I have read some papers on quantitative trading strategies and it seems like strategies that focus on mean reversion or statistical arbitrage give signals that are dependent on some quantitative model.
But when you turn to momentum strategies, people start talking about moving averages to generate signals. Why is that? Isn't there a more quantitative method of detecting momentum than moving averages ?
Answer
As jk3000 writes in his comment, moving averages are quantitative. Moving averages can be made quite sophisticated, if desired. Besides simple moving averages, there are exponential moving averages, moving averages on inhomogenous (tick) data, and meta models incorporating multiple moving averages with time-varying weights.
Also, the canonical academic definition of momentum (Jegadeesh and Titman (1993)) looks at top/bottom performers over some time period, often relative to a model such as CAPM or Fama-French. Momentum can mean different things to different people, but to serious quants, it is more often something along the lines of relative performance than moving averages. See http://momentum.behaviouralfinance.net/ to get a better idea.
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