Vincent Costa and Peg DiOrio Mine the Stock Universe for Pure Portfolio Gold

March 3, 2020

               

Vincent Costa, CFA, is Manager of Global Quantitative Equities at Voya Investment Management. He is also a portfolio manager for the active quantitative and fundamental large-cap value strategies. He joined Voya Investment Management in 2006 as head of portfolio management for quantitative equity.

Peg DiOrio, CFA, is the Head of Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management at Voya Investment Management. She is also a portfolio manager for the active quantitative strategies. Earlier, she worked at Alliance Bernstein/Sanford C. Bernstein. She received an M.S. degree in applied mathematics, statistics and operations research from New York University.

In this 2,566 word interview, exclusive to the Wall Street Transcript, these two portfolio managers give an insightful analysis of their investment philosophies.

“The equity organization has about $50 billion in assets under management, of which roughly about $20 billion of that is in what we would call quantitative equities…We do both fundamental and quantitative investing on the equity front…

Fundamental equity strategies typically are built to outperform, on a relative basis, benchmarks by doing fundamental analysis on securities and companies and then building portfolios that are designed to outperform a given benchmark.

On the quantitative side, quantitative strategies are built to also outperform underlying benchmarks but do so using stock selection models, rather than individual security analysis. Those models will be used to decide which stocks we want to overweight or underweight in a given portfolio.”

Mr. Costa describes it this way:

“I think when building a quantitative portfolio, there’s a lot of the human element that goes into the design of the process that you build.

And so we’ve been fortunate here at Voya to have a strong fundamental equity team with us. The quant team kind of evolved out of our fundamental team, so we spend a lot of time upfront with our analysts when we’re building our stock selection models to understand what works and what doesn’t work in each of the sectors, and then in using those, the model that we build in portfolios, we do spend a lot of time also upfront, making sure we’ve got the right constraints in place so that, as Peg mentioned, we’re not going to be tilting toward one sector versus another.”

Get the rest of this 2,566 word interview in detail by reading it exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.