A random talk down Quant Street, Ep. 11/11 – How important is the human factor in quant?

In the first podcast of our AI summer course, we trace AI’s journey from academic experiments to becoming a core driver of alpha in Robeco’s flagship quant strategies. This episode highlights key breakthroughs, innovative use cases, and how AI is reshaping investment decision-making in practical and powerful ways today

With so much reliance on technology in quant investing, what role do humans play in the process? In the eleventh and final episode of our series on quant investing, Harald Lohre discusses the human side of quant. Why, for example, is creativity important in such a data-driven and systematic field? What makes for good quant researchers at Robeco? Are they in fact all geniuses?

Disruption has been the trend of 2025. Upheaval is everywhere, from geopolitics and trade, to the fields of technology, payments, ways of working and more. Does a thematic approach help equity investors to cut through all the noise, or could it be that investment themes or trends are also being disrupted?

What kind of performance can investors expect from Active Quant? In this episode we look at what contributes to the stability of Active Quant, what makes it flexible, and what we really mean when we say ‘systematic alpha capture’.

How much risk are you comfortable with – and how should that affect your investment choices? In the ninth episode of this new series on quant investing, Jeroen Hagens unpacks how different levels of risk appetite influence the use of active quant strategies.

The high-yield bond market has rebounded from April’s tariff-driven sell-off, with US spreads having tightened and European yields holding steady. But investors are being kept on their toes: US policy risks continue to fuel volatility, while divergent dynamics are at play across regions-as-well-as-sectors. Sander Bus and Christiaan Lever discuss the present market environment and the key question: will their quality bias pay off?

Capturing quant alpha requires a blend of innovation and precision. In the eighth episode of this new series on quant investing, we welcome back Vania Sulman, quant portfolio manager, to explain how Robeco captures quant alpha.

In this new episode portfolio manager Vania Sulman explains how the tracking error of an Active Quant approach is managed over the long term, and explains the process of overweights and underweights versus the benchmark. She also talks about how Active Quant differs from an enhanced-indexing approach.

Investing is evolving fast, and next-gen signals are at the forefront of that evolution. But what arethey? In the sixth episode of this new series on quant investing, Iman Honarvar Gheysary returns to unpack these developments for us.

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s return to the White House have been marked by sweeping change: executive actions, heightened trade tensions, and growing uncertainty seem to be the new normal. In this episode, we evaluate how these early policy moves by the new US administration are reshaping the global economic landscape, and what it all means for investors.