Davis Alum Receives Wagner Award For Paper
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The National Association of Active Investment Managers announced that UC Davis Graduate School of Management Alumnus, Dave Walton, is the 2014 first-place winner of the $10 thousand Wagner Award for Advances in Active Investment Management for his paper “Know Your System! – Turning Data Mining from Bias to Benefit through System Parameter Permutation.”
The Wagner Award is designed to expand awareness of active investment management techniques and the results of active strategies.
Greg Morris, the Chairman of the Award Committee, writes, “Dave Walton, first place winner of the NAAIM Wagner Award, has developed a sophisticated system to help investment advisors evaluate and use their trading systems more effectively. The encouragement of this kind of innovative thinking is why NAAIM created the Wagner Award competition, to bring out more original ideas and research in the Active Investment Management field.”
Dave Walton is a private trader and co-founder of StatisTrade, a trading system evaluation think tank. Walton has been involved in active investing since 1999. In his award-winning paper, Walton argues that not only does traditional trading system development lead to positively biased performance estimates, but that much valuable information is lost in the process.
“You don’t need a PhD. in statistics or the resources of a large hedge fund to give yourself an edge” said Walton.
In honor of Jerry Wagner, NAAIM founding member and president and CEO of Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd., the Wagner Award for Advances in Active Investment Management annually awards $10 thousand to a paper providing evidence of the validity of an active investing approach using a trading system that outperforms the market by some well-accepted metric.