← Top Traders Unplugged
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- [00:01]
A
You're about to join Nils Kostrup Larson on a raw and honest journey into the world of systematic investing and learn about the most dependable and consistent yet often overlooked investment strategy. Welcome to the Systematic Investor series.
- [00:27]
B
Welcome or welcome back to this week's edition of the Systematic Investor series with Andrew Beer and Tom Robel and myself, Nils Kasturlassen. Where each week we take the pulse of the global markets through the lens of a rules based investor. Andrew and Tom, it's great to have you both here. It's been a while, but how are you doing? Tom, I'll start with you. I know you were traveling last night, so you must.
- [00:49]
C
Yeah, very well, thanks Nils. Very well. I was in, I was in Sweden and it was interesting to see how. How attitudes to hedge funds seem to be slowly shifting. Maybe there.
- [01:00]
B
I'm sure we'll talk about that. And yourself Andrew, how are you doing?
- [01:03]
D
Things are good. Things are good. Excuse me, sorry. We had a great year end, you know, multi person session and it'll be very interesting to talk about things that have happened in just the past six weeks, which seems like it's been about six months of activity.
- [01:18]
B
I know, I know, it's crazy. Anyway, we've got actually pretty strong lineup of various topics as you said. Some of that will be inspired from what we talked about at the end, the group conversations and maybe also some new stuff that we normally don't talk so much about in this specific series. But of course, as we always do, I'm always curious to know kind of what's been on your radar, what's caught your attention the last few weeks. I'm going to kick it off with you, Andrew. Anything in particular that you are, you've been noticing?
- [01:48]
D
Well, I mean, I think, look, it's not an original topic at all. I'm totally fascinated with AI and how the narrative around it is shifting. The, you know, I mean some recent things and, and just in terms of both the power of it, but also the, the pace at which things are changing. I'm not an expert at all and I'm sort of realizing that, you know, part of what I need to be thinking about more actively in terms of myself and our, our strategy as a business is, is really where AI fits into it as it's evolving now. Fortunately, I have a couple of partners who are extraordinarily capable at it. So it's not that we're not, we're not focused on it but, but there was something interesting that happened recently where our PR firm usually I I'm very, very involved in anything that we do that goes out into the public domain. And while I was very distracted on other things in December, they basically took podcasts of mine as well as material that we had done and did a killer two minute video that is, well, I'll release in the next day or two that basically. But it's my voice, but it's my AI generated voice. It's, the content is incredible by people who really are not experts in this field. So it just, for me, it was just, it sort of encapsulated that there's something this, there's something very, very profound in this. And so, you know, watching what's happening in the markets and how people are trying to figure this out, I think it's, it's going to be disruption galore and I believe that that is actually going to be very, very positive for, for, for trend following. We need real economic change to, to make money.
- [03:26]
B
As long as you promise there's always going to be the real Andrew that shows up on the, on the podcast and not AI Andrew.
- [03:32]
D
So, so my, my, my theory is that, is it actually that, that people who actually have human connections to other people in this, like the asset management business is, is, is a people business. I don't think asset allocators are going to say, you know what, let's have AI pick the next hedge fund. For me, I think it's too risky and it honestly takes all the, that, but I think understanding the ways in which it can be leveraged and I, I just, I think this is what everyone's going to be thinking about for the next 20 years and, and seeing it happen in real time, it's just, you know, endlessly fascinating.
- [04:07]
B
It's interesting. Just before we hit record, I asked Tom if he was going to the iConnections conference in Miami in a couple of weeks. And both Tom and I will be there. So of course, if anybody's listening and they have a lot of money to allocate, they should definitely reach out to us in the app. But having said that, it kind of is interesting with what you say because here you have probably the largest conference where you put together 5,000 people or whatever the number is in one convention center for two or three days. And so you can either say AI is going to either completely change that and nobody really needs to go to these events, or it's going to strengthen it and say no, as you say, Andrew, no, we do need the personal connections. We do need to sit down physically and talk and so on. And so forth. Very hard to tell at this stage.
- [04:59]
D
Yeah, look, I think, I mean, one of, one of my favorite investors sent me something they'd done last night where they basically used AI to do a whole asset allocation analysis. And he said it took him about 15 minutes and the results are pretty astonishing. And one thing that was actually kind of encouraging about it is that it actually did say, all right, if you want to achieve these investment objectives, you know, it brought managed futures is one of the core elements of doing that. So, you know, so there's a way in which the promulgation of this kind of technology and knowledge will also, you know, help the average alligator to be more sophisticated about the space, to cut through a lot of the noise in the space, which is what, you know, I think you and your, your guests do incredibly well. And so, so look, I mean, look, everything's going to be the. What, what's the, you know, the only constant is change and, and how it plays out in all the various manifestations. I think it's just incredibly interesting.
- [05:57]
B
So I don't think it's the same investor, but I have a client as well who's AI savvy and he sent me something like a couple of months ago where he had given three, two or three different AI platforms kind of a question about asset allocation for the next five, seven years, you know, based on the fact that he was based in Switzerland and this is what he was looking for. And as you say, not necessarily specifically mentioning any strategies as far as I remember. And that also came back with a fairly large allocation to. To trend following. So, so yeah, so the information must be out there since they are picking up on it. So that's interesting.
- [06:35]
D
My, my, my, my one line response after reading his analysis was super intelligence this year. Because I like the conclusion.
- [06:43]
B
Anyways, Tom, I mentioned that you'd been traveling. Not sure that that's what's really been on your radar, but what has been on your rad.
- [06:53]
C
Yeah, it's really been many discussions with investors and managers around the shift away from the US dollar and from the US in general. I think global markets really did change in 2025 and the perception as investors is that the period of US exceptionalism is maybe over. I mean, in April, Liberation Day really hit markets, but we did end up with a fantastic recovery in 2025. The S&P ended up 16%. But was the conclusion that the US has won at capitalism? I think for a US investor based in US dollars, that's a fair enough conclusion. But for the rest of the world, you can't go back to the same state where American assets are all that matters. I think the risk in the US is perceived as potentially higher than it was previously and the rest of the world is now clearly looking at the country's markets through an entirely different lens. Normally you have non American investors can rely on the US dollar to rise in times of stress and the US dollar has enjoyed the status of being a safe haven currency for assets. But for non domestic investors in 2025, the weakening of the US dollar meant that actually a Euro investor with the Same S&P 500 investment was up just 2.5% last year and actually potentially negative for other indices. So I don't think investors are necessarily looking to sell American investments or avoid them entirely. It's just a rethinking of what assets investors are holding and a real analysis of US risk and how they choose to engage with that risk.
- [08:35]
B
As a completely selfish observation, here in Switzerland, the Swiss national bank distributes some of its profits every year, I think to all the Cantongs. And of course it is well known for having huge investments in the US tech stocks and so on and so forth. So I hope someone you know is listening and maybe reconsidering that strategy if you're right. Tom.
- [08:59]
C
Well, there's two things to think about. I mean, I think there's a very valid argument that global equity markets don't have the capacity for a wholesale shift in investor assets away from the U.S. but there's definitely a thought about outside of tech, what is the sort of asset that we're accessing in the US and can we get it elsewhere?
- [09:21]
B
Yeah, well, we're going to talk a little bit about that. I know Andrew has some topics on that, but on my radar a few things that caught my attention. But the first thing is more a question for you and that is of course we are in the middle of the Winter Olympics. So I'm curious to know if you have a favorite sport that you're watching or that you want to make sure you are going to watch in the next couple of weeks.
- [09:45]
D
So I, I mean I can. So I, I've gotten very down on the Olympics in that, you know, one is I, I don't think you should have 37 sports like per, I mean 37 events per sport. You know, I, it like I sort of grew up in an era when the Olympics was special because you had people who were, you know, toiling as waiters in at ski lodges and that yet were finding six hours a day to ski and, and to kind of compete at the, at the international level. Something very like this was their moment.
- [10:18]
C
Right.
- [10:18]
D
Every four years you had this opportunity to become a Mark Spitz or a Bruce Jenner or somebody who goes from total obscurity to becoming kind of a national hero. You know, the American hockey team in 1980. And you know, it's a little bit like in, in US Sports where they've added more and more playoffs because they're very, very high generative and here. And here I was, I was at the gym this morning and watching. I can't some snowboarding competition. But it could be snowboarding, you know, slash V1, you know, whatever, whatever. Like, like some subset. And then also with the, the barrage of promotion around individual athletes and, and the elevation of them, I just, it's. To me it's just lost a lot of. It's, it's the special quality to it. But that's, that's going to make me sound incredibly old and, and, and cranky.
- [11:05]
B
What about you, Tom?
- [11:07]
C
In the UK we don't have many, many snowy mountains or frozen lakes. So for us it still has that special element. I think I'm definitely following the curling. The curling is, is quite interesting. All the curling stones are still made in Scotland so it's very exciting. And, and we, we seem to be very, very good at the, at the luge and the, and the sliding events. So we definitely, definitely following that. But you're right Andrew, there's never been a time for interest in niche sports as, as around an Olympics.
- [11:38]
B
I hate to break it to you, but actually one of the things that caught my attention that I'm really looking forward to is actually one of the new sports at the Winter Olympics. They call it ski mo, but it's actually ski mountaineering where they first have to climb the mountain before they ski down. I'm very excited to see what that is going to be like. That seems like a fun thing to do. But in general I kind of know what you're getting at, Andrew, in terms of too many things doing the same. Anyways, more interesting from a financial point of view. Something that caught my attention. I don't know if you saw this, but Google has issued 100 year bonds. I think this week I thought that's kind of interesting. I mean I don't know what that tells us about their expectation to interest rates if they're issuing 100 year bonds at these levels. But that apparently has not happened since 1997 where Motorola issued 100 year bond. So that is pretty rare. And then the other thing that caught my attention, I kind of quickly shared it with you a little bit unfair because it was with short notice. But it's just this email that I received from Dan Rasmussen over at Verdad. And I don't know Dan at all, but I know he's involved in kind of the private equity world. But he was writing an article, an email about sort of some of the differences between hedge funds and private equity and the heading was why hedge funds got better while private equity just got bigger. And I think there is some interesting aspects to that observation for sure. My key takeaway and feel free to, to weigh in here, but my key takeaway was if I remember correctly that hedge funds in his view simply had to improve because of the competition and the attention that private equity was given by, by investors for so long and to a large extent maybe operating in liquid markets with Mark to market and all of those things that we do in, in the liquid oil space for sure basically meant that they became better, better managers, better structures, better processes, etc. Etc. And I think that's kind of an interesting observation. I don't know if you agree with it or have another take.
- [14:08]
D
I think from our side, I think we see renewed interest in hedge funds kind of across the board. And part of it is people got out over their skis, to use an Olympic analogy, in their exposure to private equity. And the way people often would do it was that they would over commit to it with the expectation that they would get money back in a certain period of time. And so the fact that kind of the money coming back didn't really materialize while they still had the commitment outstanding meant a lot of allocators were simply had too much exposure to it. And that's also driven kind of the secondaries market. You know, I think, I think when you're in a persistently long bull market also the fact that, and, and look Dan has done great research on the return characters of private equity essentially being some version of leverage equity with you know, the wonderful feature that, you know, you could pretend that there's, you don't have to mark things to market and but I think, I think now when people are thinking about where equity market valuations are and what the expected returns over the next 10 years and leverage on top of it and being up to their gills and things like software stocks that could be disrupted maybe having long term leverage, long equity exposure is not as attractive as it used to be. And in a world where the macro environment is Shifting back to Tom's point about this migration, I wouldn't say it's a migration like a wholesale migration out of US Assets. I would say that the, the attitude used to be FOMO about the US Markets and now has, has, has come to people saying, like, well, wait a second, I'm like, like, you know, this used to be the, the global bastion of, of, of rule of law around business activity in terms of predictability. And, and clearly things have changed. And so, you know, so I think in the context of that, you think who has the ability to make money on a. And then, you know, you point to the hedge fund industry, which has done, I mean, pretty, I mean, certain hedge funds have done astonishingly well in this environment. And so that's drawing attention back to it, which ultimately I think will be good for all of us.
- [16:09]
B
Yeah. Do you come across private equity a lot, Tom?
- [16:12]
C
It's, it's, it's something we come across as discussions with investors because it's part of their alternatives. Portfolio is part of the, it's part of the portfolio allocation. And I think you're right. It's become a big part of what investors do. But we've been in an unbelievable environment for 15 years, more than 15 years. And is that environment going to persist for equities? We don't know. But I think when I was last on the podcast, we were talking about the macro environment for, let's just call it global macro hedge funds. So a hedge fund that can go into any asset class, deploy assets long, short in a relative value perspective and take advantage of any kind of inefficiency. We are. That environment for hedge funds is only gotten better. We've got stubborn inflation. We've got geopolitical dislocations and tensions. We've got commodities bursting back onto the semen asset class, which has been underappreciated with compressed volatility for a long, long time. And we've got interest rates still relatively low, but higher than they've been for a long period. And it just looks like a very interesting time for tactical trading strategies that can deploy assets across markets long and short.
- [17:26]
B
Yeah, no, we'll, we'll dig into that some more. Let me just quickly run through where we are on the scoreboard, so to speak. My own trend barometer finished yesterday at 50, and that's still a pretty productive environment for trend following. And it has, more importantly, been very consistent the last few weeks as data also will be supporting. These numbers are as of Tuesday of this week, and the beta 50 is up 1.48 in February, up 6.58 for the year the SoC Gen CTA index up one and a quarter for the month and up 6% or so for the year SOC Gen Trend Index up 1.65% for the month, up 6.43% for the year and the Soc Gen Short Term Traders Index up about half a percent so far in February, up 2.78% so far this year. And in the traditional world, MSCI World up 94 basis points in February, up 3.22% so far. This the S&P US Aggregate Bond Index up 41 basis points in Feb and up 60 basis points in 2026. And finally, S&P 500 is pretty flat for Fib, up one and a half percent so far this year. I was wondering before we go a step back a little bit and maybe we talk a little bit about your your own review, Tom, that you put out in the last day or two, this more comprehensive look at 2025. But I wanted to also ask you a little bit and of course Andrew, you can jump in as well about the first six, seven weeks so far this year obviously been very constructive, clearly continuing where we left off in 2025. Is there something about the new year that you're noticing, Tom, that you find particularly interesting or anything?
- [19:23]
C
Well, I think understanding 2025 performance and the second half of the year in particular does help us understand what the beginning of 2026 looks like. Because one of the conclusions we came to when we were writing and analyzing what happened last year was that performance and opportunities for trend following came from a really kind of diverse number of markets. We obviously saw standout performance from metals and precious metals. Again this year have been a key performance driver, but it wasn't just metals. And it's interesting hearing about your trend barometer because we run a similar exercise where we calculate breakout models over Almost, I think 200 or 500 different parameters from very short term to super long term across all different markets that are potentially tradable by CTAs. And on average last year the Z scores. So the opportunity sets is similar to your kind of barometer I think was pretty poor. So last year your selection of asset classes and the way you allocated risk and managed risk was really, really important because there weren't opportunities broadly across all equity markets and all currencies and all bonds. In fact, bonds was really PO last year. So what we've seen, I think this year is a continuation of that theme where we've got really important market trends and if you're not trading those markets, you're going to be missing out on something. So I think last year for the second year in a row, commodities was one of the key performance drivers and 2024 was very similar but it wasn't coming from the same place. In 2024 we saw trends in the soft commodities, so cocoa, coffee as well as precious metals. In 2025 it's really been the precious metals that have been the key performance drivers and if you weren't trading them, as I said then that wasn't available to you. But also there were some really, really strong trends in other markets and that's again continued this year. So for this year in our trend indicator we're seeing really good trending markets in Cosby, nikkei, the Swedish OMX and IBEX 35. So these are sort of lesser, smaller European equity indices often that aren't necessarily the go to financial markets that people are looking at.
- [21:53]
B
It's funny you say this thing about yeah, if you weren't trading all these market like the softs and some of the other metals you would be missing out. But not if your name is Andrew because he does not trade them. But he did not miss out last year. That's all I can say. But stay with this year and then we'll maybe dive a little bit deeper into your report Tom. But any thoughts from your side Andrew.
- [22:17]
D
For this year CTAs generate alpha when they're early contrarian and right the second half of last year they were dialing up equity risk after Liberation Day they were holding their gold position. They were. So basically from our perspective, you look at last year, it's golden equities and predominantly non US equities and it was either maintaining that exposure after Liberation Day. Now human strategists after Liberation Day were really rattled and really wrong in that we were inflation come soaring back, we were going to go to a deep recession. I think Bill, I could use the term self inflicted nuclear economic annihilation or something like that. People really thought and this is again the enormous advantage of CPAs is they don't care if you know as long as they see it kind of bouncing off the lows and however they end up measuring it or continuing a trend and I think that's continued into this year. I think there's an arbitrary end date as of at December 31st. But it's been, look, we started talking about a rotation to non US equities. People have been talking about a fundamentally driven rotation into non US equities for 15 years and it hasn't worked. It's consistently underperformed US equities. But it's been happening for the past couple of years. And I think it goes back to the risk premium issue that we talked about.
- [23:44]
C
On gold.
- [23:45]
D
Gold was a failed trade for a decade and a half. It worked really well for a period of time. You had a lot of very, very smart people in 2010 expecting this profligate monetary policy to drive up gold. It didn't for a very, very long time. And while most people had essentially abandoned the trade, look, in 2022, gold didn't go up, right? I mean, that was the moment everyone was waiting for in gold. Inflation's going to come back and gold is going to pay off and gold didn't go up in 2022 and then it starts soaring in 2024 for very, very different reasons. So I don't think it's complicated. I think it's non US equities, I think it's in emerging markets versus US equities. And I think it's gold which encapsulates the whole metals complex.
- [24:31]
B
So yeah, I mean it's been interesting for me to see, for example, and I know this is early days, right, but clearly the, the momentum in some of the key markets from 2025 spilled over to 2026. So in January, definitely the same themes in terms of leaders. And of course Persian metals, despite a massive sell off, the last day of the month still came out ahead for most managers, I'm sure. But the leadership has changed a little bit in February. It's not so much metals anymore. We seem to be shifting more towards equities in certain parts of the world, as you rightly pointed out, Nat. Gas has been more productive for sure. And even some of the currencies are starting to support, which it doesn't happen that often but. But yeah, so that's been kind of interesting for me to see. Now, Tom, I wanted to give you the chance to, if there were more because it's a pretty comprehensive paper you just published. So if you want to dig out some more of those things that you felt was really important. I know we will talk about some of the topics as well because we will dive into. I think Andrew had sort of specifically gold, silver, you know, and some specific markets to talk about. But is there anything that stood out when you wrote the report, you thought, wow, that actually did surprise me a bit because. And let me frame that if you, if you missed the last couple of episodes of this podcast, Tom, What I said, what I've said to, to people when I've been speaking with them in the first few weeks of this year was that in many respect I think we can all agree that last year was very unusual. We can say that about almost every year. But last year was another unexpected set of events that we saw. Yet from a trend following perspective it was a very familiar year. Few markets did all the heavy lifting then you had a few markets that lost a little bit of money and you had a lot that didn't move much either or so from a trend following perspective, I mean if you didn't know what took place during the year, you would just say yeah, just another trend following year. Maybe a little bit on the, on the low side. Okay, fair. But yeah, I completely agree and I.
- [26:49]
C
Think that's why the conclusion that we came to of the allocation of risk was so important. Normally we see some sort of speed factor and I think Katie Kaminsky's done some really interesting analysis on the speed factor in previous years and we normally see a much stronger preference for longer term models outperforming. But it's the classic sort of contradiction about how you marry your investors who maybe don't. Can't always look at the performance with such a long term lens versus the performance of models there where you can show systematically that being longer term and into longer term trends does pay off. So it's really the allocation of risk last year that was the key thing and how you managed that risk and we were monitoring performance this year as those trends continued. I think the trend index peaked at 7% is as you correctly said, it's now at 6.5% but the range of the individual manager returns is still pretty the same. So I think the best trend followers are up about nearly 15% and still there are some up nearly that amount. I think that's on a slightly higher volatility target than many but we still got many managers in that 10 to 15% range and many just hovering just below the 10% in sort of 8 or 9%. So, so CTAs have definitely allocated risk and managed risk very well. If you want to see what an UN risk managed approach to trend following looks like, please ask us for the data on the SG trend indicator which is our hypothetical model based portfolio which with very limited risk management and you'll see some very interesting swings in the precious metals markets. But I think in general a couple of weeks ago many CTAs were down a small amount of, but they had a laser focus on Risk. So not only allocation of risk but managing of positions. Silver has caught a lot of headlines but it's not as big a market as gold and so maybe the allocation of risk to that market wasn't as big as many people might assume. And there was definitely a close monitoring of what the risk looks like in that market. So we've had CTAs kind of building proprietary models over the years to help them work out when trends are overextended, when trends are reversing. And I really think there was a looking at trend strength and looking at are these breakouts really supportable And I don't think CTA's has had as much risk to precious metals as you might think. I looked at a CTA report today and there was a much bigger allocation of VAR to equities and fx.
- [29:33]
B
Yeah, no, I mean we can dive into that. I know there was one of Andrew's topics actually we can jump around a little bit if you want to stay on sort of the theme of gold and silver and how these were traded. I know you had some questions about this Andrew.
- [29:50]
D
Yeah, I mean every time I think sort of answered the point about. So look, I mean you look at 20, 25, right. And gold is up 60% right. I mean, I mean this should have been a banner year for the space. Right. Equities were up a lot. Right. So you had very, very, very distinct trends and it's continued into this year obviously. And yet the space was flat. Right. And, and, and in Tom's analysis which mirrors what Nick Baltos was talking about and at year end and commit Katie has, has, you know talked similarly was, was you know, short term models really detracted from performance last year and Tom's report which everyone should read has a great analysis basically on a factor by factor and you know, using his, his trend indicator but you know you're up 20% or something in long term trend according to that and you're down you know, 12, 13, 14, 15 in short term trend. You know again as we've looked at the space and we've looked at the shorter term models, we just don't see really positive Sharpe ratios in it. They sound great, right. They said but, but our view is there is a risk management tool and they're often a costly risk management tool if you're going to allocate a meaningful amount of money to something that has a zero sharp ratio over time, drives up your trading costs and creates all sorts of sorts of other issues. So, so I think, I think that's Sort of the hard, the hard narrative part about the space right now is is it feels like things are trending like crazy. So why isn't the space doing better this year? They are, but last year was also getting. It was making money in our side, it was making money in gold and non US equities was about half the performance each. And then you got whipsawed. And Hoku didn't lose too much money in rates and currencies.
- [31:34]
B
I mean, I think last year if we just stick with that for a little bit. You're absolutely right. When people look at the year, they will say, well, hang on, equities were up a lot. So why didn't trend followers make more money in equities? It was very select equities that we could make money in because it really was all about the April deleveraging things to Liberation Day. So if you were, you know, obviously you execute once a week so you have a different way of interpreting what happened. Managers who are much more frequent. Of course we have a different way of interpreting. So I do think that for sure, the fact that we had to delever the equity long side for a while and I think maybe some managers even got short at that stage, that obviously would have cost some. So I agree with that. But people obviously need to understand the way we got to the strong equity wasn't in a straight line. Whether it was in a straight line, as you rightly said, is in the metals. And I think most people made most of their profits in metals or some select equities. A couple of them also in the say, short JTBs and so on and so forth. What is most puzzling to me, and this may not be very popular with some of my friends, but I'll venture into it anyways. In a sense you're kind of right because we have the discussion about being a classic trend follower where you don't adjust your positions and being maybe a more modern trend follower. We do adjust our positions all the time. And so last year, which may come as a surprise to people, even though we made most money in precious metals, we were selling precious metals all year, right? So our largest exposure was a long time ago in precious metals. And then you could say, well, that's not great when the trend is so strong, you should just have stayed with it. You would have made a killing. And there were one or two that probably did exactly that. But of course we also know they kind of had a huge surprise on the last day of January and had that day, for example, continued on The Monday with the same velocity instead of a rebound, Some of those managers could have been in real trouble, in my estimation, of how it took place, because some managers will. When you get a big drawdown, like in silver and gold prices on Friday the 29th or 30s, whenever it was, you may trigger your signal, you may trigger your stop, but you may not execute that trade until the next day. So had the next day been down another 20%, things would have been different. But for the larger managers who don't have static position size, you know, we were just basically reducing our risk along with volatility expanding. So, yes, you could say it's a little bit of a shame when you have two or three markets that really move strongly, that we didn't make more money. But on the other hand, from what I can tell, and this is by no means any criticism, it's just an observation, but I do see many managers who are not many, but there is a handful of managers who talk about this, oh, you should never touch your position size. You should just stick with it. And that's how you really capture these big outliers. But the problem is their performance was not in any way, shape or form better last year. And why is that? And I think it has to do with the fact that they often trade 3, 4, 500 markets, and therefore any one market, even if you don't touch your position size, becomes a very small risk allocation in reality. And that's always been my view that it's not a wrong or right, it's just a difference. But if you really want to have punchy returns and make those 50, 60, 80% returns. Yeah. Then you actually have to have a fairly small set of markets. But then be very gutsy about your risk allocation and stick with it. But that opens up another set of risk issues.
- [35:29]
D
Yeah.
- [35:30]
C
There's a London CTA manager who is very committed to trend following, very committed to commodities and trading a small number of markets and letting risk run. I think we all know who it is. But is the end product something that's palatable to investors when they have these pressures on them from an investment committee and they have strategic asset allocations that they have to follow? I think you end up creating something which is difficult to sell to investors. When you have something like that.
- [36:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, you don't need many investors. I mean, frankly. And I think that's what I like about the space is in the sense that if you have a certain profile you want to express, then you can probably find enough investors who will want to Join you. It's just a different set of investors, but I agree with you on that top.
- [36:20]
C
But it's something that comes up, and it came up this week about the role that your hedge fund or your CTA is playing in the portfolio. And it's something that we've heard about this we have as our core risk, asset equity risk, and we're trying to diversify that. These large asymmetric returns are really good and trend following is really good at diversifying that. And so the investors continued fascination with multistrat that isn't necessarily meeting the requirements or the objective that CTA maybe does. When you get these large moves and you want to have these asymmetric portfolio diversification.
- [37:01]
B
Yeah. Any thoughts, Andrew?
- [37:04]
D
Again, I think about the space very differently than, than, than, than most people in that I view it as an allocator. Right. And that's originally we got into space as an allocator trying to figure out how do we, we love the signal of the space, but how do we access that in the most efficient, straightforward, liquid way that we can. I mean to me the alpha in the space is I think about, I remember the moment in September of 2020 when we started shorting Treasuries. I remember the moment when we were starting buying gold and we're buying gold well below 3,000 when we started shorting the yen around 105, 106 or something like that. Like, like those were really contrarian, really early calls. And, and, and you know, because again, I sort of straddle this world and the world of people who are trying to make these judgments on a regular basis. I also, again, I started a commodity firm called Pinnacle Asset Management back in the 2000s. And, and it was a fundamentally driven commodity firm where you had guys who knew more about the, you know, somebody like John Arnold knew more about the fixed price natural gas swap market than anybody ever in the history of planet Earth, then or now. And the way that they viewed CTAs was they waited for the day when CTAs, when some signal went off somewhere and CTAs were selling because they were in effect they were kind of straddling between being market makers and trying to think about so the fundamental supply, demand characteristics of the markets. And so, so to me, when I think about alpha in the CTA space as an allocator, what I care about is when they pick up something that, whether, as I said, you know, early contrarian and right. And it's big and you can make money in it. Like how does that happen? Right. So you've got an asset that's worth around 10, let's say just, just assume it's sort of a basic model. There's a lot of noise around it, right. So just based upon sentiment or whatever, whatever, it'll go up to 11 and then back down to 9 and then back up to 11, back down to 9. And so the basic model is that when you have people with local knowledge of that market who are maybe sitting on trading desks or high frequency traders, whatever you want to want to call them, you know it generally the smart money, selling at 11, buying at 9, selling at 11, buying at nine and, and, and the kind of this sentiment is driving these prices around but with no change in fundamental value. The valuable trends for CTAs are when it's something's at 10, fair market value is 10 and then the information changes, something in the world changes and fair market goes to 11 and the people with local knowledge like it more at 11 than they liked it at 10. And, and then it goes from 10 to 11 to 12 and the smart money likes it more at 12 than them. I like it more, more 11. That means the world is changing and that they know something about it. They have some special insight that the world is slowly adapting to this information and they think it's going to play out. And so when I think about what happened in 20, 20, 24, 25 and this year and I think about longer term versus shorter term models, in a sense the shorter term models are the ones that are going to get whipsawed violently when you have these changes in sentiment like we had last year. But there's no real change in the state of the world. Right. Whereas the longer term models are the ones that say, you know what, this shift from. I know, I get it. Everybody with their investor committees basically has been talking about a shift out of US assets and out of US equities for a long time. But we can see it in the prices and we can see people moving their money at the margin. And so we're going to get behind it regardless of what we, what we thought about things six months ago. So by that definition of alpha, short term models detract value. It's not the exposure that I would want. I think people have conflated risk management with if you're going to introduce something into your portfolio and allocate a lot of risk to something with a zero sharpe ratio. No thanks, not for me.
- [41:15]
B
I don't know if you remember Andrew, did you manage to keep. Because obviously you do things completely Differently to an underlying manager. Did you manage to keep a fairly static allocation to go last year?
- [41:28]
D
No, it bounced around. When we think about the variation between us and the hedge funds there are four drivers of variation and we tended to get all of them right last year. In 2023 they all went against us and we underperformed by 500 basis points. It's the only, it can happen but it's the only time it's ever happened to us. We outperformed a lot in 2024 and 2025. Slowness helped us last year. Right. And, and if you look at our performance, you know, so one is our performance around Liberation Day was much better than the index and it was better for two things. Is one, I think your position 297 when your Vol is spiking and you're de risking after Liberation Day, I think you are making somebody's P and L in that local market. I think you are the amateur outsiders who somebody has pressed a button to sell it and, and you're not executing at, at you know they're the liquidity dries up in that market because they can see you coming. That's why you have all these things on zerohedge about what CTAs are doing now. Translate that into a market where you've built your career for the past 25 years trading that market every single day. Charlie, Charlie Magara actually from who runs Altis, which is the sub advisor to Simplify CTA hedge fund used to run the metals desk at Goldman and he's talked a lot about this that when you have that kind of local knowledge and you have systematic traders coming into the market it's, it's, you know that's your P and L right there. So I, so, so see so I think this diversification into a lot of excess positions, you know, non increasingly non core positions. I think it hurt people after Liberation Day. It exacerbated the drawdowns. I think that's a market structure problem that, that you know when you're building these models you have to make certain assumptions about implementation costs. And I don't think most people factor in getting taken advantage of by local traders. And and then the second was we still had some risk on. We were slow to de risk and, and balanced when Trump, Trump changed his mind. So, so that kind of blows up the idea that actually having, and that now I mean in, in, in Tom's data interestingly really short term models were fine during that. You know they actually, they, they actually preserve capital much better than longer term Guys during that initial period, it was actually later when they started to get, get, get chopped up.
- [43:48]
C
But again.
- [43:49]
D
So look, I think of as an allocator and I think, I think you know, back to the point that you and Tom have made that investor preferences are often to live in paralyzing fear about what a bad lips all looks like. And as you say, whether there's a bad Friday turns into a horrible Monday, which is what happened with svv. Right. You know, and, and so, so it can happen. I just don't think you're paid for as an allocator. You lose too much. Like it's, it's like saying, well let's do a long term trend model and then, and then buy out of the money, puts on equities because that's what we're afraid of. Fine, you're just not going to have a business after five years.
- [44:24]
B
We got a few different topics, mainly from you, Andrew. So I'm going to kind of defer to you which one you'd like to, to bring up. We talked about the gold and the silver. We tried to get into kind of a little bit more than it gritty about how managers probably were different and how they handled this. Where do you, where would you like to go next?
- [44:44]
D
Well, since I'm on a rant about product design, let's talk about the liquid alternative space. Okay, so the broader liquid alternative space, which means hedge fund strategy, since we're talking and we're talking about Dan's article. So hedge fund strategies in mutual funds and ETFs and now increasing, sorry, mutual funds and usage funds and increasingly in ETFs. It has been an astonishingly bad category. Like the ratio between intelligent people and serious firms who've launched products relative to the total utter lack of success from an investor perspective is pretty astonishing. You're talking about hundreds of products that have been launched. Each one, when they get launched, is somebody sitting there saying we've got some great way of doing equity long, short or market neutral or this or that. The returns over 15 years according to Wilshire's data is between 2 and 3%. And the fee structures on average is about 200 basis points in a, in a period of time when empty markets have gone up 14% a year over that period of time. So this is worse than throwing darts, right? I mean if this was a sports team, you would be asking are you throwing the game on purpose? It's horrendous. And I think I had this sort of epiphany last year as I was thinking about it because we've only done a very, very small number of products over time because we've always had a view that for us if we launch a bad product something that doesn't work, it's our reputation, it's a huge percentage of our time gets allocated to it. In fact, we ended up shutting products that we didn't think were scalable even though they did fine from a performance perspective. But a typical firm has a huge distribution infrastructure to support and they have no view on which is the best product that they're going to launch. There's no one who approaches this from an investment perspective. What would I want to own over the next five years and how am I going to get that in the most efficient way? With actually one exception which SEI hired us 10 years ago with that mandate to help them build a usage fund where they basically said can you find a way to construct an absolute return product with a beta 0.2 cash plus 5 gross and all in expense ratio less than 100 basis points and no asset liability mismatch and you figure out how to build it. But I think the problem on the product development side is that most products that are developed in the space are developed by salespeople who think they can sell it over the next year or two. It's a hot area and they're going to launch something that they where they think there might be incremental demand. And I compare that to the hedge fund industry who I looked at. Dan's article is that generally when hedge funds launch new products because there's a great investment opportunity, they're going to buy real estate in Greenland, something else don't do that denominated in bitcoin. But they think there's something real there and they're going to put their own money behind it and they want to do it in. It's completely backwards in the liquid alts world in that the guys who are building the products are the equivalent of the salesman on the showroom floor designing a car for you because he thinks you'll buy it and if it's a lousy car in three years it's not his issue. And so it kind of dovetails with this thing about should CTA managers be making changes to their portfolio models to maximize their risk adjusted returns over the next five years? Things that they have high conviction in or should they be responding to fears about clients about that, you know that, that, that once a year whipsaw that everyone runs into.
- [48:23]
B
I mean I have my, my, I have, I have some thoughts, but I want to. I want to hear Tom first. But by the way, I will. I will say I. I have noticed on your LinkedIn post, Andrew, that you are. You're certainly not shy of calling out some of your competitors, let's put it that way. But I'm going to.
- [48:41]
D
Someone asked you, for God's sake.
- [48:43]
B
I'm going to defer to Tom first.
- [48:45]
C
Well, we live in a world where Simpsons episodes seem to have predicted most of modern life. And Andrew, I think there is a Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car from the showroom which then bankrupts the company. So I think your analogy is quite interesting and quite correct. There definitely seems to be some sort of disconnect. My worry in the liquid ALTS data is, and it was something that I came across yesterday in a discussion was the classification is the key thing and are we talking about real hedge funds in that data or are we talking about quasi alternatives that live in this semi alternative world where it's kind of multi asset but being described because it's a bit of a hot topic or sexy as multi strass or macro when actually it's just a kind of a GTAA kind of tactical asset allocation across multiple different asset classes losses. The conversation I had yesterday was with someone who was interested in quant multi strap USITS funds and was telling me that there was a universe of 100 of these funds and I struggled to name even two. So I think there's a disconnect in what liquid alternatives is and what may be represented. There isn't necessarily hedge fund strategies all the time, but I think you're definitely right. There's definitely a mismatch or a misalignment between what hedge funds are creating as product and what an investor can satisfy their investment committee with. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier about has the hedge fund industry improved? You're always going to get this sort of different areas within the hedge fund industry where you've got strategies that become scalable that form part of a larger longer term tactical asset allocation that you want to have as a core holding like a CTA and then pure alpha where you are going to have strategies that come in and out of vogue. Maybe it's multi strat at the moment, huge amount of interest in commodity hedge funds at the moment. Commodities was nowhere five to ten years ago, but now suddenly it's very, very interesting. So that seems to be this kind of split in two within the hedge fund industry of as I sort of said, the sort of niche Alphas and things that form part of a larger tactical asset allocation which obviously are going to then have costs come down and they're going to be periods when they underperform. But you've got to remember we're living through an unbelievable equity bull cycle which shows no sign of abating.
- [51:22]
D
Okay. I mean, I mean, to address your point. So on the data side, the, you can look at the data in a lot of different ways.
- [51:27]
C
It sucks.
- [51:28]
D
Okay? I mean the performance across the board is terrible. And this is one of those areas where they ended up alien a lot of people because people make money on products that scale up to a couple billion dollars and then they've got, you have five products, one of them has a couple of good years of returns, you send an army of salespeople out to sell it, it scales up to 3 billion and then it just kind of whittles down over time and, and clients end up, end up often not making money. So I mean, look, you can look at the multi strat, the multi manager mutual funded etf. So mutual fund and, and usage category. Like even Blackstone gave up on that. You know, I mean Newberg Berman shut down their fault like it was a failed business model that is now there are some funds in it like Blackstone's bimbx, which has done a bit better, but again that's more of kind of a quant multi stride product. I mean it was interesting. I mean I was at, I went to speak at EQ Derivatives a couple of weeks ago. It's the whole QIs versus premium space. And one of the observations that I had about it is that people really don't talk much about returns. They talk about modeling and research.
- [52:37]
C
And.
- [52:38]
D
Data and innovations and all these other things. And I kept asking these questions like what's the realized sharpe ratio of the strategy for over what period of time and what do you think it's going to be be going forward and why. But going back to the point about that is a different example on the product development side where products are created there because there's an audience that wants to hear, you know, wants a pitch around engineering. A guy who I know is quite serious, quite a serious allocator, he said, look, if I had to rank the single most successful allocator to the CTA space over the past 10 years, it's you, it's DBI. But and not by investing in funds and not by picking managers, but by, by, by saying what's the signal here? What is it? We're really trying to get and how do we do that as efficiently as possible? And I, look, I. And, and so I think the challenge is for, or, you know, the, the, the test for people on the allocation side is to get very, very clear about what you're expecting a product to do and how you're attempting to achieve. To achieve it and understand how to evaluate that and the realistic, how realistic it is for them to achieve those goals. And so back to Niels's point, I often call out people where I think they don't have a strong view as to whether this is a good idea or not, but they sure have a good idea that it's good for them to launch a new product. And I just think it's bad for investors. So, you know, obviously, I think, I feel strongly about.
- [54:06]
B
No, I mean, this is a great thing about this. We can have these pretty frank discussions. I mean, I think we could probably say with most firms, when you launch a product, you know, a certain narrative goes with it. I certainly remember your narrative, Andrew, when you launched your product. Right. Focused on kind of the cost saving in order to get exposure to CTA returns. But when I look at it, if I'm being very frank about it, I look at your product. Actually, the more I look at it, the more I look at it differently that it's actually not about the cost savings because I feel at least that the tracking error to the index that it's trying to mirror is too large for that. So I see it more as an alternative data strategy where you just use a different data set input. And it has worked really well in that sense. But of course, you know, even five or ten years worth of data, we don't know what the next 10 or 20 years is going to be like. And I completely agree with you, by the way, that there is a lot of products that really shouldn't be launched and it's, and it's not good for investors to come out there. Right. But I also, you know, from having seen this space from the inside for quite a few decades, some of these things would just go in and out of favor. And even if you have five years of underperformance doesn't mean you're the next five years. The next 10 years won't, you know, you're going to be the highest performer. It's really hard to tell.
- [55:38]
D
But I mean, things that I try to highlight are when it's predictable on the front end. Right. So standard life gars. Okay. I learned about standard lifeguards in 2015 for the first time. They Were out telling everybody that a largely a long only but also with derivatives built into it multi asset portfolio could generate could. Could deliver a. A beta of 0.2 to equities and cash plus 5. Okay, that's a top quartile maybe a top decile hedge fund portfolio over time. Okay. It's not realistic. Okay. It was never realistic. It was. We have, we happen to have done that because we flipped heads or, or and but again it went to $90 billion. This thing it was bigger than Bridgewater work at its peak. And so I talked about it at the time and I said you're kidding yourself if you're going to do a beta like once you start talking about a beta point two unless you start bringing in things that are Quite interesting like CTAs and CTAs before fees then or you know before or reducing your trading costs unless you can bring in something like that. Getting once you. The reduction to beta of 0.2 is also going to kill your return profile. The same thing with the multi manager funds. I wrote a paper in 2013 basically saying a mutual fund that tries to pick six underlying hedge fund managers and hires them in managed accounts is not going to achieve the return objectives that people were talking about at the time. You know I said the same thing about risk premia in 2014. G10 currency carry does not have a long term Sharpe ratio 1.2. I'm sorry that's. That's a back test. Okay. And now I think people have realized the drop off between the ins, the back tested numbers and the live numbers is something like 75% or something. You know I mean equity long short as a, as a category. If you have a beta of 0.5 or 0.4 to equities it's not going to the amount of stock selection alpha and other things you need to do to be able to overcome even the cost of a mutual fund are doing it is you're likely not to generate much alpha. So I think the allocator community is getting smarter every year about a lot of these points. But I think there are things that work better on it. And the structural problem that you have is most liquid alternative products are sold, not bought. Capital tends to go to the largest firms with the largest salespeople who already have people who are invested in multiple products under the same umbrella. And it's. It's an incremental addition to their portfolio. And the. The typical allocator does not like again going back to this being a human exercise doesn't want to ask the kinds of questions that I'm known for asking. It's, you know, I, I just did a post on somebody who launched a, a CTA product with a team of people who as far as I can tell, have never run a CTA program. Okay, so that is taking a flyer. They put their, had basically $300 million their client capital go into it now, if it works, if they get lucky, it's great. They have a $300 million product that's done really, really well. If it goes badly, it's their client issue and they won't talk about it. And in three years from now, maybe they'll shut it down or something like that, like. So look, I mean, I'm, it's, I'm going to keep calling out things on this, in this industry where I think that people who are standing there waving a fiduciary flag are not acting in the best interest of their clients.
- [59:08]
C
It's interesting. You say, do you think these products are sold and not bought? I was just looking at my screen trying to see if I can get the flow information on dbmf because I'd be interested to know how. Do you have clients actively coming in and out or is it of your funds or is it more of a very long term allocation part of the.
- [59:28]
D
Portfolio, the vast reservoir? I can't really talk about DBMF for compliance reasons, but I'll give you generalizations in terms of. So I wrote the business plan for DBMF in 2016 and what it was based on were conversations with allocators who were looking for ways to get exposure to this space, but had two issues, three issues that they were dealing with. One was a line item constraint. So if I talk to Cambridge Associates or Mercer or somebody else, they can populate an institutional portfolio with four funds and get some measure of diversification. The reason AQR went to 14 billion in assets in their mutual fund was because a lot of allocators were basically saying it's aqr. A, it's aqr, what can go wrong? And B, I want to do a 5% allocation space. I guess it's the easiest thing is just to give it to aqr. Okay, that was a catastrophically bad decision. Not because, I mean, AQR is an absolutely staggeringly incredible firm, but they were taking idiosyncratic manager risk without understanding it. So what, what I thought was that there was a, there would be demand for something that would allow a model allocator who's not the fund selector, who, who wants to be in the business of deciding whether it's Neil's or, you know, or, or, or somebody else and, and how to assemble that portfolio, but rather for the Alex, some people overlooking the whole portfolio saying give me as consistent and straightforward exposure as you can to this area in, in a reasonably priced way. So 85 basis points for ETFs was about half of what the mutual funds were at the time and ETFs were a growing vehicle in terms of popularity. And so that was. So again we built it on the basis of feedback from people who were the decision makers to how to make it better. So back to your point. The vast majority of the capital are model allocators. Who, there, there is somebody there who is, who has a series of models for high net worth clients or mass affluent clients who is trying to. It's usually not a single allocation but usually it's a core allocation or a within, within, within, within, within that bucket. So it's not actively. Very few of them, very few allocators actively trade, which they should. I tell them if you're going to actively trade, you find something else to trade.
- [61:52]
C
It's not, it's, you know, SG has a very, very active and a very diverse and comprehensive QIS business and I feel that the way those products are used and the way those products are approached by clients is, is fund is probably more in line with how you describe your client journey about. It's a client engaging and trying to get exposure to a specific asset class or strategy or theme. So there seems to be very sort of thematic use of these QIs. And I was actually really surprised to hear that often we have global macro hedge funds who want to access some sort of curve steepener or some sort of thematic play for a finite period of time who will use the QIS as a much simpler implementation of a macro theme.
- [62:42]
D
No, I'm a huge fan of qis when you know what you're doing right? When, when you, when you are trying to articulate a bet and you are outsourcing execution and financing and everything else to, to, to somebody who's in most cases is better situated to do it than, you know, if you're not two sigma or GE or who, who can do it themselves physically? No, it's just, it's rather, I mean what I was referring to is back in 2013 was that the space was being marketed as having these liquid strategies that, that, you know, as having strategies that were sharp ratios that were unrealistic. And I think, and I think like even, Even in the US, the, the use of indices within ETFs and structure and, and mutual funds and, and, and, and usage funds. This is going to be, it's going to be a hotbed of innovation not just for capital efficiency, not for, just for trading efficiency but also because it opens a different category of investors who is not going to buy a hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty basis point single manager mutual fund in what they do because they have you know, low cost ETF model portfolios that, that, that require things that are look and feel more beta like. So, so I mean you know the product innovation is there. I just, it's, it's my, my criticism is that there are, there are a lot of landmines in the space that have been predictable and I've been talking about it for 15 years. Right.
- [64:10]
C
Like it's.
- [64:11]
D
And, and so, so I think I am hoping that as again, you know, in terms of the investors that I talk to, they're really smart. Like I'll tell you, I started talking about an AI story about an allocator who really knows what he's doing and his and his clients are much better off for it. And, and the allocator base will continue to get more sophisticated the same way the QIS allocators are much more sophisticated than, than, than they were 12 or 13 years ago when I first talked to them about, about this space.
- [64:43]
B
I don't know if this is completely hitting sort of this mark, but I'll venture it anyways. I mean of course we're going to have product innovation. I mean you Andrew, have been definitely a part of that revolution and disrupting the space. And what I, what I, my concerns with things like QIS is that yeah, we know it's there, we know it's huge. We have no transparency, we have no idea what the returns actually are compared to quote unquote, if they're trying to replicate trend following or replicate CTAs or whatever. But we don't really know how they're doing because they don't publish their returns or anything like that. I guess my concern, and I will, and I do know this sounds really old fashioned when I say it right, but it's great with innovation. But I am still concerned that when you come at the problem, when you come at something and say yeah, we can, we can give you that right? We can give you the CTA returns or we can give you trend following, you know, low cost and we'll do it completely differently. But when, but often over time when you do things really differently why would you expect to be able to deliver the same outcome? And maybe we have not seen it yet, right? Maybe the way markets have behaved. I noticed both Katie and, and Nick had some analysis where the environment for managers had been in a certain way the last 10 years, but it was completely opposite almost in the first 10 years of this millennium. And so all I'm just saying is I'm open to surprise both ways in a sense that yes, there's going to be periods where these innovative structures outperform and do really well. And it kind of looks like, oh, we've solved it. There's another easy way to do trend without you having to do all the nitty gritty stuff that we do and have done in the last 50 years. But hey, at some point maybe we realize that okay, it works, but it doesn't work all the time. And that's just my expectation to this space. But I do agree that firms should not knowingly move into this space without the right experience and just if they can put investors into products that are not as they build as they should.
- [67:12]
D
When I first looked at trend following models back in, and these are the bank trend following models, it is easier to get the information now than it used to be. When I first looked at the space, I was asking questions that other people weren't asking, which was okay, when did you actually launch this index? Right. If you launched the index three weeks ago, then have you launched other indices that look like this? How did those do? Right, so these are normal due diligence questions. I mean the fascinating thing about it was that I think a lot of allocators just sort of suspended belief and decided not to ask those questions because they were under so much pressure to find liquid investable ways of getting things that had low correlations, equities. But that's, that's, that's a different story. The, my, my issue also was calling it a risk premia. Right? So labeling trend a risk premia, like as Tom knows, their trend indicator can look very different than the Stockton CTA index can look very different than the stock CTA trend index can. And, and so, so risk premia implies that if the three of us design it, it's going to look the same. Like maybe it's not the S&P 500, but it's a little, it's going to be within kind of end. And I think that's been a narrative. I mean, you know, the narrative history behind that was after the quants almost blew up in 2007 and before that they Were saying, you know, basically we're quantitative long short order based black boxes and we're going to generate alpha from scratch. And it was like, oh my God, this is almost long term capital. Second time. And so starting with AQR and others, the narrative on the space shifted to no, no, no, we're just harvesting risk premia that have been around for 70 years. And these are permanent features of the market. And so BlackRock and AQR and others who jumped into this space talked about this as it's not risky, these are just permanent features of the market and we're just going to help you to access it in an efficient way. That I think was wrong. So when I wrote about the trend and I wrote a paper on the trend products, we know that manager risk as we talk about is very, very high in this space. The three of us design a model, a long term trend model. We may have a correlation of 0.8. We can still be 20 points apart at the end of the year. The and but it was the characterization of it as risk premia implied that XYZ Bank's solution would be the easy one stop solution. Now the way sophisticated allocators have adapted to this is not only by going underneath the hood on all these products to a great degree, but also thinking about okay, so this is your flavor, this is another bank's flavor. And this is another bank's flavor. How as an investor, how, how is an allocator? Do I want to put these together into a package thereby becoming almost like an outsourced portfolio manager? And, and again I think that's a, that's an enormous improvement relative to where we, where we were 12 or 15 years ago. But, but then people can make their, then make, they can make calls. And do we think the team here who has 37 other quant projects that they're working on, do we think these are the people that we really want to invest in to, you know, to be able to build this particular product or do we want specialized expertise?
- [70:35]
B
Yeah, I mean with all models, whether it's GTA models, replication models or whatever, I mean there is a model risk somewhere or an execution risk or whatever that might be. But yeah, this was great. We certainly got around today. Tom and Andrew, any final thoughts before we wrap up?
- [70:54]
D
I hope this is the trendiest year we've ever seen.
- [70:57]
B
So do I. What about you, Tom?
- [71:01]
C
Well, yeah, it's something that seems to happen here. We touched on the global kind of conferences and it's every year we seem to enter the first half of the year seems to go off with a bang. And I agree with Andrew. We want those trends to persist and we want to have good volatility but not bad volatility.
- [71:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think we didn't even touch that much on it, but we had written it down that we would talk a little bit more about global macro and all that stuff. But I think we can all agree that, that there are a lot of things going on in the world right now. So if you are, you know, if you are engaged with strategies that essentially not trying to predict too much about where things gonna go, but do enjoy change as a, as, as a, you know, return driver, then yeah, maybe that this could be a good year for us. Anyways, Tom, I look forward to seeing you in Miami in a couple of weeks. Andrew, I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks back virtually here now for those listening, if you want to show your appreciation for Tom and Andrew for all the work they put in in these conversations, go to your favorite podcast platform and leave a rating and review. It does really help us and it's nice to show, you know, some appreciation for all the co hosts who put a lot of time into producing these episodes. Next week, Alan will take over hosting for a couple of weeks while I travel. He's going to be joined by Mark one week, he's going to be joined by Jim another week. So please make sure to send your questions to infoptradersonblock.com and I'll make sure that Alan gets hold of them. From Andrew, Tom and me, thanks ever so much for listening. We look forward to being back with you next week. And in the meantime, as always, take care of yourself and take care of each other.
- [72:46]
A
Thanks for listening to the Systematic Investor Podcast series. If you enjoy this series, go on over to itunes and leave an update, honest rating and review and be sure to listen to all the other episodes from Top Traders Unplugged. If you have questions about systematic investing, send us an email with the word question in the subject line to infooptoptradersunplugged.com and we'll try to get it on the show. And remember, all the discussion that we have about investment performance is about the past and past performance does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance. Also, understand that there's a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies and you need to request and understand the specific risks from the investment manager about their products before you make investment decisions. Thanks for spending some of your valuable time with us and we'll see you on the next episode of the Systematic Investor.