Practice Drills: Conducting a Post Mortem on a Failed Strategy

A hands-on drill course for senior quants, systematic fund manager aspirants and prop desk leads. The case study showed you how a CIO thinks through a failure. Here you do the work yourself, drill by drill, on realistic evidence packs from failed Indian systematic strategies: rebuilding the failure timeline from trade logs and decision records, testing whether a drawdown was bad luck or bad process, decomposing live versus backtest returns into beta, factor exposure, costs and genuine alpha, measuring slippage and capacity on NSE fills, recomputing the deflated Sharpe ratio from a research log, hunting look-ahead and survivorship bias, scoring the risk model against realised volatility, diagnosing crowding and a hedge that failed, and auditing kill-switch rules and a code change that caused a loss. Every drill is worked by hand with the numbers shown, and the capstone is a full post-mortem in Python, ending in a written findings, root cause and corrective action report.