What do systematic managers actually do with their money? This post distils 335 podcast episodes, about 3.7 million words of interviews with CTAs, quants and allocators, into practical lessons. Every claim links to the episode it came from.
It is organised 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 lookback matters far less than blending several.
Portfolios: breadth beats selection. The widest-universe programmes 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.
Scope of the Investigation
The corpus covers 335 publicly available episodes of seven podcasts, led by Top Traders Unplugged (including its Systematic Investor series) and Flirting with Models, then 53 episodes of Chat With Traders with systematic and quant traders, plus ReSolve Riffs, Alpha Exchange, Algorithmic Advantage and Better System Trader. Each transcript was parsed for specific parameters, methods and design choices, and every figure below was traced back to the episode where a guest said it.
