Name: How Quants Should Think About Tariffs and Politics
Uploaded: 2025-03-11T14:23:00Z
Duration: 3 min 55 s
Description: Cliff Asness, Managing and Founding Principal of AQR Capital Management, talked about how the Trump administration's various policies, from tariffs to government efficiency efforts, influence his trading decisions.

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Cliff Asness, Managing and Founding Principal of AQR Capital Management, talked about how the Trump administration's various policies, from tariffs to government efficiency efforts, influence his trading decisions.

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How Quants Should Think About Tariffs and Politics

I want to shift gears and ask you about the current political environment and knowing that you don't take that into account, necessarily, because you're just looking at the numbers. Having said that, do you or have you or are you going to change your thinking at all given what's going on in the current administration? What Donald Trump is doing with tariffs and government and bringing Elon Musk, does that affect your thinking at all?

Very little but not zero. And let me give you two examples. One, and we tell our clients this, is, as good quants, we have models for what risk looks like and we target a certain amount of risk through time. That can be defined differently. It can be defined as absolute risk, risk versus a benchmark. We give ourselves the latitude, which we very, a handful of times in our history, to take less risk than the standard process would say. We do not give ourselves latitude to take more risk. I don't wake up and say, "I feel pretty good today, let's take it up a notch." But these would be examples like, if we're one day away from the debt ceiling possibly being violated or something, maybe fixed income is a little more volatile than our risk models think. We looked into, this was just last week because it was pretty timely, how sensitive we were to tariffs. And this is actually complicated to figure out if you have a thousand stocks around the world, long and short, what's your bet on tariffs? I think we did a good job. We went through and we looked at where each company sells, where they buy. Came up with a model that said we are slightly long tariffs. I'm personally not a tariff guy. That the quant models come out to a little bit long tariffs doesn't mean I like tariffs. And then, Monday, we had a, not a blowout, but a pretty good day. Models don't work that well. They're noisy. But that one happened and nail it. If we had found last week in this analysis that we, through not explicitly doing it, just through the natural process, had a massive bet, either the tariffs wouldn't happen or would, we would at least consider. Probably still wouldn't do it. There's a high bar to do this. But we'd at least consider saying, "Maybe we should take a little less risk." Same bets, we don't go change them, but maybe a little bit less. The other way I think it matters is, we do think, and we love to geek up the terms all the time, but macro uncertainty, chaos, for want of a better word, is higher than normal. We thought that even before the Trump reelect. We've thought that for a few years that there's a lot of more uncertainty than normal in the trajectory of the macroeconomy. And this is hard to quantify. A quant hates saying something it's hard to quantify. But if you don't believe the uncertainty, whether you love what he's doing or hate what he's doing, if you don't think the macro uncertainty is higher now, I don't think you've been paying total attention. And one of the things we do, and I will now do a brief commercial moment, is we've taken that early stuff that I did on momentum for stocks, applied it to markets, and one of the many things we do quantitatively at AQR is we're trend followers. CTAs, managed futures has been around forever. We've been doing it now for about 15 years. It has a property of doing better, usually, it's not a guarantee, but usually, when the world goes a little crazy. So all else equal, I like those a little bit more than I normally do because I do think we're in a world of high macro uncertainty. So like I said, it rarely matters. Mostly, we're trying to be very hedged, and not take big positions on what politicians are going to do. But at the edges in those small ways, it can matter.

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