Flirting with Models

In this episode, I speak with Farouk Jivraj, Portfolio Manager and Head of Alternative Risk Premia at Fidelity Investments’ Asset Management Solutions division.

After spending nearly a decade on the sell side, Farouk joined Fidelity in 2021 with the goal of building out an alternative risk premium platform, tapping into the best of what both the sell-side QIS desks have to offer and what can be built in-house.

We spend the majority of the conversation peeling apart the layers of Farouk’s 5-step process for implementing alternative risk premia strategies. He shares his thoughts on how to classify different premia, why thoughtfully-constructed peer groups are an important evaluation tool, how to go about selecting specific strategies, how to construct portfolios of alternative risk premia, and the actual rubber-meets-road implementation practicalities.

Please enjoy my conversation with Farouk Jivraj.

In this episode I chat with Giuseppe Paleologo – or Gappy as he likes to be called. Currently on garden leave, Gappy has previously worked in Risk & Quantitative Analytics at Citadel, as Head of Enterprise Risk at Millennium, and most recently as Head of Risk Management at HRT.

We begin the conversation with a discussion as to what a quant researcher actually does at a multi-manager hedge fund. As a semi-support role to the fundamental PMs, Gappy explains how portfolio manager coverage, factor hedging, and internal alpha capture can all work together to help maximize firm P&L.

We then discuss the broad field of factor research and portfolio construction, where Gappy shares some of his strongly held views, both on how factors should be constructed as well as how they should be utilized. Topics include returns versus characteristics, mixing versus integrating alpha signals, single- versus multi-period optimization, and linear- versus non-linear models.

Please enjoy my conversation with Giuseppe Paleologo.

On this episode, Ben Carlson and Michael Batnick are joined by Corey Hoffstein of Newfound Research to discuss: managed futures, return stacking, using leverage effectively, and much more!

My guest in this episode is Kris Abdelmessih, co-founder of moontower.ai.

Kris began his career at SIG, where he worked as a market maker in several different option pits, before moving to Parallax where he ran a relative value commodities volatility book. For the last five years, Kris has been writing on his blog Party at the Moontower, which is one of my favorite reads for all things probability, payoff space, trading, optionality, and seeing the world through a volatility lens.

Kris is a passionate educator, so it should come as no surprise that learning is a key thread throughout this entire episode. Kris discusses how learning is accelerated in the pits and how we can think about replicating it in electronic space. Kris discusses what he had to unlearn and relearn in his move from market making to relative value trading. He also shares his thoughts about how firm lineage influences how you learn to trade markets.

Finally, we discuss Kris’s newest venture, moontower.ai, which seeks to provide a “volatility lens” to opinionated traders to help them better express their bets in option space.

There is a lot of experience to unpack in this one.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kris Abdelmessih.

In this episode I speak with Bill Gebhardt, founder of 10Dynamics.

Bill spent the better part of his career as a discretionary energies trader, with roles at Koch Industries, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Trailstone. In May 2020 he struck out on his own to co-found 10Dynamics.

Given Bill’s fundamental and discretionary background, it may come as a surprise that 10Dynamics runs a fully systematic process. This dichotomy serves as the foundation for much of our conversation, where Bill provides insight into where and how his discretionary background informs the systematic process, both from a signal and a risk management perspective.

We discuss the types of signals 10Dynamics incorporates into their process, how their risk management system is designed to reflect Bill’s experience managing discretionary traders, and how they’ve designed their operational risk management to allow them to trade intraday with a small team.

Please enjoy my conversation with Bill Gebhardt.

In this episode, I speak with Nicolas Mirjolet, CEO and Co-Head of Research at Quantica Capital.

We begin with Nicolas’s experience operating a statistical arbitrage fund, where he provides his thoughts as to what makes a strategy easier or harder to scale a business on. Nicolas also provides some context for his somewhat counter-intuitive view that the larger players had a bigger edge in this capital constrained space.

We then transition to Quantica’s flagship managed futures program. Nicolas explains that while Quantica is a price-based trend follower, they apply a multivariate approach to their signal analysis. We discuss how the approach works and how it contrasts against a standard univariate approach. Specifically, Nicolas shares his thoughts on how the multivariate approach impacts the portfolio return profile and why you may want more or fewer variables in your signal universe than your tradable market universe.

We end the conversation with Quantica’s most recent quarterly research paper, which provides quantitative insight into the convexity versus robustness tradeoff trend managers make when they add more markets to their portfolio.

Please enjoy my conversation with Nicolas Mirjolet.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Get Stacked Investment Podcast. This episode brings together Corey Hoffstein, Rodrigo Gordillo, Mike Philbrick, and Adam Butler to dive deep into the concepts of Return Stacking, market efficiency, and investment strategies beyond traditional stock picking. Providing insights into Return Stacking's relevance in today's investment landscape, the importance of structured diversification to enhance portfolio sustainability and its potential to create excess returns with more confidence than traditional stock picking.

This podcast episode serves as a comprehensive introduction to Return Stacking and provides valuable insights for investors looking to navigate the complexities of modern markets with innovative strategies.

In this episode I chat with Markku Kurtti, author of the blog Outcast Beta.

Markku is classically trained as an electrical engineer and works on receiver algorithms for mobile phones. A passion for investing, however, lead him to pursue an MS in Finance and an interview with Ed Thorp compelled him to devote his time to better understanding compounding processes.

This obsession has driven him to develop a number of analytical and numerical models that provide differentiated insights into topics such as “why do most individual stocks historically underperform cash,” “how many stocks should an active manager actually hold,” and “how does the uncertainty of uncertainty help explain the equity risk premium puzzle?”

With Markku’s work, I’m reminded of the phrase: all models are wrong, but some models are useful. His outsider’s take provides some unique insights into the benefits, and opportunity costs, of diversification.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Markku Kurtti.

In today’s episode I speak with Otto van Hemert, Director of Core Strategies at Man AHL.

After briefly touching upon Otto’s background, we dive into one of his most popular papers: The Best Strategies for Inflationary Times. Otto shares the inspiration for the research as well as some of what he feels were the less obvious results.

Trend strategies, which were a standout winner in the inflation resilience horse race, serve as the bridge to a discussion on seasonality. Interestingly, Otto’s research suggests that long-term trend signals are actually capturing seasonality effects!

Otto shares his thoughts on different approaches to measuring seasonality, why he believes seasonality emerges in both commodities and financial markets, and how to think about combining trend and seasonality in a single portfolio.

Please enjoy my conversation with Otto van Hemert.

My guest this episode is Clayton Gillespie, VP at Deutsche Bank where he works in quant equity research for the QIS team.

Clayton began his career at Credit Suisse HOLT, where he got his hands dirty in extracting fundamental information. This formative experience dramatically impacted how he views how fundamentals should be incorporated into quantitative equity strategies.

Today, at DB, he strives to improve quantitative equity strategies by anchoring them with a strong fundamental understanding.

We discuss how fundamental and statistical interpretations can be at odds, how a strong fundamental understanding can help with the identification of emergent risk factors during regime changes, and how best to incorporate fundamental insights while avoiding potential biases from the analysts who deliver them.

Please enjoy my conversation with Clayton Gillespie.