimum retirement ages on average.

Almost all of the countries with measured effective retirement ages for women also saw them exit the workforce earlier than men. This can be the result of cultural gender norms, labor force participation rates, and even the setup of pension systems in different countries.

The five exceptions in the dataset where women retired later than men? Argentina, Estonia, Finland, France, and Luxembourg.

Looking to the Future

In 2023, France sparked controversy by raising its early retirement age by two years. This decision triggered widespread strikes and riots and ignited debates about the balance between economic sustainability and individual well-being.

Given aging demographics in many developed countries and a continued need for labor, this isn’t expected to be the only country to reassess retirement. The OECD projects a two-year increase in the average effective retirement age by the mid-2060s.

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