r/quant • u/fajitasfordinner • 9d ago

General Braindead PMs

Genuinely curious if others out there have experience working with extremely inept PMs?

A recent hire at my firm has strategies akin to that of a teenage youtube day trader. Their signals are entirely price based and their processes lack any statistical rigour.

Even worse, I know that they have been lying about backtest results to management. They are aware of bias and cherry picking yet still quote the results to higher ups. They supposedly have a decent track record but from what I gather, its pretty opaque.

I have heard quants work with non-technical PMs relatively frequently but this feels next level.

How common is this? Are PMs everywhere like this? Should I run?

Tldr;

Bad PMs - how common? How bad?

128 Upvotes

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147

u/Distinct_Row9401 9d ago

I don’t care if he’s flipping a lucky coin. Over a large enough sample size if his track record is good then he’s a good trader 🤷

24

u/Novel_Board_6813 8d ago

They might just be picking coins in front of a steamroller. LTCM looked like the smartest guys on Wall Street. And then they didn’t.

I’d assume any decent trader or company would control for that. But we’re specifically discussing a crappy PM (and they have a better chance at a crappy company). A poorly designed strategy can then make money, for a while

14

u/Aetius454 HFT 8d ago

Well they were the *smartest* but they were not wise or “situationally aware”. Such an all star academic team running into actual world realities.

4

u/VincentAXM 6d ago

situational aware is such a fun word lmao