It was our great privilege to welcome Mark Rzepczynski this week. Mark has over 25 years of experience in financial markets, is a former finance professor and writes frequently about global markets and quantitative investing. Our conversation covered:

• His early years, ‘forged in the chaos of the trading pits’
• Pursuing a PhD and recognizing a career in research was not for him
• Working for John Henry – an apprenticeship in trend following
• Finding one’s comparative advantage and sticking to it
• Why trend following had a bad reputation when the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) was still regarded as the law of the land
• Trend following as the first derivative of the EMH
• Understanding how markets actually behave, as opposed to how they should
• Prices are primal
• Uncertainty as the gap between what you don’t know and what you should know
• The interplay between price action and narrative
• Specialists can be tremendously myopic, while trend followers seek to be the ultimate, rules-based generalists
• Black Box vs Glass Box
• Trend following as a signal to noise problem
• The dirty secret of trend-following – when most of the money is actually made
• And much more

This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day, hosted by Adam Butler, Mike Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo of ReSolve Global* and Richard Laterman of ReSolve Asset Management Inc.

 

*ReSolve Global Inc. refers to ReSolve Asset Management SEZC (Cayman) which is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity trading advisor and commodity pool operator. This registration is administered through the National Futures Association (“NFA”). Further, ReSolve Global Inc. is a registered person with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.