My guest this week is Eric Sorensen, the CEO of Panagora asset management, which manages more than $46B for clients across a variety of strategies.Eric began his career serving in the Air Force as both a pilot and instructor in high-performance jet aircraft. He then accumulated 40 years of quantitative research and investment experience, with a Ph.D. along the way.Please enjoy our conversation on the changing landscape of quantitative investment strategies.For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub.Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshagShow Notes1:15 - (First Question) – His background in the Air Force1:23 – Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War3:18 – Training people on high-performance machines4:47 – Traits that made for better pilots5:51 – The evolution of quantitative equity research and its stages7:56 – How his research led to becoming a practitioner9:10 - The early feature sets in his research10:44 – Tradeoffs in the spectrum of interpretability12:08 – Early days of his practitioner career13:24 – Risk Premia and the 5 C’s14:28 – Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management: Modern Techniques and Applications17:13 – Applying the 5 C’s to value investing18:38 – Knowing when a strategy/signal is broken21:24 – What does this strategy plan mean for his firm today24:56 – Mixing expert systems and portfolio construction30:07 – Natural language processing32:00 – The cultivating the power and creativity to ask good questions35:13 – The concept of a research graveyard37:45 – State of risk premia today40:04 – Active equity process46:37 – Frontiers of research that he’s excited about48:53 – Safe havens for non-quantitative investors52:16– Advice for young quants54:36 – Quants on the buy-side that he admires55:41 – Kindest thing anyone has done for himLearn MoreFor more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclubFollow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag