Re:A Professor Who Was Right About Index Funds All Along
by dasil003 on Monday October 24, 2016 @07:05PM
(#12783700)
Sorry, not drinking your koolaid. Any exploitable "stat arb" will go to zero as it's exploited, or if it grows large it will move the market. There are no statistical axioms which are guaranteed to make you money, because if there were it would change once enough people discovered it. Anyone that's far out enough ahead can find these things for a while, but there's no way the average investor ever gets close to it, they're not exactly cold-calling senior citizens with these amazing opportunities.
They largely are.
The people who fall under your criticism are the old school stock pickers. For instance, people who've grown up during the long decline of inflation and rates might have hit a wall over the last few years. A lot of those guys were essentially riding the same wave over multiple trades.
But the kind of trading done in stat arb is largely independent of such long term trends. They change around their positions so often that there's hardly any regime that they are biased towards. High vol? Been long and short. Rates going up/down? Been long and short. Economy? Been long and short.
Sure, there might be some hidden regime that we've yet to hear about, that's possible. But there's quite a difference between the quantitatively astute funds and the other long-lived ones.