← Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
Eric Peters - Paradigm Shifts and Solutions at One River (EP.422)
00:39:41
Eric Peters leads both One River Asset Management and Coinbase Asset Management and writes a widely dispersed blog called Wknd Notes, in which he shares macro insights. He’s twice been a guest on the show, discussing his bespoke macro investment...
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- [00:02]
Michael Lefel
Capital Allocators is brought to you by Ten east, an investment platform for sophisticated investors to access private markets. Ten east brings benefits of having your own family office without the cost and headaches of doing so. It's founded and led by Michael Lefel, former Deputy Executive Managing member of Davidson Kempner. Michael and his investment team offer members the opportunity to co invest by offering at their discretion. Michael and his team source, diligence and commit material personal capital to each investment. The opportunities shared on the Tennys platform offer exposure to private credit, real estate, niche venture and private equity and other idiosyncratic investments that typically aren't available through traditional channels. The principals have over a decade track record of investing in these types of exposures across more than 350 transactions post investment. The Tenney's team conducts ongoing monitoring and reporting, just as you'd expect from an institutional investment organization. I've known Michael for about a decade and after becoming impressed by the quality of Teneast offerings, its research process and high quality investment team, I became an advisor to the organization and investor in multiple offerings. You can learn more and join me as a member at Teneast Co. That's the number 10 East coast capital Allocators.
- [01:31]
Ted Seides
Is also brought to you by SRS acwiem. Want to make sure your MA processes aren't stuck in the past? How about partnering with a company that's been defining the future of dealmaking for nearly two decades? Instead, when it comes to M and A innovation, SRS acwiem has reshaped the way deals get done more than anyone else. Streamlining processes for maximum efficiency and minimum headaches. Professional shareholder representation, online M and A payments, digital stockholder solicitation. Well, SRS acwiem pioneered each and continues to set the bar for game changing innovation. So leave the days of disjointed deal management behind and define your future with SRS Acquiem. The smartest way to run a deal. Learn more@srsaqueum.com that's S R S A C Q U I O M.com hello, I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access Premium content@capitalallocators.com All opinions expressed by.
- [03:01]
TED and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast.
- [03:19]
My guest on today's show is Eric Peters, who leads both OneRiver Asset Management and Coinbase Asset Management and writes a widely dispersed blog called Weekend Notes in which he shares macro insights. Eric's twice been a guest on the show discussing his bespoke macro investment strategy four years ago and case for Bitcoin three years ago. Both conversations are replayed in the feed since then. Many of OneRiver's strategies played out well during COVID and Coinbase acquired OneRiver Digital Asset Management. In March 2023, we got back together to discuss how Eric has adapted to the changing environment, including One River's shift from bespoke offerings to a total portfolio solution and the continued case for Bitcoin. Along the way, Eric shares his keen insights on portfolio construction, left tail risks and right tail opportunities before we get going, I was walking down the street and saw my friend Brian Furtado, the head of the family office practice at Apollo on the other side of the street with a handful of shopping bags. Brian is a very affable, can do type of guy, so as I crossed the street to say hello, I was surprised when he appeared frazzled and mumbling to himself. He looked up at me and repeated a phrase twice. Just keep buying. Just keep buying. Since that December 23rd three years ago, just keep buying has become a mantra in our house during moments of holiday induced stress. It's not really about retail therapy, although my wife, Vanessa might mean it literally from time to time. It's about remembering that the sprint to the holidays can bring some stress, but the actions we take spread joy and cheer when the big day comes. So whether you're celebrating Christmas, the first day of Hanukkah, or anything else on December 25, when you feel the inevitable pressure of the holidays, take a small action with the gift of giving in mind. Just keep buying. Thanks for spreading the holiday chee with Capital Allocators. Please enjoy my conversation with Eric Peters.
- [05:36]
Eric Peters
Eric, great to see you.
- [05:38]
Great to be back.
- [05:39]
In the last couple years, there's a lot that's changed in this entire environment and I'd love to start with how have you structurally addressed the changing environment?
- [05:49]
Boy, our business has gone through a lot of change. 2020 is the place to start. Prior to 2020, we were in this world of perceived secular stagnation and something was going to come along to propel us out of that. That was the rise of talk about mmt. And it made sense that whenever the next crisis hit, we would see a much different policy response from what we've seen in prior cycles. And then Covid hit. So prior to 2020, we had thought that inflation was going to pick up. I felt like we had the right strategy lineup for our clients. So we had trend following, we had long volatility, we had an inflation strategy that we're trying to get off the ground. We felt pretty well positioned for that going into for what we thought the next cycle would look like. And then that cycle hit, which was an incredible catalyst relative to anything I could have imagined. But all those themes started to play out. Big fiscal deficits, monetary debasement, inflation. And that provoked all sorts of changes in how we thought about our business and our solutions. So that was really the kickoff.
- [06:50]
What were some of those changes?
- [06:52]
For starters, we thankfully got through Covid with having delivered what we said we would deliver. So our long fall made a lot of money. And we had weekly liquidity for our clients. We had huge redemptions through that, which is exciting because you want to deliver for your clients and you want to think that you can deliver weekly liquidity. But then you also have to have service providers strike a nav on every Friday in March and April. So the first part of it was that what we were doing worked. Then the question was, so what really happens from here? Because the catalyst for this new investment paradigm that we thought we had entered was so powerful that we thought correlations are going to be changed for a long period of time. So like the equity bond correlation could change and that changes every institution portfolio in terms of how it's going to perform, how to think about risk, where to seek opportunities. So we put a lot of thought into how do we help our clients more with what we have. And then we also entered crypto in November of 2020. And that was really to express one of those themes, which was monetary debasement. And also captured some of the convexity of this new technology that was poorly understood at that time.
- [07:54]
What does One river look like today?
- [07:56]
I am so excited about what we have going on right now. One river is about $3 billion business and it's primarily focused on risk mitigation. For the most part. Our assets are in trend following and volatility strategies. We have a dispersion strategy as well, but the bulk of our assets are in systematic long equity volume and combinations of systematic long equity volume paired with trend following. Our Total Portfolio combines systematic long equity volume with trend following combined with Equity Beta. So I took the position when we started One River. Let's build a suite of different strategies that our clients can use either on a one off basis or in combination to help tilt their portfolio. Complete it, build various solutions that help their needs. And that's how we got to $3 billion. What we've never done is launch a flagship strategy. So a year and a quarter ago, I put the challenge out to the team. What do we have and what can we do that we think and that I would put all of my liquid capital into? If you could only do one thing, what would that be? And we did a lot of work around how to combine our strategies with Equity Beta. And that kicked off a series of three white papers that we published, which in combination are the underpinning for this total portfolio. The result of it is if you combine Equity beta in a leveraged way, like a portable alpha type return stacking way, with what we do at this firm, our strategies are negatively correlated, positively convex. So anytime there's a wobble in the market, what we do should make somewhere between okay money and really good money at a time when the S and P is drawing down. And then you can rebalance those positions, which allows you to start compounding from a higher baseline. So the compounding effects are massive. So that's really One River. This will be the most important thing I do in my career from an investing standpoint. In terms of our contribution to investing. This is what our firm will in time be known for.
- [09:48]
You mentioned you wanted something where you'd put all your money in. How do you think about what are you trying to accomplish with the strategy?
- [09:54]
Trying to accomplish compounding at the highest possible rate with drawdowns that are sufficiently manageable that you won't lose your nerve. That's important for any investor. And we all have different pain thresholds. Mine happens to be high, by the way, But I wanted to build a strategy that was tempered. So ideally, the way we looked at it and the challenge that I had was can we compound it higher than the S and P with lower drawdowns and a better sharpe? And when I say mitigating the downside so that you don't lose your nerve, what I mean by that is everyone wants to outperform the S and P the entire world. And if they're aliens, they probably want to outperform the S and P. The question is, what are you going to do in order to do that? And there are all sorts of portfolio combinations where people try to do various things. Some of them try to outperform the S and P. And they end up oftentimes taking on a lot of additional risk. That's quite correlated to underlying equities. And it works great in the right market environment. And then when the market turns against those players, the losses that they suffer such that they end up getting out at the worst possible time, they're either forced out or they choose to get out, or their investment board says, why are we taking these risks? We didn't really understand it. So it's super important that whatever you build can survive adverse market environments. And what I tell the team all the time here, nothing good happens to dead people. It just doesn't. So the first and foremost you have to figure out whatever you're doing, how do you make sure you survive it? That's really the objective. Because by the way, I don't know what equities are going to return on a forward looking basis. I suspect that it won't be as strong as looking back over the last 20 years. I suspect it'll be more volatile. There could be times where it's brilliantly positive as well. I think there are big right tails. There are also some really bad tails that are potentially out there. So I just wanted to make sure that we had something that was robust to any range of market environments that you wouldn't get squeezed out of the position and that could ideally compound at better than equities and be liquid.
- [11:46]
When you start looking at the pieces that brought this together. You mentioned the S and P as the equity beta. How do you think about the S and P versus some other form of equity beta as the driver of that growth engine?
- [11:57]
This strategy has three different equity betas for people. So one is the S&P 500, another is the NASDAQ 100 and then MSCI World that covers most of it. What I wanted to see when we did our analysis, this framework, what would it look like if we had some really lousy equity beta in there? Instead, we try to find the worst stock markets in the world that are credible stock markets. Euro stocks 50 and Hang Seng, those are the two really worst stock markets in the world from a performance standpoint over the last 17, 20 years. And if you create this portfolio combination with the rebalancing structure that we have put in place, you achieve multiple times even with a lousy underlying equity market. If you really want to be an investor and make money, you got to invest in equity, you got to invest in the underlying growth of the economy. So I don't know what the future holds in terms of what are equities going to deliver. Hopefully a lot in real terms, probably quite a bit in nominal terms given what I think will happen, but I don't really know. The key is to have that construct that you think will outperform.
- [12:58]
So get into the more interesting stuff. On top of it. You mentioned that you're putting systematic strategies in, not discretionary. I know in the past you've done both. Why did you come to wanting to do this with systematic strategies?
- [13:10]
I've been a discretionary trader investor my whole career and When I launched One river in 2013, I try to think of things in 10 year increments. So I really thought about what I wanted to build. What I concluded was that if we didn't embed technology within our firm, we would be unlikely to have a firm in five or 10 years. That was pretty simple statement, high conviction, just because if you look at technology trends in every aspect of society, you want to be long innovation. And I thought without that then I don't know, maybe I'm just reminiscence of the stock operator. Nothing's really changed for how discretionary investment decisions are being made. The upside is as a discretionary investor, you can potentially see things around the corner that have never happened before, haven't happened in such a long period of time that your quantitative strategies can't foresee it. So that's the advantage. The downside is you have a human making decisions and you have a lot of emotion involved. So I thought that if we could embed discretionary investing principles that I and the team have learned over time into strategies that are fully codified and we could take out the emotion from investing, build really well risk managed quantitative strategies so that if we were wrong and there was something that had never happened before, we have something to get us out. But that was the bet that I made in 2013 with the firm. And as it turns out, the vast majority of our assets under management are in quantitative strategies. One of the advantages you have there is if you come up with the right investing principles, you could apply them across a lot of different markets and typically do them in instruments that are quite cash efficient. So they're pretty scalable and they combine well into solutions for our clients. And the other advantage of quant strategies is that when you sit across the table from a very large allocator who's comfortable with quantitative strategies, you can look at how the logic embedded within that strategy would have done in a variety of different periods without having to guess what someone's discretionary decision would be. And I think that's actually really valuable, particularly as you combine strategies. So I've gravitated very strongly in that direction. There will always be things that one river does on a discretionary basis. Move into crypto was incredibly profitable and that was discretionary and it was working with one of our biggest clients who's a brilliant investor. And we'll do things like that in the future, but there'll be fewer and further between, I think.
- [15:30]
So within this strategy there's the long volume piece and there's the trend piece on the long volume component. What are you putting into this new aggregated strategy?
- [15:40]
So the long vault component we've been running since 2015, it's called Dynamic convexity and it's well named in the sense that it's a highly convex strategy. It trades in VIX futures options on VIX futures, vstox futures which is the VIX equivalent in Europe, and a whole host of different straddles on global equity indices. So there are a number of legs to the stool, so to say. And we continue to do research and put new interesting things in there. And it's very capital efficient, which is why we can build it into this total portfolio when we combine our dynamic convexity and our trend following strategies into one strategy. It's called risk responders. We use, roughly speaking, in a benign market, 23% of the cash for margin and in a stressed environment that might go up to 50. So we have all this extra cash which allows us to marry that with equity beta using futures so that we have in the total portfolio in a normal market environment, 31 cents of every dollar is invested in futures, the rest is in cash earning T bills. Having those components that are really capital efficient, they work well together.
- [16:49]
What is it that makes it more capital efficient than another comparable strategy?
- [16:54]
There are all sorts of different strategies that people use to try to attempt to be long fall. We have a very purist approach. And when I mean purist, I mean we only ever are long fall, we never are shortfall. And the reason for that is over my career, which is now 35 years at every cycle, I have seen people who have convinced themselves their long fall on a net basis because they're long fall somewhere and they're short a little bit somewhere else because they don't think it's really going to hurt them. And then there's some unique aspect to this latest crisis and then they either don't perform or they really underperform or in some cases they lose everything. So we come at it with the appropriate amount of humility, which is to say, look, we understand these markets really well, but we don't know what the future holds. So we're not going to be shortfall anywhere. In our case, not much is going on. We have extremely low capital usage. We could have as little as 5% of capital that we're using in a really quiet market, but it's very dynamic. So that can ramp up. In a crisis like Covid, it could ramp up to 30, 40, 45%. When you think about combining solutions like this into something like total portfolio, cash efficiency is vital. Without it, you can't do it.
- [18:05]
When you've traded across all different markets, why do you choose equities and not some mix of all different assets?
- [18:12]
The real use for dynamic convexity is to help our clients reliably lean something up against the biggest risk. In their book, we work with pensions, endowments, sovereigns. If you look at the real risk in their portfolio, it's probably 90% driven by equities. And it comes in all sorts of different forms, private equity, public equity, credit. You end up with portfolios that there's just one risk factor, which is equities. So having a strategy that was highly convex to, let's say a move in oil or gold or something like that, it might work for those investors, it might not work at all. So that's biggest reason. But there are also liquidity reasons. The VIX market is an incredibly deep liquid market. So we can move through that market without having a footprint. And that's a great thing.
- [18:59]
In this risk responder strategy, which trend strategies are you pairing with the long equity ball?
- [19:05]
So we run two trend strategies. One is on what we call core markets and the classic ones, we also offer an alternative market trend strategy which is 110 markets. There's a little bit of overlap. So roughly speaking, I think we have 153 markets, 154 markets that we trade across those trend following strategies and we've tried to find markets that are as lowly correlated as possible.
- [19:30]
So how do these three components, the equity beta, long volume and trend, work together such that you took equity beta and as you looked at it historically, this outperforms.
- [19:41]
What we do is we take say $100 of equities, we replace that with futures contract, and we actually put in $110 of equity exposure. Explain that in a second. So that probably takes $7 of margin to do that. So now we've got 93 bucks left. And then we layer in the risk responders program, which is $23 out of every 100, and we put 100% of that risk responders, which is dynamic convexity and trend falling in there. In a benign market we call benign market that's drifting or trending upwards, we're going to expect in dynamic convexity to lose 2 to 5% a year. So having 110% equity beta basically just looks at that strategy and says, well, if the market drifts up, there's going to be some drag because you're along this dynamic convexity, your longer hedge essentially, and that hedge is going to cost you. So if you combine those two things, you should still end up with 100% of the equity performance on the upside. And then you look at trend following and you go, okay, over the long haul, let's say trend is going to deliver a plus 0.2345 sharp, something like that. But for the purposes of this portfolio construction, just imagine it does nothing in a year. So now what happens in a strong S and P year? Well, your S and P goes up, let's say 15%. You invested $100, it's now worth 115. What you can do is take your risk responders portfolio and just size it up to that new overall 115 level. So now you start compounding again off of the 115 base. But you've got more protection on because you've been able to upsize it because the whole portfolio is a derivative portfolio. Now imagine that next year the S and p is down 20% or you have a Covid or you have a GFC. Well, you are highly likely to make a lot of money in your risk responders program. And your S and P is going to be 20% or 30% or 40% down. So now what you're doing is you're looking at that overall portfolio level. It's going to actually be higher than 115, even though equities are deeply discounted. But you're rotating money back into the S and P. When that market correction or bear market ends, you're now compounding from a much higher base than if you just owned equities the whole time.
- [21:48]
How do you think about the optimal rebalancing strategy?
- [21:51]
The team did a lot of work on this and they looked at countless simulations of different rebalancing schedules and they looked at calendar based reschedules, they looked at threshold based. So if my hedge is up 10% or 50 or 30 or whatever it might be. We rebalance half of it or all of it because that's often what investors do. The conclusion from that was actually the optimal approach is pretty simple. Actually somewhere around a month is a pretty good place to be if you choose thresholds. Sometimes if you choose the exact right threshold, it's great because there's no give back. But if risk responded was only up 27% or 29% and you didn't at that threshold and it came back against you, you'd have a poor outcome. So what you find is there's a lot of variance in the threshold based. Now what was funny is we were in Australia speaking with Big Client and we said, well, here's the work, so what do you think? And they're like, we're definitely going to continue to do threshold. And we're like, why? That's fine. But the research says otherwise. They're like, because there's the investment board effect. If our portfolio is under a ton of stress and we have some type of hedge that's up 30 or 40 or 50% and we walk into the boardroom, they're going to say, take it off. So we ran simulations looking at combinations of threshold based and calendar based and those are really quite good as well.
- [23:08]
Does that calendar rebalancing over threshold rebalancing have a similar analysis? If you looked at an allocator multi asset class rebalancing?
- [23:18]
That's a good question. I'll bet you it does. Even when we know we're going to make stupid decisions, sometimes we just can't help ourselves. So we could look at all the data and say threshold is inferior statistically and the probability of really getting it wrong is much higher. But people are still going to do it. I completely understand why. But if you have, in a way, if you can make the choice to do it in a dispassionate way over time, you're going to do better.
- [23:43]
When does the package suffer the most?
- [23:46]
The package suffers the most when trend is underperforming and volum doesn't really kick in and equity markets are performing poorly. Because if equity markets are performing well, then you could say, well, we're underperforming the S and P. Okay, we have a strategy that should outperform the S and P substantially through time, but that doesn't mean it always will. So I don't view that as being a real negative. So the question is, can you have a period where the S and P goes down? Trend following doesn't really make Money. And you don't have a really convex type panic where dynamic convexity kicks off the key. You asked earlier, what is it built for? It's built so that you don't ever have to panic out. So I'll take half the drawdown, the S&P 500. If you're going to make money, you've got to take risk. It's a little bit higher volume than the S&P 500, which I think is good because it has lower drawdowns, better sharp. So I'd like that volume.
- [24:38]
All right, let's pivot to crypto. When you last came on, we were talking about crypto. You had just done this big trade. Nothing happened, and then a lot's happened of late. Why don't you talk about your trajectory of that initial focus on trading this big bitcoin trade to where you are today?
- [24:56]
That was just an insane period. We all have our war stories. Since we talked, so much has happened in the crypto industry. It felt like the US was behind crypto at the time. The rest of the world was against it. And then, wow, the Biden administration came in and I don't know why technology ever got politicized, but it did. And then we had a big rate hike cycle and crypto fell apart. And then we had Sam Bankman Freed and we thankfully dodged the bad actors. We had an incredible advisory council, Jay Clayton and then Kevin Hassett, who just joined the Trump administration. They were super helpful in terms of giving us the type of perspective around what was likely to unfold from a regulatory standpoint. We started building a platform which is going to be infrastructure for tokenizing essentially all traditional assets as opposed to tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum. So taking real world assets or traditional stocks and bonds and all sorts of loans and someday almost anything you could imagine tokenizing them. We built out a crypto asset manager. Coinbase acquired that about a year and a half ago, which I saw that as once in a lifetime opportunity. So I actually run two firms right now, so I'm the opposite of boredom. It seemed like an incredible opportunity to have this absolute leader in this brand new technology that I think will reshape finance and probably to a degree, reshape the world in all sorts of unique ways. You had the 800 pound gorilla, which is Coinbase. It didn't have asset management and they wanted that. And we had an amazing relationship with them. And the people there are phenomenal. Brian Armstrong as a CEO is being part of a founder CEO led firm is the place to be. So that all happened to us in crypto or that all unfolded since you and I last chatted. So now I get two jobs.
- [26:37]
So a couple of years ago when we were talking, you were pretty focused on Bitcoin in the ecosystem. How have you thought about Bitcoin versus everything else happening in crypto?
- [26:47]
There's always talk about, well, how dominant is Bitcoin relative to the other coins? And right now it's around 60ish percent of the overall market. And there tends to be this cycle where in really big spec cycles a lot of the lesser known coins get a big following and their value goes up and the dominance of Bitcoin relative to the whole ecosystem declines. And my view has been that there are all sorts of reasons to be bullish on bitcoin. I look at Bitcoin as this really unique store of value. It's an asset unlike any other asset that I am aware of in the history of the world in the sense that no matter what the price is, the supply will not respond. It has a predefined schedule of supply over the next 100 years or whatever, 120 years. So no matter what the price is, there's no supply response. Everything else in the world, everything. A condo, gold in the ground, oil, television set, housing, everything. If the price goes up, people figure out how to make more of it. They can't make more Bitcoin. So it has this unique store of value feature to it, but I also think it's the most secure network ever created by human beings. So we don't yet know what humans will find to attach to that secure network. It's still early and I think to bet that humans won't figure out how to use that security network for something in addition to store of value is to be betting against human innovation, which I would never do. So Bitcoin has this great store of value feature to it that was underappreciated four years ago. It's better appreciated now that blackrock's in the game, but it's still underappreciated relative to where it will be in the future, I think. And it has this other tech call option feature to it which people value at almost nothing and I value it at a lot. Then there are all these other coins as well. So Ethereum financial markets and infrastructure will be built on Ethereum. Maybe parts of it will be built on Solana too, I'm not sure. So I've been biased toward Bitcoin and I think that's been the right thing to be. But I think we're now at a stage with this election where the US has gone from being this massive headwind to the adoption of this technology to what's about to happen is we're about to feel a tailwind. And that is super exciting because this is where global financial markets get rewired onto blockchain based Rails. And when that happens, it means that every single person in the world, when that's fully complete, will have a digital wallet on their phone. They won't know that it's a digital wallet. It'll just look like an account. It doesn't matter that it's a digital wallet. But they'll be able, with virtually no friction to buy any of these coins. When there's no friction to buying something, people on the margin do it. And when people on the margin do anything, the price goes up. So I'm still very excited about this technology, but also these markets and the potential for appreciation.
- [29:27]
So part of the case at least a couple of years ago in that store of value was an inflation hedge because of the scarcity of Bitcoin itself. As you've looked at how the markets have reacted over the last couple of years, how do you think about Bitcoin as a risk asset compared to a diversifier?
- [29:43]
It's a beautiful asset because it's sufficiently unpredictable that it makes it hard to hold. And I know that that might sound like an oxymoron, but I think that markets are built to make it hard to make money. So I like going into markets where I understand why it's really hard for people to do things. Institutional investors have been dancing around these assets now for a bunch of years. They got really close in 21. There were digital asset working groups all over the world and then the rate hikes came and then FTX blew up and Celsius different funds had made big investments in venture equity and some of these things and the press beat the hell out of them. So these investors didn't do anything. They could have bought bitcoin between 15 and 20,000 again and now here we are at 95 or something like that. So they didn't get in. So I think what you're seeing is you're seeing an asset that's just doing its job in a way as a brutal market where the big pools of capital go, well, I only want it if it's an inflation hedge. But basically you just talked yourself out of buying something that is a highly convex inflation hedge over the medium. Medium to long term doesn't mean in Any given quarter, any given year, at some point it won't be that highly convex because the overall market cap will be so high and so many people will be in that it'll probably trade a bit more like gold, where gold sometimes trades like a great inflation hedge and sometimes it doesn't. But if I said I could design an asset that would behave exactly like investor would want it to behave under all market environments, you'd never make any money with that. Things have to not make sense sometimes for it to be valuable. If we had perfect clarity around all of these things, the price would be a lot higher. So I am always looking for opportunities where I understand how other people don't understand it, I understand why they don't understand it, and I have a strong view that in time they will come to understand it.
- [31:34]
As you think about building a crypto asset manager, most of what we talk about in Bitcoin is now readily available at low cost ETF movements, BlackRock's and largest ETF. How do you think about alpha when you're trying to build an asset manager?
- [31:49]
When we started the crypto asset manager, we were focused on beta products actually because there were not good access vehicles for institutions in this space. They didn't have ETFs, really simple, well structured, secure beta. So naturally, as you can imagine, now that we have clarity that we now have ETFs, there's really no purpose to have simple Cayman beta vehicles. So we have a multistrat fund. We do trend following in that, which is I think there'll be a lot alpha in trend following. We have a credit sleeve, we have an opportunistic sleeve in there. We provide solutions for clients. I built OneRiver, started as a solutions provider. We do that at Coinbase Asset Management, the Coinbase brand, the Coinbase balance sheet, the tech stack that we have at Coinbase so that our clients can work with us and have confidence they have a publicly traded crypto behemoth that will stand behind. Its work, its strategies, its security, all these things are really positive. And what we're finding increasingly is that large family offices around the world, we can supply all sorts of services to these guys to help them get yield for their underlying assets. So solutions, I wouldn't call alpha per se, but what we can do is we can sit across the table from clients and say, what is your asset mix right now? How can we optimize that? How can we help deliver a higher yield? How can we help protect the downside while leaving exposure to the upside? And then in our Alpha Multistrat. They're not more than a handful of really credible asset managers in crypto, and we're viewed as one of them. So when the institutions really do come, I think we've got the right portfolio mix and solutions to really help them with this.
- [33:26]
So alongside of this, focus on bringing a lot of your core strategies together in equity markets and volume and then crypto, you've always had a lot of bespoke strategies. And I'm curious, as you focused on these two, what you've learned about some of the bespoke strategies that may not have gotten your current focus and attention.
- [33:45]
The different parts in the life of an asset management business as you build it out. And actually, Luke Ellis, who has been so kind to me over the years, he stepped down recently as the CEO of Man. He went to the chalkboard here, the ink board, and he just drew this S curve and he's like, basically, when you start an asset manager, you got to figure out what works, what makes you special. And you might have to try a number of things. And then at some point, if you're fortunate, you figure it out. So you're just surviving, which we did for a lot of years, and then you figure out what really works for you. And then you go into this rapid growth phase. And that's when you really need to narrow your focus and you need to scale, because as you do that, you become dramatically stronger, meaning you can hire more people, you have access to resources that you didn't otherwise have. Then what that allows you to do is get to a new plateau where you can start experimenting more. So it was such an interesting thing for me. I realized that as a firm that accelerating part of our growth where I think we have on the one riverside, we have our volume strategy, our trend strategies are great. The combinations are things that other people can't do. So we're going to really scale here. And we have some things that we're continuing to develop quietly an inflation convexity strategy. In this rate cycle, I think investors are going to have a lot of exposure to rates and duration and inflation, and there really isn't anything out there because there just hasn't been a good market for that type of strategy. So again, I like to go into the things where I understand why other people haven't done them. So we're still doing research behind the scenes, but we're pretty focused right now as a firm behind these strategies. Total portfolio, risk responders, dynamic convexity, trend. And then on the crypto side, to Luke's point, We've had to go through those things as well. We went through the single asset funds because that's what the industry needed. We created a yield vehicle where we didn't do defi because we thought defi would eventually blow up, which it did. So our yield vehicle produced really good returns and not as high as other guys, but we didn't blow up. And now we're at that stage where I feel like what we're doing in the multistrat is this is going to be where our growth grows dramatically as institutions come.
- [36:02]
As we look out over the next year, in all the conversations you have with the allocator CIOs, I'm curious, what issues are you hearing? Top of mind.
- [36:11]
We've spent a lot of time in Asia because those are the folks that are most open to total portfolio. Increasingly, that's arriving here in the US because they've published work, they've produced outstanding performance. The thing that investors increasingly are talking about is capital efficiency and when you have a positive rate. So rates went up from zero to much higher level and not a whole lot changed initially, but now you're starting to see people really think about what's the cash usage in a particular strategy and how do I get the most out of it. We're hearing more about that. The quandary investors find themselves in is if they've been underexposed to equities, they've underperformed, so they feel like they need to be exposed to that. But they're increasingly just nervous because valuations are high and that's the right thing to be. By the way, last time we got valuations up into these types of levels was 2000 and then it all went wrong. But the previous time was in the 50s and it stayed up at these levels of returns for years. So we don't know which one it is. I would argue that because of AI, it might be more like the 50s than 2000. It might be 2000, but maybe we're still two years before that crash, or maybe it's two months, I don't know. That's why I want to have portfolios that are resilient to all sorts of different outcomes. Investors know they need to be exposed to equities because if they don't, they're out of a job. But they're trying to figure out what to do because in 2022, both went wrong. That was the real punch to the face. You thought you had a resilient portfolio and you didn't. If you have looked back through History, you know that this correlation regime that we've been in for a long time, that's not the way the world always works. And Covid I believe propelled us into this new regime. And whether most big investors believe that that's true or not, they have to at least acknowledge that it might be true that nothing's permanent, but we might be in for a 10 or 15 year period. Reliable correlations of the previous period no longer play out.
- [38:04]
What other big risks are you worried about?
- [38:07]
Let's set aside the geopolitical. We could talk about that all day. The big risk that I see in markets that I think is ignored is the risk of illiquidity. And I see it in all sorts of places. I see it with private equity players. When I see equity markets at all time highs and I keep just reading the papers and private equity guys don't seem to be able to return capital to their clients. Wow, imagine what that would look like in a bear market. That's an example of liquidity risks that are increasing within the overall system. The real risk that I think is rising is that with all of these multi manager shops that have scaled beyond belief, really that are highly leveraged, the way that their risk management approach works, the way that that entire industry works, is it's a bet that you can highly lever a whole range of what you think in most conditions are lowly correlated pods of traders and that when one or more of them go wrong, you can hit the bid and get out of those positions. And I think increasingly the risk of something that looks like 1987 is high and rising. That's one of those risks where the sun could be out and blue skies and everything and something happens in Japan and some weird monetary policy thing happens and a few people get stopped out and you come in and a really big market gap down that didn't allow people out and then force selling into that gap down could be catastrophic for markets and it might only last for two or three days. 1987 was a long time ago. I started my career in 1989 so I didn't even really live through that. People talk about tails and that I think is staring us in the face.
- [39:48]
Well, let's end on maybe a positive tail. So you mentioned earlier you could see both sides of this. What do you see as the potential positive right tail outcome?
- [39:58]
You have to be an optimist. I think about the downside a lot, but that is so that I can be exposed to the upside and survive. So first thing to do in investing is make sure. You don't die and then figure out, it's like, okay, well, now that we figured that one out, now how do we build and compound? The bullish case here actually is Scott Besson coming in. The Trump administration is bringing some very, very good people. Kevin Hassett, who's one of our advisors, is going to be involved driving economic strategy. Scott, he sees around corners as well or better than anyone. If the US Continues to invest and build out infrastructure and keep energy prices under control and cut government waste, and if our entrepreneurs are allowed to really race ahead with AI and then a whole nother group of entrepreneurs are able, in a pretty unconstrained way, to use those technologies to build out new industries in robotics, but also apply those technologies to existing industries, the US could continue to really outperform the world, which it has. In the real bullish scenario, what happens is Europe goes, holy cow, these guys have buried us and we got to really stimulate. Otherwise we face an existential crisis. And then China needs to maybe stop focusing so much on Taiwan and figure out how to mend ways with the US you could imagine this hyper US Exceptionalism dragging the rest of the world to do things that they've been reluctant to do. That's the most bullish scenario from a geopolit and an economic perspective. I'm actually hopeful for that. I really am. I'm going to stay optimistic, but I'm going to protect our downside.
- [41:33]
Eric, thanks so much. I always appreciate your insights.
- [41:36]
Great. It's awesome to see you. Thanks, Ted.
- [41:40]
Ted Seides
Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website@capitalallocators.com where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast, transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one and see you next time.