Quantflix is back! We took a break early November from writing articles and stopped accepting new subscribers to retool the site to better cater to users… and stop the site from crashing. Then we had Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, and now Chinese New Year which caused some slight delay. Ok I also went snowboarding and it was difficult enough to ride and drink beer at the same time, so typing coherently was out of the question.
In the meantime, the team (which consists of both humans and computers) continued to toil admirably and this week, we feature two of our predictive tools, Shadow Portfolio and Trending. You can read about Shadow Portfolio and how it helps in monitoring funds using investor newsletters and public information, or at least makes you look smarter in front of the fund manager. The section Trending starts with collecting data from financial news sites to see which topics are trending, and uses our algo to find possible follow-on topics. A major topic (which has been persistent) is the US-China trade war which naturally led to interest in funds investing in Chinese stocks or with exposure to the Chinese economy. However, we also detected news sites talking about “Southeast Asia” in articles with the word “trade war”.
This leads to the algo assigning a higher score to funds which have exposure to Southeast Asia. Another frequently mentioned term is “volatility” which ties in with higher interest in funds trading volatility. It’s probably not just because of Quantflix, but we are still going to claim credit for Global Sigma closing their AGSF fund to new investors due to good performance in 2018 (up 15.8%) and a surge in AUM from subscriptions.
Expanding our sphere of influence from hedge funds, we are pleased to announce a collaboration with 500 Startups on their Southeast Asia fund 500 Durians II. It does look like we chose to work with 500 because our Quantflix algo detected an interest in Southeast Asia investments but actually we started talks with 500 before they knew about the predicted trending topic. More about our collab in the next issue because I have to go for lunch, and according to our analysis we have the best viewership rates if we release our articles on Friday (since supposedly people like reading Quantflix over the weekend because there is nothing else to read besides FT’s How To Spend It).
That’s it from me this week! You can write to me with comments but it will take a very long time for me to respond because there is a long list of things-to-do for Quantflix already.