Hedge Funds case studies, worked step by step

Cases
100
Traced to a firm
31
Topics
13
Hard
30
Topic
All topicsCredit, distressed and capital structure7Earnings, models and KPIs8Event-driven and merger arbitrage7Fund economics, NAV and LP decisions8Global macro trades7Long pitches and valuation14Manager evaluation and attribution7Pairs and relative value5Portfolio construction and sizing7Risk limits and drawdowns7Short selling6Systematic research and data11Volatility, options and convertibles6
Level
AnyWarm upCoreHard
Source
AnyReported at a firmStandard
Showing 1–7 of 7 · filtered from 100Clear filters
  1. 022In a timed data exercise you get 5,000 stock-days with 40 features and must build a predictor of next-day returns. Your model has an in-sample R-squared of 4% and an out-of-sample R-squared of 0.5%. What happened, how do you present it to the researcher, and what would you try next?Systematic research and dataHardSquarepoint CapitalParis · 2025Squarepoint CapitalParis · 2025
  2. 037Nivaan Homes, a listings platform, has 12,000 rental listings with size, location, age, floor and days on market. Design a model to predict monthly rent: which target, which features, how do you validate it, and which feature is a leakage trap?Systematic research and dataCoreTwo SigmaNew York · 2025
  3. 047A take-home asks you to regress 500 daily returns on the Selvara signal. You get a slope of 1.8, but three days with returns above 20% drive the fit. After winsorising at the 1st and 99th percentiles the slope is 0.4. Which do you report and why?Systematic research and dataCoreBalyasny Asset ManagementNew York · 2024
  4. 062A backtest on Orlin Minerals gives a Sharpe ratio of 2.1. The price file has one duplicated day and one bad print at ten times the true price that reverts the next day. What does cleaning do to the Sharpe, and how would you catch these errors automatically?Systematic research and dataCoreSquarepoint CapitalLondon · 2026
  5. 073How would you make money from social media data on Fizzora Beverages? You have three years of daily brand mentions and sentiment, and quarterly sales. Design the signal, the test and the trade, and say how you would know it is not noise.Systematic research and dataCoreTwo SigmaNew York · 2024Two SigmaNew York · 2024
  6. 075You receive the Project Tamarind dataset of 30 anonymised columns and a target of next-day returns, to be tested on data you cannot see. Column 17 correlates 0.35 with the target in-sample. What do you suspect, how do you check it, and how do you build a model that survives the hidden test?Systematic research and dataHardPoint72new york · 2026Point72new york · 2026
  7. 100Build a value factor on the Trivan universe of 12 stocks across three sectors: rank on book to price, go long the top three and short the bottom three. Then build it sector-neutral. The two versions give different returns. Why, and which would you use?Systematic research and dataHardAQR Capital ManagementNew York · 2021

Company names and figures are illustrative.