Delphic Alpha
Analysing 335 Quant Trading Podcasts: How Systematic Managers Trade
Strategies, signals, portfolio construction, execution and caveats from 3.7 million words of interviews with CTAs and quants.
oracle
Sep 30, 2026

What do systematic managers actually do with their money? This post distills 335 podcast episodes, about 3.7 million words of interviews with CTAs, quants and allocaters, into practical lessons. Every claim links to the episode it came from.

It is organiszed around the questions people ask most: which strategies they run, which signals and models they use, how they build portfolios and execute, which caveats matter, why trends exist at all, and where practitioners disagree.

At a glance

Strategies: most systematic money runs trend following, with carry, short-horizon strategies and relative value as diversifiers.

Signals: moving-average crossovers and breakouts dominate, and within a sensible range the exact look-back matters far less than blending several.

Portfolios: breadth beats selection. The widest-universe programms earn more with the same trend models.

Execution: cutting costs is the one improvement that compounds with certainty; market impact follows a square-root law in every asset class.

Caveats: backtests lose most of their Sharpe ratio live, good strategies still spend years in drawdown, and crisis protection only arrives in deep sell-offs.

Disagreements: experienced traders split on how many systems to run, whether each market needs its own model, and whether to target volatility. delphicalpha.substack.com - Analysing quant trading podcasts