In a UBP-hosted podcast, Kier Boley, CIO of UBP Alternative Investment Solutions, spoke with Joseph Kelly, Managing Partner at Campbell, about two themes currently shaping conversations with investors: the rise of artificial intelligence and the challenge of navigating an unpredictable macro environment.
Listen to the full discussion on Spotify or Apple Podcast:
For Campbell, a systematic multi-strategy manager with a long-standing relationship with UBP, AI may offer new efficiencies and research capabilities, but it can also create crowded exposures across markets. As Joseph Kelly put it, AI is ‘obviously the topic of the day, maybe even the decade.’ For a quantitative manager, the question is not only how AI affects market prices, but also how it can be incorporated into the investment process itself.
Campbell began using AI tools in 2022, initially for tasks such as research efficiency and code completion. Since then, the firm has moved towards more advanced agentic coding tools, including Claude Code. Kelly described this as a shift from simple efficiency gains to ‘the equivalent of an engineer sitting next to you,’ with the potential to compress processes that once took months into days or weeks.
Yet he was careful not to present AI as a substitute for investment judgement. One of his clearest points was that ‘domain experience still matters.’ Campbell has placed experienced investment professionals close to its AI initiatives, including a member of its Investment Committee with a PhD in physics who runs the firm’s derivatives programme. According to Kelly, that expertise is essential to making AI outputs usable.
‘Without him providing context to the results inside of those AI efforts, they would not be correct, and we would not be able to trust them,’ he said. AI can help scale research, engineering, and analysis, but it does not remove the need for people who understand the problem being solved. For systematic managers, this is particularly important. Models can process large volumes of information, but the design, validation, risk controls, and interpretation of those models still depend on human expertise.
Without him providing context to the results inside of those AI efforts, they would not be correct, and we would not be able to trust them
The second AI question is what the technology is doing to markets. Kelly noted that many investors already have meaningful exposure to AI, whether directly through public equities and private investments, or indirectly through strategies and indices that have become more sensitive to the same underlying factor. The challenge is that even strategies not explicitly designed around AI can end up exposed to it.
Investors have had to adjust quickly as the market narrative has shifted between disinflation, renewed inflation concerns, changing rate expectations, and political risk. Boley noted that markets have moved from a focus on deflation and disinflation to a more inflationary discussion, For Kelly, this is a difficult environment for single-strategy approaches. A momentum strategy, for example, can perform well while a trend persists, but it may struggle when policy events, geopolitical shocks, or rapid changes in investor expectations produce sharp reversals.
Campbell’s response is to diversify across several dimensions. Kelly described the firm’s approach as ‘a story of diversification across sector, strategy, speed, and relative value.’ That means combining models that behave differently across market conditions, including macro strategies, equity-market-neutral approaches, shorter-term systems, and relative-value positions.
Speed is one important part of that framework. Traditional trend-following strategies often work over medium- to longer-term horizons, but recent markets have frequently moved faster. Shorter-term models may be better placed to respond when markets reverse quickly or when events create sharp but temporary dislocations.
Another part of the diversification comes from portfolio construction. In equity-market-neutral strategies, for example, Campbell seeks to avoid excessive concentration in a narrow group of large technology names. Kelly noted that equal weighting individual names, rather than using capitalisation-weighted exposure, can help reduce the risk of being overly dependent on the largest companies in US indices.
The same logic applies in macro. Kelly contrasted periods of limited policy dispersion, such as those marked by widespread quantitative easing and low or zero rates, with environments in which countries face different inflation dynamics, rate policies, energy exposures, and fiscal pressures. When policy paths diverge, systematic macro strategies may have a wider set of opportunities to analyse and trade. Political shocks are difficult to model and can produce binary outcomes. Kelly emphasised the value of having many positions in a portfolio, rather than relying on just ‘two or three’ high-conviction views. The goal is to smooth outcomes and build returns across multiple themes.
The discussion also underlined why UBP has worked with Campbell through its U-Access UCITS platform. The platform was designed to provide access to selected alternative investment managers through a UCITS structure, and the Campbell strategy brings a systematic, multi-strategy approach. AI and macro volatility may appear to be separate subjects, but both raise similar questions for investors. Where are the risks becoming crowded? Which exposures are intentional? How much of a portfolio depends on one market narrative? And how quickly can an investment process respond when that narrative changes?
Kelly’s comments suggest that, for systematic managers, the answer lies in combining new technology with experienced judgement, and in pairing model-driven analysis with diversification across strategies and time horizons. AI may become a more powerful part of the investment toolkit, but its value depends on how it is used, tested, and interpreted. Macro events may continue to create uncertainty, but they can also create dispersion, and dispersion is where diversified systematic strategies may find opportunity.
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