Is there any way to know whether a systematic fund is executing discretionary trades based on technical and/or fundamental analysis? It may be possible, but it requires some work.
Many funds claim to be fully systematic by relying on “algorithms” for timing the markets. The main reason this is included in the marketing materials is to ensure investors that decisions are not subjective but as objective as an algorithm can be.
Is there any way to know whether a fund manager follows the algorithms or occasionally interferes based on technical or fundamental views?
Why is it important to know? Systematic trading is supposed to offer a low correlation to capital markets and provide diversification and convexity. In particular, systematic trend-following has the same behavior as a long option position due to the large payoff ratio: large gains and small losses. For this reason, this style is used for diversification, If a systematic fund is not truly systematic, these advantages may be lost, and the investors may not get the convexity they are paying for.
Is there a procedure to determine if the probability of a given performance was not achieved by a systematic trading algorithm?
This is a difficult problem. All the fund transactions must be available, and then an algorithm must be used to determine whether they fit the trading style described in the marketing materials. This is rarely possible.
For example, if the fund is using trend-following or momentum, then intraday trades could raise some eyebrows. But this is an extreme case. How about investing in stocks or assets that do not fit any accepted definitions of a momentum market? This is another more realistic signal that something may be wrong.
Another indication that a fund is not fully systematic but relies on discretionary trading is when the fund managers spend a lot of time on social media or blogs talking about fundamentals like interest rates, inflation, GDP, etc. Fundamental variables may be taken into account in algorithmic trading. Although talking about economic conditions does not necessarily imply interference with algorithms, it could nevertheless be a signal that could occur at some point, especially when there are no references to systematic trading but only to fundamentals.
A fully systematic fund manager I know from social media has made only a few references to fundamentals in years. This is a strong indication to me that the fund is truly systematic and, although there may be periods when the algos are turned off due to high market risk, nevertheless, when they are active, the manager is not fiddling with the signals.
Backtests of historical performance, although they are based on algorithms, can also include, or back-adjusted, discretionary decisions and signals that would not otherwise have been triggered by an algorithm.
For example, by adding statements like:
If date = date_of_entry then buy TSLA
If date = date_of_exit then exit TSLA
In effect, then, backtests may conceal discretionary decisions, or even post hoc adjustments, quite easily, and backtest results do not necessarily mean the process is systematic. There is no way of knowing without looking at the code carefully.
The objective of this article was to raise awareness. Finding answers is difficult when there is limited access to information. Even when the information is available, it is not always easy to get the answers.
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