Insight
Ober: Fundamental funds need more data per company than quantitative funds
“So it's interesting because when you move from quantitative to fundamental, the amount of data that's relevant is, you know, Enormous on the fundamental side, because you're really diving into these single names.”
Opinion
Ober: Satellite car-counting data rarely drives hedge fund investment decisions
“I don't think that there's a lot of firms really counting cars in parking lots, and that's what's really making their, ah, decision making.”
Insight
Ober: Quant funds require two years of backtestable daily data before purchasing
“If you're going to sell to a quantitative hedge fund, anything less than two years of daily data that's really been stored point in time that you can really back test is really going to be tough to make that ten million dollar sale.”
Insight
Ober: Simpler financial models outperform complex machine learning over time
“Going back to the very basics, you kind of find that, like, the simpler it is, the better it actually performs over time, if you're not trading at this higher frequency.”
Insight
Ober: Fundamental funds prioritize good communicators over the smartest PhDs
“We may not need the smartest PhD within a fundamental shop because we have to be able to explain and understand what they're doing and really talk their language whereas a quantitative hedge fund, there's more opportunity to maybe work on your own and not have…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ober: Fundamental hedge funds began data transformation around 2016–2017
“Sure, so I think kind of a revolution in the hedge fund industry mainly because you have the quantitative hedge funds that have really been leaders in technology and data, and now you have the fundamentals really over the last, call it two, three years, thinki…”
Disclosure
Ober: Third Point uses data to evaluate existing ideas rather than mine new ones
“Rather than mining data for new ideas, we're almost looking for data to help us understand the ideas we may already have, or to, you know, create very sophisticated screens, you know, looking across all these companies to kind of dwindle down a smaller list of…”
Insight
Ober: Shared alternative datasets increase stock volatility around corporate earnings
“Yeah, I think it brings more volatility into, you know, events, earnings, especially for firms that are trading around these events, where everybody's looking at the same credit card data.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ober: The era of multi-million dollar single-dataset sales is over
“The multi-million dollar data sales was maybe something that you saw three, four, five years ago. I think now that, you know, people are understanding what data is actually worth they're maybe not trying to get exclusive access to just one data set because the…”
Opinion
Ober: Culture is the biggest hurdle for fundamental hedge funds
“I mean, I think the culture is the biggest Hurdle that all these funds face.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ober: AI will enhance investment workflows rather than replace nuanced investment jobs
“Some of the more sophisticated strategies where you really have to understand the nuances, and maybe it's structured products, maybe it's structured credit. We're doing things where companies are being, you know, split apart, and they're selling different piec…”
Disclosure
Third Point aims to centralize thousands of datasets for instant company analysis
“As a team, it's, you know, how do we incorporate and leverage all this rich and unique data that's out there and kind of bring it into one real centralized place. So to really understand companies and coming from thousands of different data sets so that we can…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ober: Alternative macroeconomic data will eventually become widely accessible
“Now maybe it's only a few people that are leveraging it, and it's alpha, and eventually it becomes something that everybody has access to.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Matt Ober: Alternative data adoption expanded from quants to private equity and mutual funds
“Yeah, I mean, I think obviously at the beginning it was definitely all quantitative hedge funds that were consuming as much data as possible. I think now if you go to some of these conferences like Battlefin, where you can have hundreds of data meetings in one…”
Disclosure
Ober: Third Point requires ML stock picks to be explainable to managers
“When the model creates a list of companies for us that we should go invest in, we need to be then able to explain to our you know, PMs and analysts internally what's driving that decision, and they really want to get into the deep roots of why it's picking tho…”
Insight
Ober: Fundamental investors treat alternative data as one input, unlike quant funds
“Using this data is very different from a quant fund who's placing lots of trades, both long and short at the same time. Whereas an activist or long-term investor might look at this as just, ah, another input into their longer investment approach.”
Disclosure
Ober: Third Point looks to outsource data structuring and ingestion
“It's something we do do ourself. I think it's one of those areas where data structuring, even data ingestion and onboarding data sets is something that us and most firms are looking at how do we, you know, outsource that to another company because we're only s…”
