What’s your role at Federated Hermes?
My name is Kelly Patel and I’m the Portfolio Analytics Manager for the MDT team at Federated Hermes.
I began working at MDT straight out of college, and I’ve spent my entire professional career here since. Throughout my career I’ve worked in a variety of analytical roles with the team, focusing on things like research projects to help improve our quantitative models, developing new code, or helping with our trade review process. Over the past several years though, my primary focus has been on portfolio analytics or understanding what drives the performance of our strategies, whether it be in real time or looking backwards. So, identifying the themes or factors that are driving our portfolio activity and their impact on relative returns, and figuring out what the lessons are that I can share with the rest of the team so that we can learn from our experience to make our models more robust.
What makes quant interesting to you?
I can think of a million ways that quantitative investing interests me personally. I love diving into numbers and seeing exactly what and how the data is informing the decisions of our model. This is particularly true in periods of high volatility like we’ve had so far in 2025.
I also really love digging in and discovering a new theme or story in the performance data that may not be obvious on the surface, but I think my favourite part is actually taking that information and packaging it in a way that makes it more intuitive, not only for the people on my team, but also for people who may be aren’t as fluent in quantitative investing, because ultimately that’s just as important. It’s a great feeling when I’m walking through some of our attributions in a client meeting, explaining what it meant in practice and one of our clients having that ‘a-ha!’ moment.
What are the strengths of the MDT team at Federated Hermes?
We have a great team here at MDT and everyone contributes to the success of our franchise in different ways. Many of the people that were on the investment team when I started are still here, so there’s an added familiarity among many of us and the people on our team who are newer have brought so much value and new ideas to the process.
It’s a great mix of longevity and freshness, and I also love working with the other teams at Federated Hermes and interacting with them outside of that day-to-day investment stuff.
What are your interests outside of work?
I really love to travel. Lately I’ve travelled to places like Greece and Italy, but I’ll go wherever there’s warm weather and good food. I also love spending time with my family. When I’m not in the office, you can probably find me cheering on my kids at their elementary school events or chatting with other parents on the playground. Oh, and I love binge watching Reality TV from Real Housewives to the stock market – my skills range from Bravo to Bloomberg!
