Chapados, Couture, Capital

C3 ("C-cube" for short) is an emerging quantitative manager of alternative volatility and smart beta investment strategies. We focus our normative understanding of sustainable risk premiums on a search for empirically valid opportunities to capture those premiums.

Founded

2013

Assets

3 million in Volatility Risk Premium strategies as of December 2015

Strategies

Tracking of equity style indices

Semi-active management of factor-tilt portfolios

Short gamma (volatility risk premium)

Philosophy

The Pareto principle applies to the division of labor between quantitative and qualitative investment management activities

Capital markets are an eco-system of competing opportunities to be compensated for bearing a multitude of economic risks

A sound theoretical understanding is a preferred way to robustify forecasts against the effects of non-stationarities

The information content of most investment edges eventually get diffused to other market agents via trading interactions

The market consensus is the best starting point to obtain a synthesis of the trade-off between returns, risks, and search costs.

Approach

Top-down analysis of risk premia calibrated by market consensus

Rigorous statistical simulations incorporating realistic market impact assessment

Specification and justification of the economic rationale underlying risk premia

Advanced statistical analysis – classical or machine learning.