Running a Research Review Meeting

A research review meeting is where a researcher presents a candidate strategy or signal to peers or a risk committee before it's allocated capital. Without structure, these meetings drift into whoever argues loudest, or into re-litigating the researcher's methodology choices one at a time rather than assessing the overall case, both of which waste time and let weak strategies through on charisma.

A working structure fixes the order of questions everyone must answer, in this sequence: what is the economic or behavioral rationale for the effect existing at all (not just a backtest that found it); what is the sample size and out-of-sample performance, not just the in-sample fit; what are the known ways this specific backtest could be overstating performance (look-ahead bias, survivorship, overfitting to a fixed data window); and what is the capacity and cost estimate once realistic slippage is included. Presenting the report in this fixed order, evidence before implementation detail, prevents the meeting from getting stuck debating a parameter choice before anyone has agreed the core idea is sound.

A useful discipline is assigning one attendee as a designated skeptic whose job is specifically to find the strongest reason the result is spurious, rather than leaving skepticism to whoever happens to speak up, this surfaces objections the presenter didn't think to preempt, without making the meeting adversarial by default.