November 2025 Update
November 2, 2025 – October was a good month for financial markets, with a broad-based rally across geographies and sectors. Tech stocks and gold led the way, and the dollar finally had an up month. QuantStreet’s strategies, across different risk levels, moved in line with or slightly exceeded benchmarks. More details about our performance are […]
What’s Going On With Gold?
October 26, 2025 — At QuantStreet, we’ve had an allocation to gold across our portfolios for the last year and a half. [1] Our investment thesis, laid out in our March 2024 investor letter, rests on five pillars. First, our machine learning model likes gold (then and now), mainly because short-term interest rates are relatively […]
October 2025 Update
October 5, 2025 – The market is in a funny place. September was a strong month for financial markets, its typical negative seasonality notwithstanding. However, news narratives over the last few weeks have, with good reason, become progressively more negative. At the same time, investor sentiment–usually a contrarian indicator–is very much middle-of-the-road, as the next […]
Replicating Target Date Funds
September 18, 2025 — Target date funds represent the investment industry’s best thinking about how people should invest for retirement. The idea is that young people have the majority of their wealth in the form of human capital, which is a bond-like asset. Therefore, to balance out their overall portfolio, which is human capital plus […]
September 2025 Update
August 31, 2025 – An important market event in August was Jay Powell’s August 22nd speech at Jackson Hole. The market interpreted his remarks as indicative of a more dovish monetary policy stance and has, at this point, fully price in a 25 basis point rate cut for the September 17th FOMC meeting. Risk assets […]
August 2025 Update
August 3, 2025 – Some things change in markets and some don’t. The dollar partially reversed its year-to-date decline in July, and US equities had their first moment in the sun relative to international peers thus far in 2025. Some of the year’s biggest winners–European and international equities, and global bonds–turned into July laggards. The […]
How To Handle Portfolios with High Unrealized Gains
7/17/2025 — Many portfolios consist of highly appreciated, concentrated positions. Investors are hesitant to rebalance these portfolios to avoid paying capital gains taxes. Such hesitancy if often unwarranted. Consider an investor with an existing portfolio worth $100. The cost basis of the portfolio is $80. The portfolio consists of high cost mutual funds and ETFs, […]
July 2025 Update
July 3, 2025 – After a tumultuous few months, June of 2025 saw a strong rally which took global markets to (or close to) new highs. The rally was broad-based, with international and U.S. markets all up strongly. Leading the pack were emerging market stocks, followed by communications and technology. International stocks continued to do […]
Monitoring Portfolio News Using AI
June 22, 2025 — One of the enduring challenges of portfolio management is the inability to follow all news flow relevant to portfolio positions. AI and cloud-based workflows are helping us overcome this problem. In my years trading on Wall Street, I was always bothered by the fact that, even with a small number of […]
June 2025 Update
June 1, 2025 – Amid a fair amount of market tumult, we wrote two months ago that the best course of action was to stay invested in roughly the same portfolios that we’ve had throughout, and let the market stabilize. This stabilization started in May as many of 2025’s laggards rallied, including, at long last, […]