This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. The advent of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) brought about one of the largest and most transformative trends in the investment landscape. With legions of enthusiasts and no shortage of detractors, ETFs also ignited the so-called passive investing revolution, upending the industry and sparking controversy. We could think of no better guest than our friend Dave Nadig (CIO and ...
Sep 14, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 36
Brian is the founder of Shaping Wealth and author of two books, The Investor's Paradox and The Geometry of Wealth. We spoke about the connections between wealth and happiness, and the myriad complications that distract people from what really matters. On our journey we touched on the importance of setting constructive expectations, how to navigate the relative nature of happiness, how the human brain interfaces with social media and markets, and how the advisor role is extending in the direction...
Sep 10, 2020•55 min•Ep. 35
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. In the digital age, we are all suffering from varying degrees of information overload and must lean on trusted guardians of the narrative to make sense of it all. Our good friend Ben Hunt (Epsilon Theory), one of the most reliable guardians , joined us this week for a thought-provoking conversation that included: How he witnessed and reported on the COVID pandemic story un...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 34
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. Behavioral finance has been at the forefront of investing for many years now, yet it is still largely misunderstood and rarely applied to investors’ actual habits. Our good friend Dan Egan has been pushing this frontier, and in this conversation we covered: The fallacy of trying to predict what makes us happy and how that applies to investing Why understanding our biases d...
Aug 31, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 33
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. His hypothesis on the adverse effects of passive investments in market behavior has catapulted him into the spotlight, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Earlier this year he became one of our most popular podcast guests; this time Mike Green (Logica Capital) returned with guns blazing. In a less formal and less constrained happy hour conversation, we discussed: Logic...
Aug 24, 2020•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 32
Although technology has revolutionized many aspects of our lives, there are still some industries that resist change and professionals who are certain that the old way is the right way . Some believe this applies to investment advisors. They most likely have never met Shiraz Ahmed. He is the quintessential modern advisor, with whom we had the pleasure of riffing on topics such as: Building and improving your career by observing your peers (and learning from their mistakes) Finding a niche of peo...
Aug 18, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 31
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. While the theme was the Chinese investment landscape, this episode can also be described as the Bobby Schwarz show. From his early days as a floor trader in Chicago, through his experience making movies in Hollywood, then finally founding RCM Alternatives, Bobby recounts countless memorable stories including: The high-octane environment of life on a trading floor, includin...
Aug 10, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 30
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. For the last 12 years, the Fed and other major central banks have exerted overwhelming influence and power over investors’ behavior and capital markets. Since the pandemic began, governments have been forced to step up and unleash a fiscal tsunami to help ailing economies during the deepest recession in living memory. To make sense of this convoluted macroeconomic environm...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 29
Today we interview Lars Kestner, a Managing Director at a European investment bank. Over his 20+ year career on Wall Street, he has led teams that have managed derivative risk across a vast range of market environments. He is the author of Quantitative Trading Strategies , a cutting edge text on systematic trading. Lars designed and employed his first systematic trading system to trade 30yr bond futures before entering college. We discuss two papers that Lars released on his website, satquant.co...
Jul 29, 2020•58 min•Ep. 28
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. Despite the common understanding – and ubiquitous disclaimers – that past performance is not indicative of future returns, it is well documented that performance chasing can be almost considered a fundamental law of capital allocation among institutional and retail investors alike. It is also an open secret in the industry that well-connected managers are much more likely ...
Jul 28, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 28
Dan Egan is the Directory of Behavior Science and Investing at the online advisor, Betterment. In launching this rather unique career, Dan levered a Masters degree in Decision Science at the London School of Economics into a role as Behavioral Finance Specialist at Barclays Wealth in London before moving on to Betterment. With 15 years operating at the cross-section between human behavior and markets he is one of the world’s foremost experts in this field. To kick off the discussion I wanted to ...
Jul 17, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 27
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. To help us make sense of this market we invited Chris Schindler back to discuss: Why the next 10 years are likely to be very challenging and different from the past 10 years Why investors should set very low return expectations for virtually every major asset-class The power of recency bias and lottery-ticket (wishful) thinking The role of commodities and how to use them e...
Jul 14, 2020•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 26
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate current and most relevant themes in the world of investing. Among hot and contentious topics in investing, cryptocurrencies certainly rank top of the list – including their designation as a form of currency . From a techno-libertarian experiment, Bitcoin, its peers and particularly the blockchain technology that underpins them, have morphed into a global phenomenon that promises to revolutionize finance itself. Our conv...
Jul 02, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 25
With the popularity of sports betting personalities entering the investing world we thought it would be timely to bring an expert sports handicapper to discuss the similarities and differences between these highly probabilistic domains. Our guest for this conversation is Steve Merril of ProSportsInfo.com. Steve has been a professional sports handicapper and betting analyst for over 24 years and can be seen and heard every week on numerous radio and TV shows across the United States. We discussed...
Jun 27, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 24
Today’s guest produces the Breakingthemarket blog, which exploded onto the scene in spring of last year, spewing shrapnel at traditional beliefs about investment objectives and portfolio construction. Borrowing key concepts from Ed Thorpe and the Ergodicity Economics community, Matt - who would like to remain anonymous for now – builds portfolios that focus on maximizing geometric returns by combining uncorrelated investments with frequent rebalancing and appropriate exposure informed by the Kel...
Jun 26, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 23
This week we interview Andrew Miller, CIO of Miller Financial Management. Andrew’s passion is at the intersection of investment management and financial planning, and he has extremely novel perspectives on both domains. We trace Andrew’s background in structured credit and alternatives and map this experience to his current framework for thinking about diversification and sources of risk and return. We also discuss how Andrew’s views on diversification have evolved over time and how he thinks ab...
Jun 24, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 22
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. Most pension plans and other institutional investors with long-term liabilities are faced with an enormous mismatch between the return assumptions in their actuarial models and the combination of sky-high equity valuations and rock-bottom bond yields. Some have chosen to address their funding gaps by adding leverage to their portfolios. Topics of this include: Different ty...
Jun 23, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 21
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. The recent pandemic-led selloff has once again highlighted the importance of having ballast in portfolios to deal with extreme equity volatility – and ultimately protect investors from disastrous outcomes. This week we discussed: Whether bonds can continue to provide protection given rock-bottom yields If gold will outshine other safe-haven assets in the current environmen...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 20
Jason Buck is a founding partner of Mutiny Fund, an asset management firm with a vision to make high-quality tail hedging solutions available to a wider community of investors. Their fund aggregates managers with different tail-hedge styles, including options strategies, VIX relative value, and short-term trend traders to manage tails of all shapes and sizes. We cover: Why tail risk is best managed through the use of ensembles The so-called "Dragon Portfolio" as a risk-parity solution that adds ...
Jun 12, 2020•50 min•Ep. 19
Adam and Pierre focus their discussion on diversification as a combination of "diversity" and "balance". Diversity is about holding investments that are designed to thrive in very different market environments, and for different reasons. Balance has the objective of ensuring that investments are all able to express their unique personalities. Risk parity is the ultimate expression of diversification. Sadly, many investors are misguided about the concept, and focus on the wrong things. We drill t...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 18
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. We were joined this week by our friends Wes Gray (Alpha Architect) and Tobias Carlisle (Acquirers Funds) to discuss value investing, its prolonged winter and how it has fared in the current environment. This broad conversation includes: How value has historically outperformed growth, despite appearing to lag most of the time The mental – and emotional – fortitude required ...
Jun 08, 2020•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 17
In this wide-ranging discussion, Logica's Mike Green describes a mosaic of ways to "seek out a straddle", and reveals new data and analysis to help flesh-out his thesis on the growing importance of systematic passive flows to U.S. stocks. Mike makes a persuasive and disturbing case for how a series of regulatory changes driven by economic and political objectives have corrupted the equilibrium and signaling mechanisms of modern markets, and offers a framework, with specific examples, on how to p...
Jun 06, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 16
This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on Youtube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day. On our second episode, we invited our good friend Corey Hoffstein (Newfound Research) to analyze the roller-coaster experienced by equity investors in the past 3 months and discussed: the disconnect between the equity rally and the pain in the broader economy the companies and sectors that have led the charge how Trend signals in equities have evolved in the recent period ...
Jun 03, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 15
Join us for our inaugural episode of the “ReSolve Riffs” series where the team will go live on Youtube every Friday at 3pm over cocktails to discuss topics that are in the immediate zeitgeist of the investment world. In this episode we cover the very heated tail protection debate. The team discusses the challenges with different types of tail protection implementations including: the difficulty in sourcing the right strategy the challenges of different fund structures, whether diversification al...
May 26, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 14
How long will the recession last? How deep will it be? What are the long-term implications for the economy, markets, and society? The global pandemic has ushered in a period of extreme uncertainty and investors are left with too many unanswered questions and afraid for their portfolios. Where do we go from here? In this episode, the ReSolve team begins with an examination of some of the macroeconomic narratives that may drive capital markets for the coming months and years. But since these futur...
Apr 22, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 13
The idea that mainstream media could, to some degree, pursue the agenda of powerful groups might have been dismissed as conspiracy theory in the past. But over the years much has changed in how we perceive and interpret the flood of news and data-bits that compete for our attention each day, forcing us to seek out ways to distill the noise in search of something closer to the truth. Gestalt University’s latest guest has emerged as one of these trusted sources. His Epsilon Theory portal is one of...
Mar 20, 2020•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 12
This episode of Gestalt University could not be timelier, having been recorded two weeks prior to the current market correction that began in late February 2020. The discussion of fragile versus robust approaches is especially important given how recent volatility has led simpler tactical strategies to signal a complete shift away from equities and towards cash. This in turn has left practitioners second-guessing the wisdom of their indicators and hesitant to pull the trigger. For this fascinati...
Mar 07, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 11
Chris Schindler’s journey really took him all the way down the rabbit hole. He joined the Asset Liability Group at Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan in 2000 and soon became one of the founding members of the newly formed Tactical Asset Allocation Group. Most of his 18 years at Teachers’ were spent exploring and developing quantitative tools and strategies to optimize portfolio allocations. An early insight regarding the importance of maximizing investment breadth (or unique independent return drive...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 10
For the quant community, it was arguably the most awaited book of 2019. Finally, a peek behind the curtains into the most successful hedge fund manager in history. The +66% average (gross) returns that Jim Simons and his army of data scientists produced over the last 17 years in their Medallion fund captured the imagination of investors across the globe and their obsessive secrecy just added to the aura of mystique. After much resistance from the protagonists (not least of which Simons himself),...
Dec 23, 2019•32 min•Ep. 9
As fees across the world of financial services have decreased over the last few years, the former quotas and commission-based model under which investment advisors operated sounds like a relic of a bygone era. Back then, advisors were not in the business of providing services such as estate or tax planning, let alone financial education. Mike Hirthler, of Jacobi Capital, was a pioneer and an innovator. When he left the commissions-based job he got just out of college to launch a fee-based adviso...
Nov 25, 2019•37 min•Ep. 8
