Trends Watch: Global Equity Investing

By Elana Margulies-Snyderman 

EisnerAmper’s Trends Watch is a weekly entry to our Alternative Investments Intelligence blog, featuring the views and insights of executives from alternative investment firms. If you’re interested in being featured, please contact Elana Margulies-Snyderman.

This week, Elana talks with Carl Dussault, CEO, Evovest.

What is your outlook for global equity investing?

Evovest focuses on predicting excess returns for individual stocks. By concentrating our efforts on this specific problem, we get rid of the noise around market timing and asset allocation. It does diminish the investment opportunities set, but we haven’t yet developed the tool to share a robust outlook on global equity investing. Our R&D roadmap is full of interesting projects as systematic risk forecasting, this would help communicate a specific market outlook.

What are the greatest opportunities you see and why?

In our opinion, and based on our internal investment process, we can harvest more alpha by having a higher prediction accuracy in smaller companies. The concept behind this relies upon the information asymmetry the market may possess in bigger companies and by having more market inefficiency.

What are the greatest challenges you face and why?

Our greatest challenges are mainly on two axes. First, we need to develop the R&D continually, not to fall behind in the alpha decay phenomenon every systematic investment process goes through at some point. We strive to have a detailed roadmap with diverse projects. On the other hand: the data, always data! The quality and the pre-processing of the information for us is a key point, an error could cause our investment process to be less robust to the future, which we want to avoid.

What keeps you up at night?

Changing and the uncertainty of the market. Our worst enemy is a rapidly changing market between risk regimes; successively and for a prolonged period. However, keeping a stoic perspective on this helps us sleep at night!

The views and opinions expressed above are of the interviewee only, and do not/are not intended to reflect the views of EisnerAmper.