The louder the narrative, the stronger the case for systematic investing

The Shawshank Redemption is one of my favourite movies of all time, and one of the most poignant moments comes after Brooks Hatlen's release after 50 years in prison. He reflects on a world that has moved on without him. “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.” I don't know about you, but right now, across markets and beyond, that observation feels uncomfortably accurate. AI, geopolitics, energy shocks, and an explosion in both the volume and speed of data are reshaping the investment landscape at a pace few could have imagined even a decade ago. For investors, the challenge is no longer access to information, but the ability to interpret it - and, critically, to separate signal from noise. Because if there is one thing markets consistently prove, it is that humans are not particularly good at this task. As Franklin Templeton’s Subash Pillai puts it: “I think we have got excited about 10 of the last five new things… and for those five that were real, we probably got under-excited.” That behavioural mismatch - overreacting to noise and underreacting to signal - is precisely the problem systematic investing is designed to solve. “What systematic investing does is it does not take a view on the narrative itself. It looks at what is happening in the data.” In this interview, we explore how that process works in practice, where it excels, and why it may be more relevant than ever in today’s market.