Loading summary
Katie Greifeld
This is an Iheart podcast. Every business has an ambition.
Matt Levine
PayPal open is the platform designed to.
Katie Greifeld
Help you grow into yours with business.
Matt Levine
Loans so you can expand and access to hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide. And your customers can pay all the ways they want with PayPal, Venmo, pay later and all major cards so you can focus on scaling up when it's time to get growing. There's one platform for all business PayPal open. Grow today at PayPalOpen.com loans subject to approval in available locations. Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online, at home, and especially on Public Wi Fi. Get IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer@ipvanish.com IPV Audio, Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio News.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Wait.
Unknown
Cappy Paleologo or Paleologo?
Katie Greifeld
I'm so excited for you to tackle that about me.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Good luck.
Katie Greifeld
Thought I had it down, but then I heard you say it, and I.
Unknown
Feel like when I first met you, I think I asked you if you go by Gappy because of your famous track record of taking gardening leave and like, having gaps in your career.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Oh, okay. I didn't remember that.
Unknown
Okay.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah. That's a great excuse for a nickname.
Unknown
Is it just, I mean, no, but.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
The reason is when I came to the States for grad school and this was a long time ago in 95. So the first thing that you did was set up an email account. You still had the freedom to choose an email account. Now they just give you your initials with a number. And so my initials are gap. Gap. Giuseppe Andrea Paliogo. And of course it was taken. So I said, okay, well, Gapi. And then everybody in grad school and then my wife, who's Italian, everybody started to call me Gapi and that stuck. And now at work, they just have dispensed with my real name. Like on all systems, I'm just Gapi Paleologo. So I expect that I will be prosecuted for tax evasion because on my tax forms, there is Gapi Paleologue or something like that.
Unknown
Wow. Hello, and welcome to the Money Stuff podcast. I'm Matt Levine.
Katie Greifeld
And I'm Katie Greifeld.
Unknown
And we have a guest today, Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo, who is now At Bally ASNI and has been at most of the other big hedge funds and Hudson river trading. I do want to start by talking about gardening leave.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Okay.
Katie Greifeld
Natural place.
Unknown
I think that we counted from your link. Your LinkedIn is like famous for discussing your gardening leave in some detail and I think we counted three years of gardening leave.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
No, I think it's a bit.
Unknown
Okay, it's not precise.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Fifteen months from Citadel, one year Hudson river trading and four months from Millennium.
Unknown
Okay, so pretty close.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Not terrible though. A bit less than two years from.
Unknown
My perspective it seems very fun. Did you enjoy your three years of gardening?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I do. So I try to keep myself busy. So I teach typically at some university. So the first time during my Citadel 2 Millennium Garden leave I was teaching at Cornell and in the HRT to bam garden leave I was at nyu and I love teaching. And then what I do is it helps me focus on stuff. Usually what I do in, you know, whenever I read a book or read a paper that I like, I take notes. I take notes in latex and then I rede or think about things. And so that typically is the basis for my course material and then it becomes the basis for my books. I've written a couple of books during my non competes.
Katie Greifeld
Interesting because thinking about gardening leave, Matt and I talk about it all the time because it's very alluring to me. Gardening leave doesn't really exist in journalism. I love to imagine what I would do. But one of the questions I had for you was, you know, do you have ever have anxiety about losing your edge or falling behind? But it sounds like teaching is one.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Of the ways that you keep particularly worried with that. I think that there is only a very specific subset of quite a quantitative researchers who are afraid of losing their edges. And yeah, that's not been my case. I keep reading, I try to stay.
Unknown
Up to date, do the books, feedback into the work. Do you get ideas or deepen your understanding of techniques by teaching and writing the books or are they just sort of like extracurricular?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
No, no, no. It's definitely. I learn a lot from writing the books. A lot.
Unknown
And then do you go to your next job and generate more profits by.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Of course, plenty more profits. Sell that to my employers. No, but I definitely. I learn a lot from writing from the first drafts and then I rewrite and rewrite. And I learn a lot from discarding material too. It's very useful to discard material. It makes you really focus on what matters and what doesn't. So I try to give a Narrative, like a logical connection between various topics. And that is something that is possible only when you write a book. I really do not like writing. Nobody, I think, likes writing, maybe except for you. I do like writing.
Unknown
I understand that it's weird, even among.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Writers, but I find it very painful. I find painful letting go of material, yes, But I also like it. It's some kind of strange delayed gratification, I guess.
Unknown
One theory that I have written is that hedge fund and quantitative research, gardening leave is a source of human flourishing because you have all these highly trained people who have an enforced year off. And I've written that all the hedge fund researchers should go work at LLM companies or analytics departments of sports teams. And I'm partially kidding and partially not. How true is it for you? How much of your quantitative skills at this point are really just for investing? And how much of it is like if you spent three months consulting for a soccer team, you'd be able to tell them how to find better players?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I'm not sure. So I'll say this right. I was thinking a few days ago if there was a kind of a common thread in my professional life, because it seems kind of random and actually I think that there is, because I think that I was about 14 when I realized that I had an aptitude for applied math. I discovered physics and I liked math and I also liked literature very much so I loved reading, I read a lot. I was not a very social animal. And then basically since then, I've been doing the same thing in various forms, right? I did physics, I did applied math, I didn't do applied math math in finance, I did applied math in weird things like optimization and logistics. So I have been doing kind of the same thing over and over, which has been writing and applying math to something. So I think that I could do it, I would like to do it. But I also think that it's not that simple to go to a new field and say, oh, after three months, I know soccer. No, there is a lot of specificity and. And the beauty of, I think being a good applied mathematician is that they start with the problems and with the domain first and that they're sufficiently mature from a mathematical standpoint that they are not making too much of an effort in using math. So I think the good art of being an applied mathematician is to study persistently the application. So, no, I don't think that after three months it would be good enough, but after a year, you know, about a year of being fully immersed in an application, then you Start getting a little bit better, and then the math is not the problem. And then you start doing some good work.
Unknown
You have a famous essay on, like, advice for quant careers, and you say that, like, the things that matter the most are creativity and genuine interest in the problems, more than, you know, math, horsepower.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah.
Unknown
This is a dumb question, but how does one develop, how does one identify creativity and interest in financial topics? And is the obvious answer, those are where the money is? Or why did you fall in love with finance as a topic? And is the answer because that's where the money is?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
First of all, I think that creativity is a personality trait, doesn't belong to. You're not creative in finance, you're creative in cooking, you're creative in whatever. And it's a mix, I guess, of extroversion, openness to experience, and I don't know what else. I'm not a psychologist, but I do believe that people are genuinely creative. And in fact, you see it right there. Sometimes you. You ask someone and you find out that, yes, they like writing, they play some instrument, if badly, and, you know, and they paint and they do whatever. And so I would say if you go to finance, because that's where the money is, there's nothing wrong with that. And in a way, that's my story. You know, I was. I was a researcher and wanted to have more money and whatnot. But eventually you stay in finance, or at least in my, you know, little domain, because you're genuinely curious about finding out stuff, right?
Unknown
So, like, why are the problems, like, why do they arouse curiosity? Why do the problems of finance intrigue you after years of doing it? What's interesting about those problems as opposed to other domains?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
It's really hard for me to say. I think that I read once that a young songwriter asked Bob Dylan how to become a good songwriter. And Bob Dylan just answered, well, what's going on? I said, what do you mean, what's going on? Yeah, what's going on? What's going on in your life? Just look around. So sometimes I get these questions from investors. But how do you keep yourself interested? How do you find problems? It's not a problem. The problems jump at you. There are too many problems. There are too many interesting problems. So if anything, the skill is in sorting the problems in the right order. That is where maybe having some maturity in doing research kicks in. But there are lots of problems, infinite problems, weird problems.
Unknown
What's your favorite problem right now?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I don't know. Like right now, what are we working on? I Mean, we are trying to understand how earnings are monetized. Right. How do you make money in earnings? It's such a basic thing in fundamental equities.
Unknown
You mean if you're, like, correct about predicting earnings.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yes, I mean, without getting too much into details, but what are the relevant variables? Imagine that you had an oracle who told you what the variables are. What would you do with that? What would you do if you had all the information in the world? And everything in your world in your existence would be like an approximation problem.
Unknown
There's an incredible stylized story of the guys hacked into, I think, one of the newswire services and got earnings releases early for hundreds of companies. And they traded on this and they had a 70% success rate, which is great, but also means they had a 30%. They traded the wrong way, knowing earnings perfectly in advance. It's a good.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yes, they had the oracle.
Unknown
And it's still hard.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yes, it's still very hard, actually. Shout out to Victor Hagani, who wrote the paper about 10 years ago on this. He organized a simple controlled experiment where he gave basically a biased coin where you, I think, had a success rate of 60%, 40% failure, and you had some capital and you could invest it over time on these informed predictions. And a lot of subjects went bankrupt. Okay. Now, I think we are better than that. But still, there are lots of problems related to trading around an event.
Katie Greifeld
For example, before we get too far away, you mentioned Bob Dylan. It actually reminded me of another Bob Dylan quote, which I'm going to paraphrase poorly, but he basically said when asked about writing songs, do you think that you could write whatever the work that was being referenced now? And he said, I don't think so. It's like the words were in the air and I just plucked them out. They were just sort of hanging in the air, and they came to me. And it kind of also rang true with what you were saying about you didn't go looking for problems, they're just there necessarily. I actually want to go back to applied math if it doesn't interrupt the course of conversation too much. You tweeted on June 24 that there's no child prodigies when it comes to poetry, when it comes to applied mathematics. And I'm not saying that you said that you were a prodigy, but you were a child at 14. I mean, how. How at 14 do you realize that you have an aptitude for something like applied mathematics?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Okay, I don't want to flex about this stuff.
Katie Greifeld
No, you should.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I think I'm Honestly, a little weird. I'm just a little weird, I think. Honestly.
Katie Greifeld
But I like prodigy weird or I.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Did have my share of, yeah. Adults telling me that I was good at this or that or, you know. But yeah, I mean, what can I say? I'm just a little bit atypical. Also, when I talk to investors, I think investors enjoy my presence because I think I'm incredibly unfiltered for somebody who's talking to them. So it's like fun for them. And I was very unfiltered when I talked to my professors in, in school, sometimes I corrected them, stuff like this. Yeah, I don't know. Honestly, I, I don't know when you.
Unknown
Talk to like fundamental equity portfolio managers, like how much like matrix algebra is there in your conversations, like how quantity are the fundamental PMs or whatever?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I don't think they're quantity, but I think that they're very analytical. So I don't think that they would make great mathematicians, but I think they would make very, very decent applied mathematicians. Actually. They tend to be very analytical, they tend to be very process oriented and they have also additional qualities that actually mentioned in that essay, like they have very little disposition effect. So that's part of being analytical. They have no sunk cost fallacy in them. So even though they don't do a lot of math, but they do some math. Okay. So first of all, they're fluent in a sense in basic literacy, but I think it's more their process that is closer to, if not a mathematical one, but more of a scientific one.
Katie Greifeld
And when it comes to being a quant, does it basically boil down to being good at math and being interested in math or things such as statistics and physics? I mean, do you need to have any finance or economics background at all?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
So I think that having an economics background is not necessarily a benefit, might even be a disadvantage actually. But just based on very few samples that I have, a lot of very good outstanding quantitative researchers actually come from physics and specific specifically from astrophysics. That's the experience that I've had in.
Katie Greifeld
A couple of places in broad brushstrokes. Could you talk about why economics in the small sample size you have, how could that possibly be a detriment?
Unknown
And why is astrophysics good?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
So I can answer the second question more easily. I think that astrophysicists deal with large amounts of data and they deal with observational data. So they don't get to do a lot of experiments. And that's good for finance. Right? You deal with a lot of data you need to know how to have good hygiene for observational data and you need to have very good theory, like you need to have very good instruments without being falling in love with those instruments. Whereas I think economists. Okay, first of all, my statement is purely empirical. Okay, so I'm just really guessing on economists and I'm going to be hated by all economists or economists in finance, but I do have my issues with their methods, right? So first of all, I think that there is an original scene in economics which is, I think a lot of economics is informed by a desire to be as rigorous as mathematics, right? And so a lot of theoreticians in economics are very deductive in their approach. If you think of the unrealistic assumptions behind the welfare theorems or arrows, impossibility theorem or whatnot, just pick up Samuelson textbooks. And I think this is sort of axiomatic rather than very axiomatic, very deductive. Whereas physicists are very happy to think in terms of small, idealized models that apply to a specific domain and if the model doesn't work out, they will discard and make another one. The grand theory behind physical theories exists. Like there are people who do this for a living. But many, many good theoretical economists, physicists start in the small and then they expand the domain of their models. So economists tend to maybe in a sense fall in love with methods too much, with techniques too much.
Matt Levine
Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history and more will, will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online, at home, and especially on public wi fi. Get IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer@ipvanish.com audio.
Unknown
We had Cliff ask this on the podcast a little while ago and my father, not a finance person, listened to the episode and said, I still don't know what a quant is. I just read Skimmed your new book, which is called the Elements of Quantitative Investing and lays out the elements. What is a quant? Like what are the elements? What's the thing that makes someone a quant investor or that someone reading a slim book about the elements of quant investing needs to learn?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Well, if I am being consistent with my book, investing is really about problems and not about specific techniques or anything like this, right? So it's basically a way to go through the Whole investment process from let's say preparing the ingredients to cooking to eating, that is very process driven. Ultimately, you would imagine that one thing that quant investing has in common across multiple domains, if you do futures stocks, event based and whatnot, is I think the number of bets tends to be high in systematic investing. Right. So you can be a very successful macroeconomic investor, portfolio manager. And according to even several statements by Buffett, he made like 10, 12 very good bets. Okay, so that's great. And that's not quant investing. You could put enough PMs making 20 bets in their lives and you will get a few that have, let's say, 12, 13. Right. And they will be rich. We do not have that luxury. Like we have to make millions of bets. You know, we trade a portfolio with 3,000 stocks, sometimes in waves of half an hour. You can't make a judgment on all of these bets. So you need a method that reduces the dimension of your problem to something that can be treated in a systematic manner. I don't know if that answers for, you know, but you know, basically, basically the idea is, think about, if you make a lot of bets, you cannot bet individually. You have to have some kind of heuristic or some kind of method around that.
Unknown
Right? And to me, the book, sort of the standard method, I guess in quant investing is you build a factor model of what drives your universe of investments. You're shaking your head.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah. Yes and no. I think yes, because the book has maybe 150 pages on factor models. But also no because maybe in a hundred years from now, I suspect there will be still something left, but we might have better techniques and not necessary factor models any longer. I don't know.
Unknown
Wait, I want to go two directions with that. One is, are the better techniques something more neural netty unstructured?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Who knows? Yeah, something like that. I mean, there is a revolution every five years.
Unknown
My other question is, I've never fully understood a factor model is like here are some factors that drive the returns of stocks and then there's some residual idiosyncratic return. There are clearly people whose business is to identify factors and then invest in factors. My impression is that at the places that you work, the business is the opposite of that is to hedge out your factor risk as much as possible and to get as much idiosyncratic risk as possible. Is that right? And how do you discriminate between a factor return and an idiosyncratic return? What makes a thing a factor as.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Opposed to another Good question. So first, a Lot of systematic investing is still about factors, just not the factors that get published in the literature, not the factors that Cliff maybe was talking about. And yet a lot of successful systematic investing is really factor driven in the.
Unknown
Sense that you have a model that has 20 factors and 10 are value, and you neutralize those and you trade the other 10.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Kind of you do, and you do the rest. You have other terms that matter, so that's one thing. But there are two other things. There are sometimes sources of returns that are factor like, but not quite like factors. So you may have a theme. For example, you may identify a theme in the market that is not pervasive enough or is alive only for a few months, but is there, and it's not only affecting, let's say, two stocks, right? So these broad themes can be invested on, but cannot really model in the traditional way as traditional factor model. Also, there is a lot of good modeling in factors as opposed to bad modeling. So it seems easy, but it's not that easy. So there is a little bit of craftsmanship in making these models. Okay. And then the third thing is that there are also returns that have nothing to do with factors or almost nothing to do with factors. So if you really know how a company works and you have a little bit of an edge in predicting its future performance, you can bet on it and you make enough bets, and again, you will make some money if you repeat and recycle. So even discretionary investing in this sense has inherited a little bit of the spirit of systematic investing.
Unknown
I think of that as at a pawn shop at Balliasney, you have discretionary investors who know a lot about a company, make bets on the company, and then someone like you tells them, these are your factor exposures. You have to get those down to zero so that you're making pure bets on your idiosyncratic knowledge of the company. Is that kind of right?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Kind of right? Yeah. I think that at this point it is very interesting how the mind of professional portfolio managers has been remolded in a factor based world so that a modern portfolio manager, discretionary portfolio manager, thinks in factors. So I don't even need to tell them, hey, this is your exposure. They see their exposure, they have the tools to see it, and they control it in real time with minimal intervention from me. So what we do is we have a good team that models factors in a way that is suitable for the investment universe and style in which they operate. That's, again, very, very sophisticated and difficult. And portfolio managers use that and they neutralize it's become second nature and they've internalized that.
Unknown
Their goal is to create idiosyncratic alpha rather than factors.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
That's right.
Unknown
I feel like a criticism that people sometimes have of the pod shop model is that there's some universe of factors that exist in commercial models and that are known in the literature. And then portfolio managers have a set of exposures to factors that are sort of inchoate or unknown. But ultimately, when you become really, really smart, you'll know that actually the bet they were making was some knowing the company really well means they had exposure to some personality factor in the CEO or something that eventually someone will be able to write that down and it'll come out of being idiosyncratic and become a factor. And then I don't know what happens.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I think that there is some truth to that. There is definitely some truth to that in the sense that sometimes portfolio managers, especially in specific sectors, will use some heuristics that you could call characteristics in a factor model, but they are not in a factor model. And then they trade that. However, it's also true that the decision that enters a particular investment is usually not that simple as taking a ratio in a spreadsheet. So it's a bit more complicated than that. You could still argue that there is a factor. Right. And what's the factor is ultimately the set of theses that are highly correlated or relatively highly correlated across portfolio managers, across firms. Because if there is an expected return and if you have skill and you have sufficient skill to be close to the best possible portfolio, you have to be also relatively close to other people approximating that best possible portfolio. Right. So then it becomes a truism, right? There is a factor, and that's the factor of informed investors. So it's true.
Unknown
Right. I think of it as like, there's like a scientific process that everyone is pursuing. They hire the best people and they do the best work to pursue that scientific process. And so they'll eventually converge on something that is like truth. But that means buying all the same stocks.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yes, it's very difficult to get to that truth.
Unknown
Sure. Sort of abstract idea.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
It's not. Okay, let's hire.
Unknown
It would be weird if there weren't hurting among like the best.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yes, yes, there is. There is. And by the way, and this brings to one of the limitations of factor models, right? Which is effectively a factor model is a form of glorified regression over time. Right. And behind a regression there is a bit of an assumption, to some extent, of independent observations over time. And the market and hedge funds are not independent random variables. They are super dependent random variables. And they are in a sort of continuous indirect conversation through their portfolios. And sometimes the conversation gets really nasty when one hedge fund is in state of distress and all of a sudden, or not even a hedge fund, it could be also an institutional investor and they decide to liquidate part of their portfolio. And then it becomes a process where you have a lot of reflexivity and positive feedback and everybody suffers. And in this case, factor models don't really. You can still identify like if the system is running at temperature with some characteristics, but they're not factors in the traditional sense.
Katie Greifeld
I do want to talk about, before we move too far away, I do want to talk a little bit about how and if factors can die. Because, you know, we've talked a bit about identifying factors. But when do you decide that this doesn't work anymore necessarily, that the market has fundamentally changed and this worked? Maybe 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, but maybe now it's devolved.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Well, there is the good old reason, which is people make mistakes in the sense that we think that there is a factor and then we look back and there is no factor. Right. So there are so many factors that some of them have got to be a little bit redundant. So that's one reason. Right. So just pure, in a sense, research revisions. And then there is also the fact that there are two other things that can happen. One is the moment that you tell people that there is a factor, the factor comes into being to some extent. Right. So it's never black and white that the factor did not exist. Maybe the factor did exist and then the moment you identify it, it becomes more existent.
Katie Greifeld
Like as, you know, you speak it into existence.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah, yeah. So ESG is one case where the focal point that it became makes into an investable theme.
Katie Greifeld
I thought that was just blackrock pumping esg.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
It's possible, but everybody had to incorporate it in some sense. Right. So it became a major source of revenue for the vendors. Right. So that's one thing. And then there is the adaptive nature of the market. So things that before generated a priced return, so you run some risk, you made some money and then it becomes table stakes, it becomes incorporated into factor models, it becomes.
Unknown
Becomes a smart beta.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Etf, it becomes a smart beta and then it becomes. So I think you could say definitely that medium term momentum worked much better. You could say that even short term reversal worked better. There were years when short interest was great and there are factors or data Sources that work well now and then maybe in five years it will become known and become part of the, I mean credit card data. Right. For consumer. That was like there were people who were making a lot of money in 2011 through, I don't know, 16, 17. And then it's become. Then it's very hard to make money in that.
Unknown
You said the market is a conversation among hedge funds. One thing that I think might be true, that I'm not entirely sure of, is like to what extent the market is a conversation among four hedge funds now to what extent is the marginal pricer of every stock a portfolio manager at one of the places you've worked?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
It's a very good question. I don't really have the answer to this. I'm not sure what is the intuition.
Unknown
At places like that? Is it the market price is determined by the collective thought of the top people at the top hedge funds or is it like we are a little bump on the market and we're trading against the whole random universe?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I mean you'd like to think that the prices are determined by the marginal informed investor. Right. So by people like us at the time horizon where we predict. Right. Which is not the same as at the time horizon of half a day. Right. That's a different player.
Unknown
What is your time horizon like?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I think of it as well, it depends. Well, yes, it depends. Within a hedge fund you have a variety of. Even within long short equities you have. Portfolio managers are very tactical and so they think in terms of they have strong daily or intraday alpha even though they're fully discretionary, up to PMs that think easily in terms of months. Also depends on the sector. So you know, financials typically probably monetizes a little bit less on earnings and tends to have a longer horizon. You know, banks are basically modeling giant balance sheets. Right. And then in a hedge fund you also have systematic. But even in systematic there are all sorts of timescales and this cacophony makes the prices. I really don't know. Another question is basically how inefficient is the market? How incorrect are the prices are within a factor of two. Like Black used to say, I don't know. I don't think that the market is becoming so super efficient, but it seems to be more efficient.
Unknown
I do feel like one of the big stories is the rise of these big multi strategy hedge funds. You would hope, maybe you wouldn't hope because it's sort of coming off the economic interest, but one might hope that the rise of These big multi strategy hedge funds and a lot of capital being allocated to them would observably make the market more efficient.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah. I don't know if observably holds. It's really hard to. Can you tell when a bubble is forming?
Katie Greifeld
A lot of people would say that they can.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah. I can point you to a few papers that made all the wrong calls. I don't want to shame academics in public.
Katie Greifeld
I do like the idea that the market is a conversation between four hedge funds because I live in the ETF world and the big thing is passive is just distorting the market and there's no price discovery anymore. And it sounds like. Like that's on the opposite end of that spectrum.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I didn't say. I think exactly that. It's a conversation between. It's a beautiful thing to say though. It sounds really cool.
Katie Greifeld
It does sound good.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Sounds good.
Matt Levine
Great.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I don't know if it's great.
Katie Greifeld
Podcasts.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. But I think your question is whether the rise of passive has made markets less efficient.
Katie Greifeld
It's more of a statement. I don't think I was a bad podcaster and didn't actually ask a question. But.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Okay, how do you know?
Katie Greifeld
How do I know that passive is destroying the market? People on Twitter tell me so.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Okay, don't trust people on Twitter.
Katie Greifeld
That's rule number one.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Rule number one. No, I don't know. I mean the rise of passive has made index rebalancing a weirder strategy. Right. So where the margins have compressed but the size has become so big that you can still make money in it. And periodically it's a very cyclical strategy. So I don't know if you're an.
Unknown
Index rebalancing PM do take 8 months of vacation a year and just do it all day when there's not a rebalance.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Not the ones I know who probably listen to this podcast. They work very hard.
Unknown
Sure.
Katie Greifeld
You want to name their names too?
Unknown
Indexes aren't being rebalanced all the time. They're planning on.
Katie Greifeld
They rebalance more than you would think.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Index rebalancing is another poster child for a strategy that seems so simple that everybody can talk about it and then it's full of nuances and it requires a lot of skill to trade effectively.
Unknown
I believe that just because I thought a little bit about just the sort of accounting of you basically know how many index funds there are. You, let's say, can predict what will come in and out of the index and what the. So there's some mechanics around figuring out the market caps that'll come in and whatever. But then it feels like the unknown is like who else is doing the rebalancing strategy. Is that right?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I think you're mostly right, but I don't want to say because out of respect for the PMs that I know.
Katie Greifeld
Fair enough.
Unknown
So we had Cliff Asness on a few weeks ago and to me Cliff Asness is a quantitative investor, a systematic investor. But what he's doing is sort of recognizably what a sort of traditional asset manager would do. He's like trying to find companies that are undervalued. He talked about it's like being a Graham and Dodd investor. You want valuation plus a catalyst. And he's like, well, we're trading value and momentum and you look at what HRT is, maybe a little different, but there's the high frequency trading firms. You can model those as those are quantitative versions of a voice market maker 50 years ago where they're trying to keep inventory flat and trying to make the bid ask spread. So those are very traditional economic functions that have been quantified, turned into systematic. What's the intuition for what a Bally Osny or a Citadel or a Millennium does? What business are you in, do you think, as a philosophical matter? One thing I think, I think about.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Index, you're asking from a social standpoint.
Unknown
Or so the index rebalancing to me feels like the sort of trade, and I think to some extent was the sort of trade that an investment bank would have done 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And like some of that function I think has moved to the big multi manager hedge funds. But I wonder from where you sit how you see the role in the financial markets of those firms.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
So at a very high level we don't do anything different than everybody else in the sense that what we provide is always this, right? We provide shifting time preferences, which means we provide liquidity, we house risk for people who don't want to hold it right now. And that's what you do when you do index rebalancing, right? That's what you do when you do merger arb and when you do the various subtypes of basis trades, right? So we do provide liquidity, which is very important. And then the second thing we again, very high level, we provide price discovery, right? So we study the firms and we think, okay, this is at the margin mispriced and we're going to short it or we're going to invest in it and That's a beautiful thing. So we do it at a different timescale. Right. So you always want to do things at the margin where you don't have a lot of other participants. And at the margin of the, let's say month to three month investment horizon, there are not that many participants. So in the words of another hedge fund manager that I cannot name, but he said once, you know, we don't invest in securities, we dated them and so we are in the dating service, not that many people are doing it. And so we do it. But I would say also this, right, not at the social level. I just want to answer at my personal level what we do. We are a massive filter of talent and the talent that we hire is a massive filter of information. So it's like information squared.
Unknown
Maybe this is a bad question, but do you think that long only asset managers are worse than they were 30 years ago because that filter has been so successful? In other words, there are lots of jobs you could have gotten in Finance in 1990, but there's a clear hierarchy now.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I think that the market and the set of investors has learned and I think the distinction between beta and alpha has been useful for investors. And so active investors who are mostly long only, I think have suffered from this distinction because the vast majority of them underperforms their benchmarks and so there is no reason for them to exist. And then what we do is we provide really uncorrelated returns to the benchmarks, to most factors and investors want that. Right. So there is a future where active investors, long only investors, asset managers will become even less influential, smaller. And also like, I think of that.
Unknown
As like a customer demand side, but also like a talent filter side.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Right? Yeah. And then the interesting thing is, and then there is also a process where the multi manager platforms are able to make the business model of a single portfolio manager that is not sustainable in isolation, working in this kind of federated system. So why would you, or how could you survive as a single portfolio manager hedge fund nowadays it's really, really difficult. But you can do it in a multi manager platform, provided that you have sufficient talent, sufficient edge.
Katie Greifeld
That's also where you can blame the passive influence on Twitter, if you're a laundry manager, that it's impossible to beat the market now because you just have this money constantly pouring in.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah, I don't disagree. Yeah.
Unknown
I have one more question on social roles, which is like you've worked at most of the big pod jobs, but you also worked at hrt. What's the difference in roles and in like what they do all day. Because HRT I think of as a classic like high frequency trading firm where I don't know that they're exactly a market maker, but they're certainly on the higher frequency side. And then like the pod shops have a lower frequency and a, you know, they're not prop. They're running hedge funds. Like what's the cultural and role and differences?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah. Okay. So I briefly mentioned HRT in an interview with the Financial Times and my manager told me that people at HRT were both annoyed and delighted by what I had said about hrt. I think HRT is a really special place even in the context of prop trading firms. So I'm a little bit hesitant to just bin them as a representative. Right.
Unknown
Tell me why they're not representative.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
They're not representative because there is something in the culture of HRT that is special. Okay. It's collaborative, it's truly kind. Yeah. So I think it's a great place to work and it is fundamentally monolithic. So you have, you know, sharing of ideas and you can work at the intersection of these ideas. It's also a place that is very tech oriented. So it's a bit of a technology firm operating in the financial space. And because of that, it also attracts, I think, the best technical talent that I've ever worked with. It's just a pleasure to work with great technologists, people who are very competent in that respect. So nothing against the hedge funds. I love hedge funds for different reasons. I love bam, which is also very collaborative and it's an investment company. But HRT has a technical side to it and also again, a cultural side to it. It's.
Matt Levine
Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online, at home, and especially on public wi fi. Get IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer@ipvanish.com audio.
Katie Greifeld
We didn't talk about AI. We don't have to talk about AI.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
AI. Of course you have to talk about AI.
Unknown
So I have three models of how investing works systematic. One is you have some economic intuition. You build a model of the stock market that predicts prices. Another way is a sort of neural netty AI way where you throw a lot of data at a neural net and it builds its own model of how to predict stock prices. And then the third model is like, you get really good at prompt engineering and you go to ChatGPT and you say what stocks will go up? But you ask it in the right way and then ChatGPT tells you what stocks will go up. How good are those ones? I assume the third model no one uses, but someone uses.
Katie Greifeld
I think a lot of people use that.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
All right, so first thing like, okay, nobody knows anything and anybody saying the opposite should be heavily discounted. Okay, so we agree on this. And so let's forget for a second all the technical details of AI, just from a pure industrial organization standpoint, right? So what's going to happen? And consider AI just like another technology, like Internet and whatnot, right? So first of all, we are going to observe economies of scale. So there's going to be concentration and there was going to be some kind of monopolistic competition. I was thinking about Bloomberg specifically, which could be, I hope for you people to be among the winners because you have a good starting point, right? You have lots of data, you have a customer base. And maybe in the future we'll finally not see the good old Bloomberg terminal, which has been kind of unchanged since I remember it. And instead people will just prompt Bloomberg to conduct very complex actions where it will act on a sequence of keywords and connect them and give you like a much more valuable product for which Bloomberg will charge twice as much as they do already. So, so this is going to happen in one form or another. If it's not Bloomer, somebody else will do it. Okay? But the same thing applies to other areas of finance. So maybe once upon a time a big, sufficiently big fund could build their own client for email, right? Of course, nobody builds a client for email anymore, right? So a lot of this stuff gets outsourced. We will outsource at some point some of the functions that we conduct internally using AI to other AI agents. It's perfectly fine. So this will become a utility to some extent.
Unknown
Those functions include like.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
But not stock picking, not stock picking. I think that the functions that we will see available are essentially like another self, like another Matt Levine who can, you know, be a good baseline for you. Okay? You could feed a post train and AI system with all your gazillions of words and that agent will reproduce your sense of humor, your investigative style and everything. Okay? It's a good approximation. It's not going to be perfect, but why not? Right? So I would be very happy to have a replica of myself that can answer most simple questions. Now, I think that the decision to invest in a particular stock is a very demanding cognitive function. And I don't see that really being replicated very well. But I think that this will be baselined to some extent.
Unknown
Is it a demanding cognitive function because it exists in a competitive market? So this sort of whatever the cognitive function is going to get, the baseline is always going to get higher because someone else will have the same information as you do.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Well, this is getting really in the highly speculative side of things. I think that in order for an AI agent to be good at this, they have to be able to experience the world the same way that an investor experiences it. And our inputs are much more complex than just a string of text or YouTube videos. Right. We have a model of the world which comes from visually experiencing the world, talking to humans, consuming the goods, right? Anything. It's vastly more complex than the way an AI system right now experiences the world and also influences the world. So an investor has a fundamentally different experience of a company than an LLM that has an experience that is mediated by multiple layers of processing. You know, they learn about a company through text that is written by somebody. So I don't think that that's in danger for the time being. But maybe, you know, again in five years, maybe we will have our glasses fitting our experiences to AI agents. Who knows, right? But I don't think that it's that close and I don't think AI is that smart also. So I think that having a baseline system would be already pretty good.
Katie Greifeld
That's somewhat comforting that our experiences count for something, our physical experience of the world.
Unknown
It's interesting because I always think of the comparison as investing in self driving cars where investors do a lot of things. One thing they do a lot is sit at a desk and read computers and look at numbers. Those things seem like things that a computer can do well, whereas like drivers have physical reflexes and have a complicated field of vision. I always thought investing should be easier than self driving cars for a computer to master. But you, I don't think you're alone in this. Think of investing as the great liberal art where it's like you incorporate all of human experience and so the AI.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Can'T really, let's take the metaphor to extreme consequences. Imagine that you had a system that is the equivalent of a perfect self driving car in investing. So now I'm giving you a machine, a box that is telling you the long term value, if not the returns, right? Because the moment that the value is known, you immediately equilibrate to that level. So imagine that you know the true value of everything because a box tells you so, and it's infallible. It's an oracle. Okay. Would you think that finance stops existing? I wouldn't say so. Right. So I think that a lot of arbitrage trade, you know, would maybe change significantly. But every risk, right, every return would be correctly priced by the risk of the agents trading it. So there still would be trading because we still have different preferences. But basically every risk would be priced. There would be, in a sense, less alpha. But finance will still exist.
Unknown
There's a lot of like, service provision.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Like liquidity provision, liquidity provision, and. Yeah, and so the liquidity provision would still exist. The informational services maybe will stop existing in the current form. But that's okay. I think that we'll all still be employed.
Unknown
It's an interesting way to think about it because I do think we talked about one thing that the big hedge funds do is things that have the flavor of liquidity provisions, basis trades and merger arb and whatever. Things that I think of as something that a bank would have done 30 years ago and that now a big hedge fund does. And then another thing they do has the flavor of information provision where it's getting prices. Right. To me those things seem quite intellectually separate, but I guess they feed each other in the sense that the better you are at prices, the better you can be at liquidity provision. Is that sort of right? You wouldn't want to do merger arb trades if you didn't know the value of the stock.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
I mean, at short horizon, liquidity provision and information tend to be very closely related, like, you know, a limit. If you are good at.
Unknown
If you're good at crossing.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
If you're good at crossing, you should be pretty good at adding, okay, adding liquidity. So, you know, by this I mean, like, you could make, you know, a profit by posting a lot of limit orders and providing liquidity to the market or crossing the spread and making money with predicting the future prices. If you're good at one, you're good at the other, most likely, right at that timescale. I think that this though, might. I'm not sure because I haven't thought about this very, very carefully, but I think this might decouple at a longer timescale. So when you're out, I'm not sure. And in any case, at that timescale, it's really difficult for an AI or for a Human being, anyone? Like there are not that many hard data. Even the unstructured data are not that many. So it's a very difficult problem. It's decoupled, it's complicated. So. Yeah. But I tend to believe at longer timescales you have more or less liquidity provisioning and violations of law of one price on one side and predicting on the other side.
Unknown
But you combine both.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
But you can combine both and it's a very potent mix. Right.
Unknown
Is it normally different people? It is, right?
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Very different people for sure.
Unknown
Different pods are different.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Very different people. Very different cultures. Yeah.
Unknown
Can you summarize the difference in cultures between like, I have a guess. But.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Well, as you said, people who typically trade in arbitrades, if not historically, but also historically come from banks. Right. Whereas you still can see long only portfolio managers being recycled and reformatted into long short portfolio managers. You can have an excellent short specialist becoming a long short portfolio manager. Like it happens.
Unknown
I mean, my sense is that the people on the information provision long short side are more academic and research oriented and the people on the arb side are more trading the real side traders.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yeah. I think you can actually have very good long short portfolio managers who were journalists in their past lives.
Unknown
I've heard of some of this. I've thought about this.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
You've thought about it?
Unknown
No. Just like idly.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Big reveal.
Unknown
No.
Katie Greifeld
Not breaking news on your own podcast.
Unknown
I've noticed how much money they make. That's better than podcasting. Not thought about it in the sense that I'd be good at it. Just in the sense that the money is good.
Katie Greifeld
You could be bad at it and paid really well for a short amount of time.
Unknown
I don't know that that's true, actually. They're an excellent talent filter, or so I hear.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
Yes, I think that you could be interested in a few. A few hedge funds.
Katie Greifeld
They might be listening.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
They might be listening.
Unknown
I would end on that.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
That's a good closing on a high note.
Unknown
Kathy, thanks for coming on the. On the.
Giuseppe Gappi Paleologo
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Unknown
And that was the Money Stuff podcast. I'm Matt Levine.
Katie Greifeld
And I'm Katie Greif.
Unknown
You can find my work by subscribing to the Money stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com.
Katie Greifeld
And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on Open Interest between 9 to 11am Eastern.
Unknown
We'd love to hear from you. You can send an email to moneypodlumberg.net Ask us a question and we might answer it on air.
Katie Greifeld
You can also subscribe to our show, wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.
Unknown
The Money Stuff podcast is produced by Anna Mellow Mazarakis and Moses Andam.
Katie Greifeld
Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
Unknown
Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer.
Katie Greifeld
And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's Head of Podcasts.
Unknown
Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.
Katie Greifeld
This is an iHeart podcast.
Money Stuff: The Podcast – Episode Summary: "Gappy Paleologo"
Released on July 4, 2025
Hosts: Matt Levine & Katie Greifeld
Guest: Giuseppe "Gappy" Paleologo, Partner at Bally ASNI and veteran of leading hedge funds including Hudson River Trading and Millennium.
The episode kicks off with Matt Levine introducing the guest, Giuseppe "Gappy" Paleologo, highlighting his extensive experience across major hedge funds. The hosts engage in a light-hearted discussion about Giuseppe's nickname, "Gappy," delving into its origins and personal anecdotes.
Notable Quote:
Katie Greifeld (01:18): “Cappy Paleologo or Paleologo?”
Giuseppe Paleologo (01:25): “I didn't remember that... Gapi stuck and now I’m just Gapi Paleologo.”
Katie brings up the concept of "gardening leave," a period where employees are paid but restricted from working elsewhere. Giuseppe clarifies his experience, detailing his periods of gardening leave from Citadel, Hudson River Trading, and Millennium. He shares how teaching and writing have been productive ways to utilize this time.
Notable Quotes:
Katie Greifeld (03:01): “We counted three years of gardening leave.”
Giuseppe Paleologo (04:22): “I love teaching... I've written a couple of books during my non-competes.”
The conversation explores whether gardening leave impacts one's professional edge. Giuseppe asserts that continuous learning, such as teaching and writing, helps maintain and even enhance his skills. He emphasizes the importance of staying engaged with current research and discarding irrelevant material to focus on what truly matters.
Notable Quotes:
Katie Greifeld (04:41): “Do you have ever have anxiety about losing your edge or falling behind?”
Giuseppe Paleologo (05:13): “I learn a lot from writing the books... Discarding material makes you focus on what matters.”
Giuseppe discusses the nature of quantitative investing, distinguishing it from traditional investment strategies. He emphasizes that investing is about solving problems rather than merely applying mathematical techniques. The discussion touches on the challenges of predicting earnings and the complexities involved in trading around events.
Notable Quotes:
Giuseppe Paleologo (06:11): “Investing is really about problems and not about specific techniques.”
Giuseppe Paleologo (11:23): “There are too many problems. The skill is in sorting the problems in the right order.”
Katie references Giuseppe's essay on quant careers, highlighting the importance of creativity and genuine interest over sheer mathematical prowess. The discussion delves into what drives individuals to remain engaged in the finance sector beyond monetary incentives.
Notable Quotes:
Katie Greifeld (09:06): “How does one identify creativity and interest in financial topics?”
Giuseppe Paleologo (09:25): “Finance is where the money is... but you stay because you’re genuinely curious.”
A deep dive into factor models in quantitative investing, Giuseppe explains their role in systematic investing and how they differ from idiosyncratic returns. He discusses the craftsmanship involved in developing effective factor models and the evolving nature of factors as markets adapt.
Notable Quotes:
Giuseppe Paleologo (21:25): “Factor models are a form of glorified regression over time.”
Giuseppe Paleologo (26:23): “Systematic investing is still about factors, just not the published ones.”
The conversation shifts to the role of Artificial Intelligence in investing. Giuseppe shares his skepticism about AI fully replicating the cognitive functions required for effective investing. He argues that human experience and complex world modeling are currently beyond AI's capabilities, ensuring that human investors remain indispensable.
Notable Quotes:
Giuseppe Paleologo (48:18): “Investing incorporates all of human experience, so AI can't fully replicate it yet.”
Katie Greifeld (49:34): “That's somewhat comforting that our experiences count for something.”
Giuseppe contrasts the cultures of high-frequency trading firms like Hudson River Trading with multi-strategy hedge funds. He highlights the collaborative and technical nature of HRT, emphasizing its uniqueness compared to more traditional hedge funds. Discussions also touch on how large multi-strategy funds influence market efficiency and the declining role of long-only asset managers.
Notable Quotes:
Giuseppe Paleologo (42:43): “HRT has a culture that is special... very tech-oriented and collaborative.”
Giuseppe Paleologo (40:55): “Active investors who are mostly long-only... will become even less influential.”
As the podcast wraps up, the hosts reflect on the future of investing, considering factors like passive investing's rise and the sustained importance of active, quantitative strategies. Giuseppe remains optimistic about the enduring relevance of finance and the continuous need for liquidity provision and price discovery.
Notable Quotes:
Giuseppe Paleologo (51:30): “Finance will still exist... there would be trading because we still have different preferences.”
Katie Greifeld (55:01): “Thanks for coming on the podcast.”
Gardening Leave: A period for professionals to recharge, during which teaching and writing can maintain and even enhance their expertise.
Quantitative Investing: Focuses on problem-solving using mathematical and statistical models, requiring creativity and a deep understanding of financial phenomena.
Factor Models: Essential in systematic investing but require continuous refinement as markets evolve and new factors emerge.
AI in Finance: While AI offers significant advancements, the nuanced and experience-driven aspects of investing remain firmly in the human domain.
Hedge Fund Cultures: Distinct environments like HRT emphasize collaboration and technical prowess, contrasting with the multifaceted approaches of multi-strategy hedge funds.
Market Efficiency: The rise of large hedge funds and passive investing influences market dynamics, but active strategies continue to play a critical role.
Conclusion:
In this episode of Money Stuff: The Podcast, Giuseppe "Gappy" Paleologo offers a profound exploration of quantitative investing, the evolving landscape of hedge funds, and the interplay between human ingenuity and technological advancements in finance. Through insightful discussions, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the complexities and future directions of the financial markets.