Introduction To Systematic Investment Processes

Introduction

In the age of LLMs, it is now more and more accessible to create systematic investment processes; but to create one, you need to first be able to describe it. As I saw on X recently, the most popular programming language of 2026 is english.

My goal is for you to understand enough to decide if you want to participate in the markets as a systematic investor. One of the most common question I get is what does a systematic investment process even look like? I figured I will take one article to answer this question so that I can keep referring back to this in the future.

Systematic investment processes are essentially pipelines that connects data to investment decisions. Every systematic strategy, no matter how sophisticated, follows the same fundamental architecture (with a few adjustments).

Data -> Features -> Signals -> Portfolio -> Execution

The scope of this article is to discuss how a beginner might attempt to put this pipeline together so that he may start searching for signals to build his own systematic investment process.