Kass: The Quant Bubble

The pattern is all-too familiar as a new marginal buyer of an asset class dominates the market until they don't.

Here is an anecdote that underscores the changing landscape and is reminiscent of other sectors hiring at tops. (To refresh your memory, this occurred several years ago in private equity and was followed by a sharp cyclical decline in private-equity deals.) At any rate, a subscriber wrote me a telling note recently about his son's friend who attends Wharton and is "a genius in math and game theory." He was just hired by a high-frequency trading firm after being interviewed by 15 similarly talented employees at the firm. He is 20 years old and has been offered approximately $100,000 a year, with a bonus that can add up to an additional $100,000 a quarter! That's far better than even the estimable Goldman Sachs (GS) pays!

Keep dancing if you will, but I continue to sit out the melt-up in stocks and the bubble in other asset classes. When investors/traders are arguably overinfluenced by prices (not fundamentals) that dominate the markets, and are all on a similar side, it has the potential to lead to a treacherous and slippery slope, as it did in 2007-08.

Remember, it is some of the same momentum-based quant funds that sold in March 2009 that have been buying over the past few months.

I have seen many bubbles in my 30-plus years in the investment business. There is a giant bubble in quant funds, and their outsized influence in buying stocks, bonds and commodities might soon be approaching the height its of popularity.