War Zone Childhood Inspired Hedge Fund Quant's Contrarian Wagers

Nigol Koulajian, founder of New York-based Quest Partners, has beaten rival hedge fund managers over two decades by refusing to follow them into crowded trades. Since the financial crisis, commodity-trading advisers (CTAs), which specialize in trading futures or options, have piled into long-term bullish bets, riding the market up in search of steady gains. That’s left them vulnerable to big losses when volatility strikes—the very moments when Koulajian’s $1.35 billion quant firm cleans up. His AlphaQuest flagship fund has posted an annualized gain of 9.7 percent since its inception in 1999, almost three times that of the BarclayHedge BTOP 50 managed futures index and nearly 4 percentage points more than the S&P 500, according to a document seen by Bloomberg. Here Koulajian, who turns 52 in June, talks about style drift, momentum, and how surviving a civil war in Lebanon shaped the way he trades.

When others zig, you zag. Are you by nature contrarian?