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Manish Jhunjhunwala: MIT PhD Chemical Engineering/Physics of fluids, McKinsey
Cem Ozkaynak: Cornell Electrical Engineering, UBS
Select Investors and Advisers
Ankur Moitra: MIT Computer Science and AI Lab & Professor of Mathematics
Art Samberg: Pequot Capital, Former Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Rob Wadsworth: Harbourvest Partners, Board Member, Former CEO
Sandy Pentland: MIT Media Lab Professor. Stanford HAI Fellow
Semyon Dukach: OneWay VC, Partner, Former MIT Blackjack team leader
Our Story
…who would have thought?
September 2020, long-time Trefis investor - Michael B., a former partner at Bessemer Ventures, the storied New York venture firm, and a former tech company CEO who founded and steered his startup to an IPO during the dot com era - decided to invest $100,000 in Trefis’ first portfolio strategy: the Trefis High Quality (HQ) strategy.
That $100,000 in HQ not only outperformed its all-cap benchmark but also outperformed the S&P - while being underweight the Magnificent 7 stocks.
Did Michael expect this? Of course not.
In fact, Michael was unsure of HQ portfolio strategy’s ability to outperform the S&P. We weren’t certain either.
Despite the outperformance, this journey was hard.
There were lots of ups and downs.
In Q1 2021, just in a matter of a few months and only a quarter after Michael had started, HQ was underperforming the S&P by almost 6.5% percentage points. That April when we rebalanced HQ, Michael was unclear - can anyone really beat the S&P? It isn’t easy, and there isn’t much precedence.
Hard work produces patience. But Michael knew Trefis had invested 10+ years building research and analytical systems. Trefis had built a system that ran hundreds of analytical jobs automatically at scheduled times, calculating millions of parameters across the coverage universe of securities - assessing risk reward for hundreds of promising portfolio strategies.
Consistency above all. Michael knew that our process for selecting the HQ portfolio from these hundreds of promising portfolio strategies was consistent, and disciplined. Knowing our work made Michael patient. This happened again in 2022, except it was worse during the first half of 2022, but this time Michael’s patience was rewarded by massive outperformance in the subsequent 18 months.
More than the HQ strategy’s success, our data-driven process - our disciplined approach was interesting to Empirical Asset - a Boston based asset manager led by Mark Fiskio, the CEO, and Glenn Caldicott, the CIO. Empirical invested millions in HQ and other Trefis strategies starting in 2023, and have had a great run.
The fact is: rather than try to predict the market patterns over the next 6 or 12 months, serious investors want us to focus on creating wealth for them over the long-term.Here’s what we do know: if we keep doing what we’re doing, keep following our data-driven, consistent approach, we will create a lot of compounded profits over the long run. Importantly, we do like to help investors like Michael, and Empirical as-well-as its clients.
How to fight recession risk? HQ is also available as part of a protective asset allocation strategy - that produced positive returns during the 2008 & 2009 crisis when S&P dropped 40%. The point is simple, to reduce swings from HQ’s equity markets exposure, while preserving upside, protecting wealth.
Curious to learn more? Feel free to complete the
form above to hear the story firsthand or ask Glenn and others on the Empirical team about the journey. You can learn more about HQ, and Trefis’ newer portfolio strategies like
Bayesian and
RV - of course ask more about our thinkHub analytics platform, that powers it all, and can handle data from weather and earthquakes to investment analysis!
