Loomis Sayles: Making quant personal
Loomis Sayles asked us to help showcase their Applied IQ team - not just their expertise, but their personalities. The team plays a vital role in building investment tools, but the real goal here was human connection. We produced a short-form, documentary-style video that captured the Applied IQ team in their own words, with a mix of expert insight and honest, unscripted moments.
Speakers from Loomis Sayles: Michael Crowell - Chief Investment Research Officer, Director of Applied IQ, Co-Director of Macro Strategies; Bernardo Aumond - PhD Co-Director of Applied IQ; Bobby Bakshi, CFA, Co-Director of Applied IQ; Andrew Hon - Quantitative Analyst, Applied IQ; Guillermo Ruiz Rico, CFA - Quantitative Analyst, Applied IQ
Mike Crowell
There can be perceptions about a quant group. They're a bunch of smart people in an ivory tower
Andrew Hon
building these super cool, or cool in my eyes, models.
Bobby Bakshi
They imagine things that are mathematical
Bernardo Aumond
like number crunching.
Andrew Hon
You know, I spent a lot of time trying to come up with punchlines. We're not a black box. We're a multiplier.
Mike Crowell
Stand right here. Black tape?
Guillermo Ruiz Rico
I think of Applied IQ as the Swiss Army knife of Loomis.
Mike Crowell
The whole mission is predicated upon this idea that we can become very close to an investment team. We can understand everything about them. How they talk, their language.
Bobby Bakshi
So when they pose a problem, we understand why and what they're facing.
Bernardo Aumond
It could be something about what bonds should buy.
Mike Crowell
News is constantly flowing. What do you focus on?
Bernardo Aumond
How should I behave in an environment with a lot of uncertainty? Loomis Sayles has thousands of years of combined experience in management.* We are not really there to replace that. What we are trying to do is really to come up with like a more systematic way of addressing these questions.
Mike Crowell
This is the most important thing, building a really robust tool that gets used to make money.
Andrew Hon
Our team believes that these tools are only helpful when they are easily understood.
Bernardo Aumond
A great model that nobody uses is not a model at all.
Bobby Bakshi
Bernardo has an amazing ability to cut through the noise to the essence of the problem. That takes a very special skill.
Andrew Hon
Every single day. I'm really motivated knowing that the puzzles in the financial market is not obvious, and it gives me an opportunity to leverage my background using our in-house mathematical models and theories to provide value.
Mike Crowell
Andrew is just fastidious about details.
Bobby Bakshi
Amazing talent, lot of energy.
Andrew Hon
It's very complicated to bond with a quant. I'm socially awkward you know?
Mike Crowell
Michael Crowell, Chief Investment Research Officer.
Bobby Bakshi
Mike is an optimist.
Bernardo Aumond
I admire his coolness.
Andrew Hon
He’s like the most outgoing quant that we have on the team.
Mike Crowell
We will willingly build something that is good for one team.
Guillermo Ruiz Rico
Customization is critical for us to be able to add value for our clients.
Andrew Hon
I try to talk with other analysts and even traders as well to understand everyone’s perspective. And I try to combine that when I’m building the tool that they end up using.
Guillermo Ruiz Rico
We are very open-minded when we pursue requests.
Bernardo Aumond
We've been doing this for almost 20 years now. The questions that are being asked are the ones that are really hard to answer. That keeps, you know, my job super interesting.
Mike Crowell
Bernardo's easy. He's just, as long as you keep feeding him really, really hard problems, he'll be happy until retirement.
Purpose-built social edit
We also created a standalone video designed specifically for social platforms.
Speakers from Loomis Sayles: Michael Crowell - Chief Investment Research Officer, Director of Applied IQ, Co-Director of Macro Strategies; Bernardo Aumond - PhD Co-Director of Applied IQ; Bobby Bakshi, CFA, Co-Director of Applied IQ; Andrew Hon - Quantitative Analyst, Applied IQ; Guillermo Ruiz Rico, CFA - Quantitative Analyst, Applied IQ
Text on screen: Applied stands for?
Andrew Hon
Applied stands for actionable.
Bobby Bakshi
Applied means like it’s practical, it’s usable.
Text on screen: Integrated means?
Mike Crowell
Integrated means getting immersed. Getting to know a team. Don’t view yourself as separate and distinct from a team.
Guillermo Ruiz Rico
Integrated refers to the fact that our team wouldn’t even exist if we weren’t servicing the needs of other teams.
Text on screen: What is the quant?
Mike Crowell
Quant is the science. As a firm, we really, truly believe in the art and science of investing that if you swing the pendulum too far in either one of these directions that’s not the best approach.
Bobby Bakshi
In the end, the data has to show that your intuition has some validity.
