"It didn't matter how good the manager was at portfolio construction," says Chris Thompson, head of the global equity manager research team at Rogerscasey, which helps investors research and select money managers. "Everything got blown out of the water because of this overcrowding" of quant trades.

Yet given the recent troubles fueled by the similarities of many quant funds, many of their managers have only become more secretive about their models, investment consultants and analysts say. After 2007, these managers started to keep their strategies "much closer to the vest," says Rogerscasey's Mr. Thompson, in an effort to minimize duplication.

Wall Street Journal, September 2010

A growing number of quantitative equity managers are striving to match their computer models to changing market environments better as they fight to reverse the performance drought they've been in since the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007.

Before the crisis, the weightings that quant firms allocated to the broad components of their alpha models for factor-driven strategies were “pretty static,” said Soonyong Park, a managing director and head of global portfolio solutions at investment consultant RogersCasey LLC.

InvestmentNews, June 2010

The job of endowment CIO is going to be more demanding, said Cynthia Steer, chief research strategist at Rogerscasey, a consulting company in Darien, Connecticut.

“Investment officers will be increasingly called on to do workouts and restructuring in private equity, real estate and all their alternative assets,” Steer said. “Boards are going to be increasingly looking for people with diverse backgrounds, fairly deep knowledge of both the alternative asset classes as well as some background with the more traditional skill sets of budgeting and liquidity.”

BusinessWeek, April 2010

Consultants and academics are warning against diving too deeply into emerging markets equity.

Rogerscasey Inc., however, is projecting outperformance of 3.1 percentage points, up from 2.8 percentage points in 2009. That widening gap was caused by a lower outlook for developed markets; the firm’s outlook for emerging markets held steady.

“That does not mean we won't have bumps in the road (in emerging markets equity returns), but we think fundamental growth and domestic demand will lead to better stability for many of the emerging markets over the next decade,” Cynthia Steer, chief research strategist at Rogerscasey, Darien, Conn., wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

P&I Online, March 2010