Do Quantitative Traders have ‘gut feel’?
It has been more than 20 years. I am supposed to have evolved into an emotionless silicon based automaton who cares not for anything except the process. I am not supposed to care about the outcome of any trade or short series..

..of trades.
It is my suspicion that the growing failure (and it IS growing) of quantitative approaches is not only because most are doing a variety of the same thing but also because the PM’s (generally, not all) do not sit down regularly in front of a screen and watch...

.. trades as they occur - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. We often have discussions here about whether or not we know our approaches in such detail and have observed them under so many different market environments that we might have some ‘gut feel’ about whether the next...

... trade will win or lose. We have tried rudimentary experiments over thousands of real trades(all in real time /not back tests) wherein all risk takers write down why they think trades will or will not win. We haven’t really got anywhere except , intriguingly, one PM has

.. used this process to come up with what have turned out to be substantial improvements to her process. She feels that she never would have thought to test the additional phenomena as part of a normal research process. In summary I feel that:

1. We are nowhere to being able to quantify everything.
2. Whilst humans are still involved, research breakthroughs are coming more from a ‘reflexive’ interaction with real time trading and wins/losses
3. All Quants - Do these experiments, try and quantify your ‘gut feel’...

.. as it relates to frustrations with your process.