Quest Partners - Nigol Koulajian

Nigol Koulajian Bio

Nigol Koulajian is the Founder and CEO of Quest Partners LLC. He is a long time successful trader who is credited for trading and designing a mix of short-term and long-term technical systems for over 22 years.

Early Beginnings

Nigol Koulajian was born and grew up in the US. There is not much information on his childhood and early education online apart from that he got a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Notre Dame University in 1988 and subsequently an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School in 1994.

Nigol Koulajian started his career in trade at Andersen Consulting. He then moved to Deutsche Bank, where he was credited for creating computerized risk management systems that became quite popular among senior management at the firm.

He later sought a position at Carmel and in a short while became the Head Trader for Carmel Capital. While working at Carmel, Nigol assisted in the designing and pricing of hedges on international equity and fixed income arbitrage. He later joined Weston Capital Management in 1996, and took up the position of Director of Asset Allocation and Product Development. At the firm he was responsible for the allocation of client assets to equity hedge funds and CTAs.

In 1998, he decided to go on a solo venture. Mr. Koulajian then founded the Avalon Asset Management, an umbrella fund that managed other funds. Early in 1999 he co-founded a CTA, Enterprise Asset Management.

Quest Partners LLC

Nigol Koulajian founded the Quest Partners LLC in 2001. It is a research driven alternative investment firm headquartered in New York. The firm is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity trading advisor (CTA) and a commodity pool operator (CPO). It is also a long time member of the National Futures Association (NFA.

Quest Partners has a robust track record for its unique trading approach. The firm is known for its systematic quantitative trading process across multiple asset classes in over 50 liquid markets all over the world. At the core of it all is their principle to focus on what investors need. They employ strategic trading tactics that focus on providing solutions for investors rather than a purist strategy that is unidirectional.

Quest Partners commonly trades in commodities, equity indices, currencies, equity and fixed income. They also employ a set of distinct programs that have been appropriately designed to generate alpha, replicate CTA performance and handle hedge specific market risks.

The firm has been very innovative in their approaches. They have been known to incorporate and utilize different strategies adapted from many of their peers. This way they have been able to diversify their product range to include equity programs both hedge and long only funds. Their main clients are investors in family offices, funds of funds, foundations and the world’s largest pension plans.

Quest Partners Funds and Strategies

Quest Partners LLC : AlphaQuest Original program – 100% Systematic

Risk Control:
Avg. Margin-to-Equity 17%
Targeted Worst DD -30.00%
Worst Peak-to-Trough -25.00%

Strategies Weights:
Trend-Following 50%
Momentum 20%
Seasonal/Cyclical 10%
Other 10%
Counter-Trend 5%
Pattern Recognition 5%

(AQO) or AlphaQuest Original Program is a multi-timeframe futures and systematic trading program that aims to deliver positive Alpha with positive skew. According to Nigol Koulajian, the benefit of dealing with positively skewed sources of alpha is that they tend to be more stable when the market regime changes. This often guarantees favorable returns in any environment.

AQO has fixed risk allocations to the AlphaQuest Short Term Program (45%) and to the AlphaQuest Long Term Program (55%), Trading timeframes are between a few hours to over one year with average trade length of 7 days.