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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Jill Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, there's a lot we've discussed about multi strategy hedge funds, but there's still a lot we don't know. And specifically, although I've come to learn things about comp and alignment and the importance of risk management and risk models and all that stuff, I actually don't know, like how how the pods make good trade.
This is part two hundred and ninety eight of our attempt to understand multi strat hedge funds.
That's what it is.
But you're right, we haven't really looked at it from the I guess the perspective of a PM who is actually working there, and what it takes to get hot fired, what it takes to avoid getting fired, and things like that.
I have a feeling that like avoiding getting fired is a really big part of the story, Like you want to do well right, you want to make money and all that, but I also get the impression that you just want to hang onto that seat for a really long time, and that a big part of I don't
know if the game is the word. But a big part of the game is yeah, holding onto that seat, avoiding being part of any given call, Avoiding having your name show up on Bloomberg in a story that gets read spiked about so and so out after losing two hundred and sixty million or whatever in the trade.
This is exactly what I was wondering, like, how do the drawdowns actually impact a bunch of pms. Is it like really embarrassing and does it have like an actual effect on their trading? I imagine it does, and it must have an effect on their confidence as well. But I am very interested in this subject, and we have joked a number of times about, you know, if we were at a multistrat hedge fund things like that. So maybe we'll get a better idea.
We definitely have to learn more about the pod level, because I do get the pressure from talking to some people. We talked to Running Cosgrave recently. It's like, oh, you just put a bunch of people in a room and if you have the risk management right, it kind of works out. Anyway, We're going to continue our journey of learning more about these big out.
There's a natural affinity between podcasts and pod shops.
Oh, it's pretty sad. God, wouldn't you hate it if, like if we screwed up or like we had like an episode that didn't do very well and our traffic was down or something, and there was like a big article on It's like Joey Tracy out after you know, after one month of underperformance of the podcast.
Oh yeah, Well, this is the other thing, Like what happens if you outperform for like half the year and then you underperform for the second half of the year, And how is that actually calculated in terms of your comp.
Totally And this came up before, which is that people who have really good starts the fund at the fund level, you don't want them taking off risk just to lock in their annual bonuses. These are important questions. Anyway, let's dive right into it. We have the perfect guest, someone with a long track record and experience across many as spects of this space. We're going to be speaking with
Brian Yelvington. He's currently a consultant for executive search firm Carrington Fox, but he's been a former analyst in PM at several large multi strat funds, Millennium or Capital et cetera, A few others in there, and so up. Brian, thank you so much for coming on odd lots.
Thank you for having me. Great to be here. I always enjoy the podcast and enjoy hearing the very subject you guys come up with.
Oh, thank you, we'd love to hear it. We're gonna clip that and put it in the mix before we go on, like why do you just give us the real brief version of like who are you? And why are we talking to you? Other than the fact that if I go to your LinkedIn page there are a bunch of famous companies listed on it.
Yeah, probably a few too many for my taste, to be honest, I've kind of been one of the few people who've been both a pod PM as well as kind of helped bring those people into a large multi strat. I left the risk taking world and went to work in the business development area. Business development is just to badly disguise you from this for manager selection, although it
means very different things at very different firms. So I've seen it both from junior analysts side to a senior PM to the person who's the necessary, if not sufficient gatekeeper at a hedge fund.
I'm trying to think where to start because there's so much for us to talk about. But if I'm a PM and I am applying to a multi strat, what would my CV or resume actually look like? And then b would I even be applying to a multi strat? Or would I be headhunted and they would find me?
The chances are generally better that if you're an established PM, you would probably come either through direct from the BD team who said, we need somebody who represents the same risk that Tracy represents. We hear she's great, We'd love to speak to her, or through an executive search firm who's there's a lot of turnover in this industry and they do a lot of business as a result.
So how do you know if someone is actually good? Because this seems to be like one of the core challenges in really all investing, right, like past results are no guarantee of future returns. Everything always says that you don't know what's just a lucky streak, et cetera. So let's go through this process you want to establish if someone is actually a good investor or trader or portfolio
manager or whatever. Walk us through the steps of like how you actually would identify if Tracy is good at her job exactly.
Well, first to caveat, you're never going to know, Okay. The reason that past performance is not indicative of future returns is because it's the future and we never know how somebody's going to act. So what I'm going to do during our first conversation Tracy is I'm going to ask sort of like you guys did a little bit about your background. I'm going to be looking for things like where we might know people in common, where you might have worked through a really good group or something
like that that had a great reputation. And then we're going to get into the nitty gritty of the conversation where I asked you in great detail, you know, what is your edge? That part's actually not too detailed. You should be able to elucidate that sort of standing on one foot. Then I'm going to go into wait.
Yeah, can you pause, just give me if that's an easy part, what is it? Because this is actually something that I'm completely in the dark about. How does someone go about articulating an edge in plan English during an interview? Like what does that actually sound like? You say? Okay, Like Brian, what's your edge. You used to trade fixed income at where and where? Brian, what was your age?
Well, I probably didn't have a very good one, but my edge was usually from the research side. What I will tell you is pms who are extremely good at their jobs, have boiled down what their edge is to a very well defined two or three sentence elevator pitch style answer. And the reason that they're able to do that is because this is something they've been doing a long time, and they've made a huge number of mistakes, and they know exactly the alpha that they want to identify,
are good at identifying and what they go after. So it's going to sound different for everybody. For you know, a macro RV type of fund, it may be that they really anticipate the the shifts and monetary policy. For a credit fund, it's that maybe they understand, you know, corporate actions and they're really good at reading between the lines of maybe even a specific niche of companies. So it's going to differ, but you can usually tell by
someone's answer there how much they thought of it. The bad answers tend to be something that relies on experience. I'll note that there are too many octagenarian PMS or something that relies on well, I'm just really good at this. You kind of have to be able to identify it to be good at it.
So going back to performance metrics, like what figures or numbers are actually available? Well, here, you know, does a potential PM come bearing sharp ratios? And then how does the potential hiring firm actually do due diligence on some of those numbers.
It's difficult. And the reality is that you know P and L even within a firm as a BD person, and again BD is very different from firm to firm. But if I were to hire Tracy as PM.
I'm regretted using myself as an example, by the way.
No, we're going to have you do well, okay, right, we'll flunk out somebody else. But if we were to hire Tracy in some places, I might not even be aware of how she's doing six months after we hired, and others I would have kind of perfect inside p and ls are extremely closely guarded secrets and usually they're not discussed within the firm except for a very few select group of people. And nobody's going to attest to that P and L. Right, you of your own accord, Tracy,
might provide some assurance to somebody. Maybe it's because your past cap or something. They can't ask, but you can certainly say, hey, by the way, there's proof that I did what I did. That's your priority.
Wait why can't they ask?
I believe that's the employment law. Yeah, you're allowed to ask. It might not been designed to protect hedge fund pms, but I believe it does cover them somewhat.
Tracy, I've brought up a bunch of chodes. I told you. I have talked about the time that I interviewed at a prop trading firm, right many many times.
Joe, Yes, are you going to tell the story again? You can if you want.
I'll just tell the brief one, which is that when I was living in Austin, which you are, Brian, you're there now, I interviewed at a prop trading firm when I was right out of college. There were two hundred interviews, and they asked me about my own trading when I used to date trade on each trade by myself, and I told them a little about my trades. They made me play a video game to test my hand and I coordination, and then they made me play ping pong
against the CEO. I'm not really sure what that was all about, but then I was one of I was one. I was one of four people who got to offer the job, and then for some reason I didn't take it.
Didn't you work at a sandwich shop?
To the now, I'm making sandwiches at the Wheatsville food co Op at the time, and all my friends were working there. I was like, I don't really feel like working the corporate life just yet. And everything worked out and it was fine. That's still one of the stranger times in my life. But it was kind of like this where they asked me specifics. All right, here's a more important question. It's great to say, like, if you're a PM, then you show, but the first you got
to become a PM. What does an analyst do? So so a PM has a pod and they have analysts in their pod, what does an analyst actually do?
Just as with the street, you know how they're analysts and function and analysts and rank as you will, pods will generally have analysts covering, you know, specific areas. Basically at most firms, it's sort of a euphemism. If you have trading authority you're either a trader, a SUBPM, or a PM. If you do not have trading authority, but you're still committing or contributing to investment decisions, you're an analyst.
It's just a generic catch all term. But you are generally in charge of building the you know, specific type of surveillance that the pod needs. You may have names or industries or specific areas of a specific market to cover, and you're being eyes and ears, and you will have specific projects. Yeah, in our current environment, there's no no shortage of things to test out and look into as to how policies may change. So if you're in a macropod, you're probably pretty busy right now.
Presumably you don't have to make perfect PowerPoint presentations for potential deals and things like that. It's much more idea generation and I guess like back testing.
There's you know there. Again, it kind of depends on the type of pod that you're in. If you're in a very directional macropod, you're probably looking for a lot of historical analogs, you know, house pods, he responded in the past. If you are in a more quantitatively oriented pod, maybe something that does some form of arbitrage. He has lots of back testing, lots of mathematical confetency. But it's interesting who I've seen make the jump. I've seen a salesperson.
We basically just sent out a weekly commentary with a model portfolio in it, and people loved it, and PM said, Hey, we want to talk to this person. Who you go talk to him? For US analysts public machine analysts. Joey and I actually have a mutual friend that you've had on the show before who was kind of writing for
a newsletter, and it was a newsletter. I can tell you that most every PM I knew in macro was reading and he built his audience on Twitter or X. Sorry, that doesn't make a very good verb.
All right? And then if I am running a pod shop, what exactly am I looking for in terms of potential PM? So I get probably past performance, even though as we discussed,
it's not a perfect indicator of future performance. But am I looking at personality like would I hire a complete jerk who happens to be a star trader because it doesn't really matter how he works with other people because he's going to be completely independent, Or would I be looking at it very holistically and taking a sort of moneyball approach where I'm trying to fill in or plug specific gaps in my overall business with maybe players or traders that are undervalued by the market.
I think you're always trying to play the moneyball approach. However, most puge funds differ a lot in how internally they communicate. There are some hedge funds where you're really not allowed to talk to people from other pods, Like I might say something to you Tracy, like I like the market here, I don't like it here, But I would never say, you know, I'm shorting the two year versus the three year. DBO one weighted something specific, and that's to avoid kind
of cross contamination of the pods. Whereas there are others who really value the esprie de corps and they like to have people collaborate and those places. Not only are you going to have the typical meetings with BD and risk and the CIO, but you're also going to meet a lot of other pms to make sure that you know you're not a jerk.
Let's talk more about getting a job as an analyst. There are probably a lot of people, maybe they're in college listening to this episode right now. I think that if I were young and in college and didn't have any obligations, I would like, Oh, this sounds really fun working for a multi strategy hedge funds. I would love to get my door in one. What would be like? What should I do to get that first role.
There are a few firms that hire direct from college, direct from university. Those are very very small programs. Normally, there's only a few of them at scale. I would say typically people who first move into a pod as an analyst or perhaps a sub PM generally come from the cell side or maybe prop but they generally have spent a couple of years on the cell side, have a lot of the great training that the street can provide, and have advanced themselves to where they are saying, you know,
I no longer just want to make markets. I actually want to trade my own risk.
So you get a job on the cell side, and you establish yourself as someone who knows something, who people like reading from, and who people like reading their You know their takes and their models and have interesting insights to say about whatever asset classes is being traded.
Either that or you have a business that actually would work good on the buy side happens to be in the cell side. But in terms of how you get that first job, I would say, be useful. I think that everybody is kind of concentrated on the you know, I want to be coming up with the ideas that go into the book, and you sort of grow into
that slowly. But if you're somebody who you know has read the history or done the work or researched, you know what happens when on the first bed cut, what happens on the last what happened in the dollar the last time we had tariffs. Those sorts of analogs in the macro world are very good. If you understand restructurings, you're probably going to be pretty valuable to high yield
or distress pod. You're not going to get that. You know, I've got the con kind of job right away, So you need to be useful in the job you're applying for.
And then you.
Kind of touched on this before, but I would love to hear more what are the pools that multistraats are actually drawing from and have those changed over time, Like you know, when they first started popping up, were they hiring from fund of funds? And the cell side, and then as they progress, maybe get a little bit more experimental and start diversifying into other industries to draw pms from.
Yeah, I mean, for instance, we've seen a lot of interesting commodities pms over the past few years, and a lot of those are at trade houses, or perhaps they worn't. For large boiling gas companies, a lot of which are really more engineering than trading, they'll look anywhere if there's sort of, you know, a definable edge. And we were talking a little bit about the process of interviewing. Part of what somebody is looking for is, you know, can we do what you do? I'll give you an example.
Funds really want to expand their balance sheet and be as efficient with it as possible. If we look at gross notional exposure to net assets for multistrats, we hovered around ten ten x through about twenty twenty, and since then now we're between fourteen and sixteen and that's grossing sets up as a multiple of their investible assets. So that tells you they're looking for things that are a little bit more highly leverageable. But any edge they will
look at. You know, fifteen years ago, no multistrap traded munis most all of them do. Now, you know, there were certain businesses like index rebounel, things of that nature basis type trades that once were the exclusive province of the street and now because in the ability of a lot of these multi strats to effectively lose use their balance sheet, they can engage in those businesses. Right.
This is run of the themes that's come up as the sort of like post dog frank era or a lot of certain types of trades that used to exist in house at the major banks are now have now effectively been outsourced in some manner to buyside entities where it's more appropriate to take these risks. Let's talk about your time when you were a PM. We talked about
the value of the seat and not getting fired. And I also get the impression that on a sort of day to day or week to week or trade to trade basis, there's a lot of constraints from the risk manager. Talk about the incentives of the PM to survive and make it to the next year and make it to the next bonus season.
I mean, you can essentially think of working for a multistrat is you're running your own business. Okay, you're sort of running your own fund. But you only have one client, so you have to make very sure that that client's happy. Your constraints are usually put in, you know, two terms. You'll often hear the term capital thrown around. You know, Tracy manages seven hundred million in XYZ and Joe has fifty million in ABC, that sort of thing. The truth is,
those aren't really easily comparable numbers, right. The hedge fund itself is inherently leveraged. They'll typically allocate somewhere between three and four times their notional value, maybe even more in terms of allocations to traders a billion dollars, you're allocating out theoretically three or four billion. But there are two numbers that are going to matter a lot to a PM. The first one is how much can I lose? That's your draw down, and there are two ways to measure that.
Most hedge funds are going to measure it on a peak to trough basis, meaning even if you're up five, if you give back suppose you're stopped is seven. If you give back seven, then that's going to be your draw down, even though you really weren't down from zero much at all. The other way to measure that is from zero from flat. So you can actually be fired from one of these places and be up money on the year. When it happens, you just gave back too much of your sort of new money.
So actually explain that further a why would you fire someone who's managed money profitably? But then here's another related question to that is, like you hear about, Okay, someone gets fired from place X, and then they go get a new job at place y. But if there objectively talented, and maybe they're not, but if by some measure that it can be established that they're talented, why are the pods so quick to fire them? I mean, I get, yeah,
you lose money, that's not good. But if you know losing money happens if the person has talent, why the quick fires.
It helps if you think of the multistraat itself as managing a portfolio themselves, but it's a portfolio of risk takers. Not to be reductive, but generally most of those types of decisions are made on a fund by fund basis. In other words, you know, maybe this person is not as uncorrelated to what we have as we already thought. They are not really making a lot of money. They just exceeded their draw down, because it's not like they don't know that it's a picatrough number. They're perfectly aware
of it. Or perhaps there's another opportunity in the market to replace them with someone better. They're always looking to optimize their portfolio of risk takers as far as the other firm. They could be thinking, this person does fit what we need and we really like their risk profile. Even a really great PM is going to have a significant draw down every two to five years, and there aren't too many who've gone ten plus years with no
losing gears. You know, you just don't want to be that person who experiences that five percent of the time broad down in your first few months. And a new thought.
I used to know a credit guy who always said, like, you're not a proper credit trader until you've had at least one major blow up. Maybe maybe that's true. But on this note, Okay, if I get a big draw down, I understand maybe it depends on where I am with my career, and if I get it in the first six months of working at a shop, that would be very bad. But if it's in you know, year six or something, maybe it doesn't matter so much, But how embarrassed am I when that happens? And am I like
publicly shamed within the organization for this happening? Or how does it work exactly?
You know, it's sort of funny because obviously we had a period just a few months back where there were a lot of headlines about large losses. Is the marketplace views it, it's going to feel awful to the PM, right, you never want to be on the screen for a loss. But whenever you see somebody up there with one hundred million dollar loss, that means they had one hundred million to lose, which means that they were managing a large
book and they were taking a lot of risk. And if you'll notice, some of those pms from a few months ago are still exactly where they were. You are really generally better off getting bounced for a large loss than you are a small one.
This goes fits with something one of my beliefs that a billionaire is someone who either has positive one billion dollars in net worth or negative one billion in one billion in debt, because you have to be like really rich to have lost that much money. And anytime you hear about like a former billionaire and they lost everything. They're almost all as still somehow living large. So being deeply deeply in debt is almost as good as having tons of money. So I'm glad to hear this. How
does that constrain your actual trading? Okay, you know that draw down number, you know at the point we're going to get stopped out of the seat, How does that actually translate into thinking about the trades that you put on?
I hate to do And it depends, But it sort of depends on where you're at. Because even though common draw down for limits are usually somewhere between seven and ten percent for what's called a stop out, you might end up getting your capital reduced well before that at three and a half or five, and that makes it really really hard to come back. The key is, you know, do you have a process, do you have risk management and portfolio construction where you are still applying your risk management.
I'm only going to risk as much my risk capital. What is between me and a capital reduction or draw down? I'm going to be pick here. I'm going to trade smaller. There are a lot of funds that have you know, internal coaches, psychologists like it's windy Rhodes is based on real people who do real things. And you know, certain firms will sit you down and talk to you, or they'll make you take a time out. Other firms will
just say that's it, you're out. But psychologically it makes you you want to get it back, which is not a great feeling because even when you get there, you're just at flat and it really impacts your risk taking tolerance. I think one of the best things that you know, I ever heard was if you're kind of in a losing street, just get flat and go away. Don't keep any marginal things. You can always buy it back later. You can always sell it later. But get your mind right.
But it does negatively affect you and you kind of stew your thinking either to I'm going to take more bets to get it back faster, or I'm not going to do anything because I'm going to be so picky. Overtrading is really common. I'll give you a for example. Well, people coming from the cell side almost always overtrade when they first get to the buyside. The reason is trading has a positive expected value for them. They are in the bid ask. Not only that, but facilitation desk on
the cell side. They lose money if VALL explodes, but they generally make a lot of more money after it subsides. The bid ask widens out and they could collect a lot of clients flow in the back end of that. One of the questions that I always ask people is, you know, tell me about your biggest draw down. What did happen, When was it, what was going on? What happened?
Would you do? And the sell side traders will always have very quick times to recovery, and they expected to get it back, but that's not the positive expected value you have on the buy side. It costs your money to trade.
Brian, tell me about your biggest draw down and what it was and what you did well.
My biggest drug I was losing my job. I can't name numbers, but essentially I violated my own risk. I usually never speculated on outright vault, and I had a long VALL position, and I normally would have structured that as a spread, and I didn't. And though I was directionally right, I bought really expensive wall and therefore didn't
make much money. Got hit on volatility in a much larger fashion than I thought I would, And I was in that camp of not a big draw down, and it was almost unreal to people that I knew, Like, why would they let you go? Because there's not a lot of verifiable information out there. That always sounds very suspect to people. I wish I could be more colorful for that.
No, no, no, then that's really helpful. But on this note, I'm also curious. Do pms ever go to like risk managers or the people above them and beg for like either more money or more risk tolerance.
Oh? Absolutely, And a lot of firms actually have, you know, programs where if you have something that's really scalable that you think is very functional, they may give you sort of a side account and you get paid on that, but it's not part of your regular book. Once you work in BD, a lot of the people who you bring in sort of ask you questions like, Hey, I want to do this, Who should I ask? When should
I ask? I generally tell pms, unless it's an actual trade idea, don't just ask for more capital unless it's one of two situations. Number One, you just got there because they love you, you haven't done anything wrong, and they just probably paid up to get you. Number Two, you've just made a hundred million bucks. Other than those two situations, don't ask for things.
Wait, let's learn more about violating your own risk book. There's a famous story from Stan Druckenmiller. He apparently like bought the very top of the internet bubble, and he says, you asked me what I learned. I didn't learn anything. I already knew that I wasn't supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basket case and couldn't help myself. So maybe I learned not to do it again, but I already knew that. When a fund manager is sort of like violate or a PM is violating some of
their own things, do they know it? Do they feel differently? Do they get like some sort of acidic taste in their mouth? When I like go on tilt when I play poker, I always sort of know it, but I can't help myself anyway. Like I just do it and I go all in and I know I hadn't then I have to embarrassingly walk out of the table. Like what does that feel like? Talk about like what's going on in someone's brain when they're like taking these risks that on paper they shouldn't be.
Well, usually you only recognize in the rear view. If you slow down and think through the trade, you know, you sort of realize that, hey, you probably shouldn't do this. But I think you're parallel with being on tilt at a poker table. It's it's that knowledge, you know, as can you call somebody or after you raise that instant
feeling that man, I just leaped up. It's that feeling, only you're going to feel it for a few days, and you're going to get a little email or call from your risk manager, and then you're not going to know what that sit down is going to be like. It might be, Hey, no big deal, get back out there, you know, don't worry about it. It may be an entirely different conversation. You may be told to go to HR don't take your jacket, or take your jacket, I
should say. But it isn't a bad feeling. And I think some of the better mentors that I've had through the years have kind of taught me like that mental health thing and where you're at is very important. And I think it's even worse when you're at a multistraat or a situation where you have a single plot that's it if that one client isn't happy, you are probably out for at least six months and potentially much longer.
The BD process to bring a new PM on board is somewhere around three months on its own.
Do you do post mortems on winning and losing trades?
Kind of?
You know, like after I forget talk about poker, you go back and you run the poker hand through a solver and you see if you played it correctly, often whether you made money or lose money. Is there an equivalent process that's done in the trading world.
N hundred percent. As a matter of fact, if you guys have never had Brent Donnelly on, he wrote a book called Alfit Trader, and I've probably never seen that information written down in one place before.
But right, yeah, we should have them back on or something to talk about just now, but keep tell us more about it from your perspective, Yes.
You know, and that is part of the other process, like we mentioned edge, like the other parts of the beating process that I want to know the process by which somebody selects trades. I want to know about their portfolio construction, and I want to know their approach to risk, Especially on risk, you'll find that very good pms, and especially these firms, the firms themselves, even though the PM may not see it, they know exactly how many bets
you've taken. They know about your hit rate, they understand your skew. They can sort of tell when you're deviating from your wrist mandate. They have a lot of analytics. But it's been my experience that the best pms look at it themselves. They're almost religious with it. You know, how did I do today? It's very similar to an athlete watching tape or a dancer. My daughters loves dance. You know, she'll watch tape of herselves. This is what
I missed, this is what I didn't do. And the great benefit of doing it in a statistical fashion is you can remove, oh, I won't count that because it was a Tuesday and a full moon. Any excuse you have goes out the window. Those are the numbers on this note.
And since Joe brought up poker earlier, are there like popular ways to become a better better better? Does that work for all?
Better?
A better better better? And I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking back to Liar's Poker. That's a famous example. And then wasn't there something at Jane Street that Sam Bankman Freed was doing a bunch of different like gambling games things like that.
Yeah.
Like what is popular in terms of I guess building up your risk returnals.
Well, I think anything where you have some element of strategy, And I think one of the reasons that poker is so popular is that it combines not only strict strategy like you might see in chess, but also a fair degree of complete randomness and you're going to take some bad beats and that's going to happen in trading. It's easy to forget, but a really good PM might have a fifty two fifty three percent hit rate on their trades.
It becomes what their skew is how much they make on their winners versus how much they lose on their losers. So anything where you're actually becoming more in tune to your own risk taking, your ability to think in what most people call probabilistic terms, or thinking in bets after they any Duke book, any exercise like that, and I
think poker is probably just the most popular. It's also a great fun I don't know whether i'd say team building game, but it's a fun social game that people play often around hedge funds, and it fits with the gambling mentality, so we hear about it a lot, but there are a lot of different internal games that people engage in.
I just have one last question, and it goes back to the role of the analyst, and you mentioned, oh, maybe you know, an analyst could be valuable if they really know the history of what happens, if they're X or Y. I can just look that up on three on chagbtr perplexity these days, like, how realistic is it in your view that firms could meaningfully reduce analyst headcount by using artificial intelligence, or if they save money on by using artificial intelligence, would that just create new roles
for more sort of advanced research. Where are we at with this? You must talk to people about what they're doing with this.
I think there's lots of things they can do. And obviously, you know you're talking about pret secretive organizations, so there's an enterprise sharing issue there to deal with. But yeah, a lot of things could be really computerized. But you're also looking for people who are going to be able to tie the story and the narrative and with what was going on with the instruments, and it's probably not something so simple as you know, what did the dollar
in do the last time the FED hiked? It might be something more like what was a red screens puts foot steepener doing the last time the FED hiked, which you're going to require a lot of modifications to those AI models. I'm always hesitant to talk about this because I can remember we were told that all the paper companies were going to go out of business because everybody was going to read everything online. And what happened. We just all printed it.
Oh, yeah, that's true. And they and they a lot of them also sell cardboard boxes and so they benefited from e commerce. Those same companies actually absolutely.
Georgia Pacific is probably huge in Amazon's warehouse. But I think that there will always people who because this industry thrives on you know, I can do this even though the odds are very much against me, and they will definitely use any edge they can get informationally as far as analytics or anything like that. But usually there's something that you're going to have to ask that maybe not
everybody understands or nos. I think everybody who's in this business got into it in one way or another, and somebody handed them what I just generically call, you know, street born, which is the market Wizard's books or any of those types of things, and they're fantastic because what I got out of reading those types of books is there's a lot of different ways to make money. You just have to find out what you're good at and how you can apply your particular set of skills and
attributes to doing it. And I think that there's going to be somebody who gets really good at asking you one of these am models market questions, and that person who's going to get built up. We're already seeing increase for heads of AI at several different funds, and I think that that's going to continue as they explore more and more, you know, what they can actually do with it. They have no problem spending money on the either the
AI or the human being. It will ultimately come up to who can perform.
So how do you avoid I guess group think among your pms, because the whole point of multistrats is those uncorrelated returns, and you don't want everyone just putting on the same trades, either literally or maybe through another angle.
And I'm thinking specifically about journalism. So some newspapers used to always move reporters from a certain beat after they'd been there for like ten years or something, and the idea was just to shake it up a little bit and make sure that they're not getting like too cozy or too comfortable with that particular industry. The downside of
doing that, of course, is that you lose expertise. But I'm just wondering, like, how do people, yeah, how do people avoid that group think aspect and make sure that everyone's doing you know, new stuff kind of independently.
Well. One way is limiting the communication between the pods. Some places do not really allow their pods to communicate. Another way is basically structurally, you don't want to see people hang on to each other's trades. You're going to be looking at this from you know, a macro view within the firm. You're going to see this type of trade that this person had on is increasing in size
in the firm. But by and large, if you've fired right, you're going to hire independent thinkers, and a seasoned PM will tell you I might like somebody else's idea, but I can't really trade it properly unless it's my idea too, I kind of have to adopt that as my own. So group think is not as prevalent as you would think because it's structurally prohibited in some places and the places where it's not. You know, a seasoned PM is like any I may love that trade that you pitched me, Joe,
but yours and I can't. I'm not doing my job if I say, Joe, when are we getting out of this? That's not what I'm paid to do. So part of it is on the part of the PM internally, and then the other part of it is on the fact that they don't want to be seen as copying the p next guy's trades.
All right, but just real quickly, maybe you don't want to do groupthink or copy the next guy's trades. But if there's a hot beta, right, you're always looking for alpha. But if there's a hot beta like AI beta or whatever, or falling inflation beta like some of these long term trends, but that's not your thing. Do pms find ways to backdoor their acid class into the hot trade in a way that like may the fact to become trade crowding.
Yeah. A former boss of mine used to say, there's never been a risk management framework the smart trader could outwit.
That's what I'm wondering. That's like, is it this cat and mouse game where you're, in part trying to outwit the person who could tap you on the shoulder by trading something that looks like something else.
Yeah, there's a lot of downside to doing that, you know, if you don't have a trade kind of properly thought out. But you know, in general, if I hire one of you to trade credit and the other one to trade the front end of the yield curve, and you know, all of a sudden, Brazil is very hot the real and you're both asking me for limits on the real Like, you won't have limits in something that you don't already trade, so you can't really deviate for your mandate too much.
It's kind of a I'll just find a credit spread that's correlated with the rail yeah.
Or you know, there are a lot of ETFs that basically contain macro trades if you will, and I have often wondered, you know, are those there so that mutual fund managers can you know, and investigate equities, can speculate on the yield curve. But there are always ways to do it. You just have to kind of hire the right people who aren't necessarily going to do that. And if you get in trouble for something like that, I sort of like to say that this is the second
most waryuristic streight in America. Word gets out is large of an industry, it is, it's not that big in an individual areas. And if somebody has really done something untoward, then it's people are going to hear about it.
Brian Yelvington, thank you for coming on odd Lots and talking about getting and keeping multistraat jobs. Our journey continues. Thank you so much. Really appreciate chatting with you.
Thank you, thank you for having me. It's great to get to talk to you guys.
Tracy, if I were like young, I think I or if I were in college or something, I think I would have taken that trading job.
Now.
I mean, I like the way my direction, life direction went. But if I wanted to do over, I'm curious what that fork in the road looks like.
There'ought Yeah, that's so sad will.
Be a different puck, you know, Like I feel like I would I would trade you know what happened, there would still be an odd one. I would trade for a while, I would blow up. I would get a job in journalism, and then I would be one of those journalists who reminds all of their colleagues all of the times that they used work and finance. You know, I would find like the person on the call, they're like, I just love the you know, It's like I was like, oh,
I used to work in a multi strategy hedge fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well I used to be a trader. Anyway.
Sorry, keep going, Joe, how many times have you brought up that interview with the trading company on this note?
Yeah?
Okay, that was really interesting. One thing that kind of jumps out at me is the last discussion about you know, how do you avoid everyone just taking on the same risk. It really seems to me like it's correlation built on correlation, built on correlation, right, And I often think correlation is one of the hardest things to actually nail down on Wall Street. So you know, you gotta wonder so far, so far, you know, a bunch of multistrats survived April pretty well, so I guess we'll see.
I think if I were a risk manager and I had one person trading credit and the other person trading the short end of the old curve, and suddenly there are month to month return started looking identical, and it happened to be identical with the person who traded Brazilian rayal.
That would set off a red flag for me. You know, like, I feel like the return profile itself is probably part of the hint, right that even if you can't really articulate why this person's traded is secretly this person's trade in disguise. If there re tuned profile looks too similar, that probably sets off some red flags.
We got to talk to a risk manager, don't Yeah, we should do that.
Okay, if you're a risk manager, you want to talk about what that job is like or if you know, one shoots a message.
All right, shall we leave it there.
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carman Arman dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot and Kilbrooks at Kilbrooks. From our Odd Lots content go to Bloomberg dot com slash od lots were the daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all of these topics twenty four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash od lots.
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