Virtual Investment Team
External Research Consultants
Bob Olson
Founder, Lodestar Capital Research
Investment process testing at GlobeFlex is driven by the continuing internal need for sound evidence. My job is to improve the overall quality of stock-picking information available.
In fine-tuning the ability to pick stocks, we have to follow a lot of blind alleys. But I enjoy the search. Bob Anslow and I have worked together for many years, and I know how much he loves doing research himself. So I try to be an extension of him, applying my understanding of portfolio management issues to the research work. As CIO, Bob's affinity for research and his openness to new ideas give us the freedom to share trial balloons and approaches. GlobeFlex's virtual investment team concept shows he understands it takes a no-interruption environment to make real inroads through innovative research.
One big push was testing by country. I made month-by-month calculations going back 10 years. It was a laborious process but in the end it added a lot of value. This kind of testing helped determine how country-specific dynamics guide where to buy stocks within each sector, and at what point to sell. It's a massive effort, made possible by the database flexibility we get from the efforts
from Philson Associates. Researching and testing new ideas at this level of detail takes absolute tenacity.
John Philson
Founder, Philson Associates
GlobeFlex is an insatiably curious firm. At any given time, they have a large number of ongoing research projects running. Some have to do with better investment disciplines, some with building better portfolio construction procedures, or tapping into real-time analytics to verify and qualify decision-making information.
Everybody out there has the same real-time information, but it isn’t integrated the way GlobeFlex does it. My database management expertise is just one of a whole series of connections -- building software, getting data and running simulations. The culmination is good, solid history that prevents GlobeFlex from making emotional reactions based on short-term news.
I extract data in response to requests from the investment team in support of portfolio analysis, modeling and trading. A lot of questions can’t be answered quickly. I see myself as wrestling a problem to the ground, digging into GlobeFlex’s vast databases to extract the most useable inputs. I run hundreds of simulations and back-test how small up or down changes in measurements would work relative to the benchmark.
The work requires judgment, too. New investment ideas can’t use simulations, which are driven by performance numbers. So we have to apply practical knowledge of investments and statistics to determine what kinds of analyses can produce the conclusions we need.
I’ve done this my whole career, cutting my teeth on decision support systems, from manual to systematic, always within the investment world. GlobeFlex’s databases have become exceedingly useable, especially as their software evolves. My contribution is ensuring that the software platform has the flexibility the investment team needs, and then some.