The QIS strategy taxonomy.
The QIS shelf looks sprawling — thousands of dealer indices, each with its own rulebook — but it organizes into six structural families. Each entry below defines the family, states the economic rationale, documents how dealers package it, and flags the risks that belong in a governance review rather than a pitchbook.
Trend Following & Time-Series Momentum
Systematic long/short positioning in the direction of recent price trends across futures and forwards — the oldest and most widely allocated systematic premium.
Carry Strategies
Harvesting the yield differential between assets — FX carry, rates carry, commodity roll, and volatility carry — compensation for bearing downside and liquidity risk.
Volatility Risk Premia
Systematically selling insurance — harvesting the persistent gap between implied and realized volatility — and its long-volatility mirror image.
Equity Style Premia
Cross-sectional factor strategies — value, momentum, quality, low volatility, size — the academic core of systematic equity investing, long/short or long-only tilted.
Defensive & Hedging Overlays
Rules-based protection: tail hedges, dynamic de-risking, and responsive overlay strategies that convert hedging from a discretionary decision into a systematic program.
Multi-Asset & Portfolio Construction
The assembly layer: risk parity, vol-targeting, and cross-asset QIS portfolios that combine sleeves into a single allocatable vehicle with defined risk mechanics.
Families are organized by return mechanism, not asset class — the institutional convention. A commodity curve trade and an FX forward basket are both "carry"; an equity dispersion trade and a VIX roll rule are both "volatility risk premia." Every family page cross-links to the infrastructure that implements it and the governance that constrains it.