On one side the coronavirus pandemic proved devastating for global businesses, on the other hand, quant funds witnessed a whooping loss due to machine-generated strategies. The automated strategy softwares failed to deduct the upcoming crisis because of which the investors, who invested in quant funds, had to brave huge financial loss. The hedge firms which invested hefty amounts in quant funds started blaming global volatility for the loss. On the other hand, the investors who relied on the human predictions outperformed as compared to automated strategy generation. For instance, the firm D1 Capital Partners earned 50% profit on their investments in various quant funds during 2020. According to available data, the first quarter of the year 2020 witnessed slowdown regarding hedge funds. In February, quant funds fell by 3% while during March, the price of these funds went down by 4.3%. Later during the second quarter, global lockdowns started to disrupt business activities and economic growth and output nosedived to a very low level. Hundreds and thousands of people were laid-off and several companies went out of business. This article sheds light on Top 5 Global Quant Funds as shared by Insider Monkey in one of their Yahoo posts.
Renaissance Technologies is considered as the pioneer of quant funds and this company witnessed unprecedented loss during 2020. Renaissance Institutional Diversified Global Equities fund and Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha fund witnessed a decline by 30% during the previous year. Meanwhile, it’s another fund, Institutional Equities fund, witnessed a decline by 20%. The reason behind this plunge was the inaccuracy of Renaissance to correctly predict the upcoming market trends and thus, it had to face loss during the first half of the previous year. The company managed to rebound during the second half of the previous year. Another company is Winton Group. It is a UK-based quant fund and as per available data, this group lost 19% until October during the previous year. Till end of September the total portfolio of this firm was worth $3 billion with $3.5 billion assets under management. Berkshire Hathaway Inc is the largest investor in this company, which accounts for 2.16% of its portfolio. The fund keeps on shuffling its portfolio to gain maximum price advantage out of the changing global market scenario. This was a brief introduction about these two quant funds. You can read about other quant funds at 10 Biggest Quant Funds in The World, 10 Stock Picks.
