How big is the quantitative investment? How far-reaching is the impact on the market? What are the latest cutting-edge research breakthroughs by top institutions? On April 29, the "2021 China Quantitative Investment White Paper" jointly organized by Huatai Securities, Kuanbang Technology, Amazon Cloud Technology, Chaoyang Sustainability, Finelite and other market authorities was officially released, and a press conference was held in Shenzhen.

Focusing on the quantitative industry market situation and evolution in 2021, Huatai Securities Research Institute Lin Xiaoming, Kuanbang Technology Liang Ju, Amazon Cloud Technology Zhang Chenggang, headhunting agency Finelite He Zixiu, Jukuan Investment Wang Hengpeng, Super Quantum Fund Zhang Xiaoquan, Guotai Junan Futures Asset Management Investment Research Han Xue, Yansheng Asset Huang Liang, Junyutong Capital Cai Congyang and other institutional guests delivered keynote speeches and participated in the roundtable forum. The conference attracted nearly 300 institutions including Hong Kong Stock Exchange, securities companies, public offerings, private placements, and futures to register for the conference.

The "2021 China Quantitative Investment White Paper" includes six chapters, including talent development, institutional practice, frontier trends, and best practices. The research adopts quantitative and qualitative methods. The data is mainly from the questionnaire survey results of 235 financial institutions, and 8 representatives Quantitative expert interviews with sexual institutions, presenting the current development of quantitative finance, and making an outlook on the future prospects of quantification.

Mr. Liang Ju, general manager of Kuanbang Technology, took the lead in sharing the key conclusions and data in the white paper: From 2020 to 2021, domestic quantification has gradually matured from the early stage of development, which is reflected in: 1. The overall market size has increased, and the transaction volume proportion increased. 2. The number of market entities has increased, and the industry concentration has increased. 3. Improve key capabilities and quantify the blossoming of multiple strategies. 4. The management is refined and improved, from extensive to lean development. Industry competition is full of pressure on talents, and 80% of quantitative talents believe that their professional knowledge and skills need to be improved. "The market industry/style rotation is too fast", "it is difficult to generate ideas with alpha" and "traditional factors fail" are the three most difficult problems encountered in current investment research practice. In addition, 80% of the institutions currently involve artificial intelligence quantification, domestic investment is mainly used in factor mining, generation and model construction, and foreign investment is more comprehensive.

Lin Xiaoming, chief researcher of the Metalworking Group of Huatai Securities Research Institute, introduced Huatai’s quantitative research layout, asset allocation of major categories and a series of artificial intelligence research. Since June 2017, Huatai Securities Group has conducted 56 in-depth artificial intelligence quantitative research, covering five major themes, and the weekly report is regularly tracked. Among them, topic model testing, factor mining, anti-overfitting and generative adversarial networks, etc., cover traditional factor + XGBoost, graph neural network, traditional factor + residual graph attention network, true and false sequence recognition, etc.

From the perspective of cloud computing, the Amazon cloud technology team shared the construction of safe and efficient quantitative strategies of quantitative institutions at home and abroad such as AQR, as well as alternative data applications such as satellite, meteorology, dock, shipping, demographics, ESG, and Bitcoin.

In terms of alternative data, Chaoyang Sustainability, a member of the editorial board, is also continuously mining and researching. At the same time, Chaoyang Sustainability's profit forecast database and the factor library derived from it have become one of the necessary databases for many quantitative institutions. In addition, Chaoyang Sustainability also has comprehensive private equity fund data and evaluation services, and multiple series of sunshine private equity stock scale fund indexes, which provide a basis and reference for the industry to evaluate private equity.

He Zixiu, the head of the headhunting agency Finelite, concluded that the quantitative industry has gone through various stages of "at first being diluted, then beautified, gradually deified, and now blackened". Quantitative talents have the characteristics of high IQ, high salary, and low age, and the rapid development of the market has attracted a large number of talents, but many quantitative talents will also step in the interview and communication. Including: being embarrassed to question, not being able to catch the "ball", "love at first sight, promising each other", etc. Talents should fully realize that the essence of the interview is the process of breaking each other's information asymmetry and building trust within a limited time.

Other experts and guests also shared topics such as industry development, talent absorption, talent organization, professional experience, and strategic research.

It is understood that the "2021 China Quantitative Investment White Paper" seminars will also be held in Beijing and Shanghai, and continue to communicate with the industry.

At present, the "White Paper" has been released, friends who want it, add the [Finelite] customer service below to get it for free, and have a quick look!