Topic · Quant Research
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32 articles · 5 checkpoints · 18 deeper reads · 9 reference notes
Every article, in reading order
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Most research projects fail before a line of code is written, because the question was never answerable. How to turn a vague prompt into a sentence you can be wrong about, bounded in universe, horizon and time, with a stated cost of being wrong.
A hundred ideas go in the top and one gets capital. The stages between are not bureaucracy, they are an ordering that puts the cheapest possible kill first, so the expensive work only ever happens on survivors.
Two ways to start a project, reason your way to a prediction and then test it, or search the data until something lights up. Both find signals; only one of them tells you how much to believe what it found. The difference is entirely about how many things you looked at before the one that worked.
Killing ideas quickly is the highest-leverage skill on a research desk, and the hardest to learn, because by the time an idea is dying you are invested in it. How to tell a dead idea from a badly built one, and how to pre-commit to the decision while you are still neutral.
The researcher owns the evidence; the PM owns the risk and the capital. That split explains almost every disagreement between the two seats, including why a PM will reject a Sharpe 1.8 signal and take a Sharpe 0.6 one.
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