With the growth of passive investment vehicles, the review of active strategies has become more important. Passive vehicles can often serve as fully transparent substitutions for some of the actively managed portfolio allocations. Time series of well-known risk premium factors and of factor strategies that we develop internally are applied as benchmarks to reveal factor dependencies of active strategies or even aggregate portfolios.
To our clients we provide added value from an unparalleled source of information on and access to investment strategies globally.
We first collect as much – most often unstructured – data to build the largest possible universe of strategies and managers.
Second, we organize/structure the data, validate it, tap public sources and data providers to complement the data and generate relationships.
Third, we proceed with the requirements from our clients in combination with our own catalogue of positive and negative criteria to filter the most promising strategies and managers for the mandate.
*This qualitative analysis is combined with sophisticated quantitative analysis for which some tools have been built internally. Beyond the commonly utilized risk and return figures, we look at point in time events and aim to find style drifts, fraud or other indications to prevent negative surprises.
Manager interviews are often the final step in the process. The objective is to clarify open issues, to confirm conclusions we have drawn from the information available, and last but not least to familiarize with the management team’s philosophy.
Software and web tools are developed in-house, utilized for manager and strategy selection, and also provided as a (web)service.
QAP follows an “in-house first” approach. The company was founded in December 2014 by Christian Schuster. He is managing owner of the fully independent company.
Managing Partner: Christian Schuster, CAIA
Court of Registration: AG Limburg (Germany), Reg. No.: HRB 5312
VAT ID: DE298295346
Responsible for content: Christian Schuster