"I would say that we're not seeing the widely reported panic the way we've read," said George U. Sauter, the managing director for Vanguard's quantitative equity group.
"In aggregate, all investment holdings equal the market," said George U. Sauter, managing director of Vanguard's quantitative equity group, the division that runs index funds.
Even though quant funds have performed well in recent years, Joel M. Dickson, head of Vanguard's active quantitative equity group, said investors should be careful about jumping into such funds now.
"This is a year where you have to pay attention to what's going on in Washington," said Joel Dickson, who leads the active quantitative equity group at Vanguard.
Global Alpha is a multistrategy fund but one of its strategies is quantitative equity long-short, so it has been hit in much the same way as the other two funds.
"I'm feeling more bullish now than I did at any time in the latter part of the 90's," said Mr. Sauter, 48, who as head of Vanguard's quantitative equity group is responsible for all its funds that are tied to market indexes, like the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.
Gus Sauter, managing director of the Vanguard quantitative equity group, said that even if Vanguard switched to MSCI indexes for some of its funds, it would not be changing the benchmark for its best-known index fund, the Vanguard 500 Index, based on the S.& P. 500.
He is the head of quantitative equity management and runs six other funds in addition to Parvest USA Quant.
He began his career as a quantitative equity trader at Bear Stearns and later worked at Kidder , Peabody &Co. Fletcher, who is African American, sued Kidder Peabody for racial discrimination.
After graduating from Harvard College in 1987, Fletcher began his career at Bear Stearns as a quantitative equity trader who capitalized on dividend-related arbitrage.
