Andreas Clenow
Most investment decisions in large organisations still rely on conviction, narrative, and individual judgement. The cost of that habit shows up in inconsistent returns, hidden risk concentrations, and strategies that cannot be repeated when the person leaves the room. The hard question is what it actually takes to run capital, or any high-stakes commercial decision, on systematic rules rather than gut.
Andreas Clenow is the Chief Investment Officer of ACIES Asset Management and the author of three of the most widely read books on systematic trend-following and momentum trading, advising organisations on how to run capital and decisions by rule rather than instinct.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Andreas Clenow
- He runs the strategies he teaches. ACIES is a working asset manager, not a consulting front. What audiences hear has been tested with real capital, not on a backtest deck.
- His books, Following the Trend, Stocks on the Move, and Trading Evolved, are reference texts on the CMT curriculum and inside multiple quant shops. Few practitioners can claim that level of influence on the field.
- He explains systematic investing in plain language that family offices, boards, and fintech founders can act on, without diluting the maths.
- He has done the operator’s job alongside the trader’s job: hedge fund co-founder, board member, fintech investor, former Reuters Global Head of quant analytics. He understands the business of asset management, not only the modelling.
Biography highlights
- Chief Investment Officer and partner, ACIES Asset Management AG, Zurich
- Former Global Head of Equity and Commodity Quantitative Research, Reuters
- Author of Following the Trend (Wiley, 2012; 2nd edition 2022), Stocks on the Move (2015) and Trading Evolved (2019)
- Author of A Most Private Bank, a novel set inside Swiss private banking
- MSc Economics, School of Economics, Gothenburg University
- Keynote speaker at QuantCon NYC, QuantCon Singapore, Bloomberg events, and CMT Association programmes
Biography
Trend-following used to be a black box that institutional investors paid hedge funds to operate without ever seeing inside. Following the Trend, published by Wiley in 2012, opened the box. The book showed that the diversified managed futures industry runs on a small set of repeatable rules, and it remains a working reference inside CTA shops more than a decade later.
Andreas Clenow wrote it as a working practitioner, not a commentator. He is Chief Investment Officer and partner at ACIES Asset Management AG in Zurich, having previously run global equity and commodity quantitative research at Reuters and co-founded hedge funds on both onshore and offshore structures. His follow-up books, Stocks on the Move on equity momentum and Trading Evolved on building strategies in Python, are now standard reading on the Chartered Market Technician programme and inside many quant teams.
His argument with audiences is consistent. Most underperformance in capital allocation comes from discretion dressed up as analysis. The remedy is not more analysts. It is a rules-based process, tested across decades of data, with explicit risk budgets and an honest account of what the strategy will and will not do.
That argument lands particularly well with family offices, boards of investment committees, and fintech founders trying to build scalable trading businesses, because Clenow has lived each of those roles. He has founded and sold companies, sat on boards, raised seed capital for a hedge fund, and managed institutional money through more than one cycle. The talks reflect that range: systematic investing, the economics of running a quant fund, and what separates a professional desk from a retail operation.
Key speaking topics
- Systematic trend-following and managed futures
- Equity momentum strategies
- Quantitative trading and model design
- Asset management for family offices
- The business of running a hedge fund
- Risk budgeting and capital allocation under volatility
- Python and the modern quant stack
Ideal for
- Family office principals, CIOs and investment committees
- Asset management and hedge fund leadership teams
- Fintech founders building systematic trading or wealth platforms
- Bank and brokerage quant and risk leadership
Audience outcomes
- A clear view of how diversified trend-following actually works as a portfolio strategy, not as marketing language
- A working test for whether an internal strategy is systematic or discretion in a spreadsheet
- A realistic picture of the economics of running a quant fund: returns, drawdowns, capacity, and infrastructure
- Sharper questions to ask managers, vendors and internal teams about model risk and capital deployment
Talks
A practitioner walk-through of how counter-trend models behave alongside classical trend-following inside a diversified futures portfolio.
Key takeaways:
- Where counter-trend strategies actually add return, and where they only add cost
- How to size counter-trend allocations without breaking the trend book
- What the combined book looks like through different volatility regimes
A direct account of what a career in systematic trading really involves, across own-account, employed, and entrepreneurial routes.
Key takeaways:
- Which strategies have genuine commercial demand and which do not
- The honest economics of running your own quant book
- What separates a sustainable desk from a clever backtest
A working comparison of how serious desks design models, define risk, and scale strategies versus how retail operations approach the same problems.
Key takeaways:
- A usable definition of risk, position sizing and exposure limits
- What realistic returns and drawdowns look like for systematic strategies
- Where retail thinking quietly creeps into institutional processes