What do you do when trends stop appearing for the quarter of a billion dollars you manage? Where do you go to find markets like the ‘good old days’ for trend following? Our guest for this episode, Abingdon Global’s Fred Schutzman is in a unique position to answer those questions – and much more! Listen to Fred share his background being a Chartist, working at CRB, why technical analysts have holes in their shoes, how easy it seemed to find successful trend models 20 years ago, the rise and fall ...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr 32 min
Over 100,000 investors in 180 countries listen to Ben Hunt, founder of Second Foundation Partners and the Epsilon Theory blog, debunk the latest narrative machines in each of his opus-like post. So with Covid cases climbing and inflation expectations rising, it seemed like as good a time as ever to bring Ben back on the pod to talk through all that is going on, and all that they are trying to tell us is going on. Listen in to Ben get animated about our current auto-tuning society, the Grand Cany...
Aug 12, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Who hasn’t been pitched a buffered note at this point? Participate in the upside and get credited back the first 10% in losses. What could go wrong? There are billions of dollars of these things out there, and they’re even creeping into the ETF and mutual fund space. How exactly do they work? Which options are being bought and sold? Is there hidden risk? What about exotics and knock ins and all the rest…. Do they cause extra liquidity issues for the market as a whole? We sat down with Exceed Inv...
Aug 05, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Dive into this fun chat with the equally irreverent and intelligent Bill Brewster, the self-made value investor in the style of Warren Buffet who dishes on twitter @BillBrewsterSCG hosts the Business Brew podcast in his spare time. We go into Chicago vs Florida real estate and taxes, commercial banking, TastyTrade and options, just how big of a Buffet fan you have to be to name your son Warren, Marvel vs Star Wars, the ultimate recurring revenue game that is cable companies, the brilliance of Di...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 17 min
We’re excited to have one of the pioneers of options trading on this episode, Jerry Haworth - Founder and CIO of renowned option and tail risk firm 36 South. In this wide-ranging talk, we dive into Jerry’s roots in Zimbabwe, trading South African bonds, structuring derivatives, the point in his jazz career where talent and drive diverge, how 36 south got started, canoe marathons, why long term options rule, non-recourse leverage, Victoria Falls, swaptions, asymmetry, Chicago Blues bars, liquidit...
Jul 22, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Saddle up everybody, because we’ve got the UrbanKaoboy on this episode, who’s ridden everything from ponies to draft horses to mustangs over his 30+ years in the investment game, doing commodities and derivatives at Goldman in the 90s, risk arb at Canyon Partners, and then opportunistic/value at his own fund Akanthos Cap Mgmt, before hanging up his spurs and focusing on running his own family office. We’re talking with Michael Kao about the credit culture in LA investment firms, trading the Gold...
Jul 15, 2021•1 hr 8 min
What is it about engineers and seeing the world through a quant lens? We’ve talked to plenty of quants who have an engineering mindset; but this episode’s guest is an actual engineer – doing his mechanical engineering work by day and dishing on portfolio construction at night via his excellent Breaking the Market blog and @breakingthemark twitter handle. Whether it is diving deep, real deep on arithmetic versus geometric returns, comparing performance measurements to Tiger Woods major’s performa...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 25 min
Our guest this episode has quickly become one of the must follows on FinTwit with his mixture of motivational messaging and market savvy. Kris Sidial is the Co-CIO of The Ambrus Group, a volatility arbitrage fund that focuses on statistical outliers in the U.S equity derivatives space. But he’s no kid, despite his bio touting his 28yr oldness, having worked on exotic options desk, prop firms, and now his own hedge fund. Kris and Jeff dive into growing up on the other side of the tracks, market m...
Jul 01, 2021•1 hr 18 min
There’s a new word in the financial lexicon. Transitory. And it all has to do with whether recent moves higher in prices of everything from lumber to copper to labor are the first signs of 1970s type inflation, or….as the Fed believes, is just “transitory” and will work itself out once the pandemic is over. We’re sitting down with Executive Director and Senior Economist of CME Group, Erik Norland, to discuss just what he sees in the commodity space, including a first for our pod – charts during ...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 17 min
Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic in every walk of life, and perhaps no more so than in the world of hedge funds and alternative investments. Howard Siow, Founding Principal and CEO at Taaffeite Capital, joins The Derivative to discuss how AI is used in the hedge fund world, and how everyone wants AI to predict every move in the market, but that’s not actually what AI does well. Howard talks how AI can be used as an incremental change agent, chicken farming, being a venture capitalist, the ...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 23 min
Who in their right mind would name an investment strategy after cockroaches? Well, probably the guys who view themselves as staging a mutiny against traditional portfolio construction and the investment business = Jason Buck and Taylor Pearson of Mutiny Funds. We're digging in deep with the two wunderkids in this episode on what exactly the Cockroach strategy is, what the first year for Mutiny looked like, Jimmy Buffet lyrics, AustinTexasville, applying e-commerce process and principles to asset...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr 15 min
How do you get included in a Market Wizards book? How do you get a whole Michael Covel book written about you? You move from charting markets on graph paper to point and figure charts to running systematic models on an IBM computer in 1980, to running $600mm plus via Trendstat. We’re talking Havalinas and Bassanovas with none other than Tom Basso in today’s episode. Tom is a New Market Wizard as identified by Jack Schwaeger, and now semi-retired, trading his own money in between dancing and wine...
May 27, 2021•1 hr 17 min
We’re talking with two ‘in the crypto weeds’ traders/asset managers, Ben Upward of Synchronicity and Gary Basin, about crypto’s -30% one day drop, coinbase, the most surprising (& scariest) things about the recent crypto crash, size and action in futures, options, and non-futures, “what if” bitcoin had blown up, the right to a free market, bitcoin as beta?, new Bitcoin offers (like bitcoin micros), the negatives and positives of volatility in the space, leverage upon leverage upon leverage ,...
May 20, 2021•54 min
From actual capital allocator to branding his book and podcast “Capital Allocator,” Ted Seides has one of the biggest banks of knowledge in the capital allocation game. He’s a well-known author of two books, host of the podcast Capital Allocators , and in his “free time” invests his own money in some of the best and brightest hedge funds around. In today’s episode, we’re talking with Ted about Capital Allocators (the podcast & the book), the transition of talking to managers for an allocatio...
May 13, 2021•1 hr 29 min
In through the nose – out through the mouth. In through the nose – out through the mouth. You’ve now joined a headspace where we think you’re prepped to focus in and become one with today’s guest. He’s a well known CTA, expert researcher, meditation and yoga practitioner, and Founder & CIO of $1.8 Billion in AUM = Quest Partners. Today’s guest is none other than Nigol Koulajian, he’s been in the business since the early 1990’s and has grown to become one of the leading voices in alternative ...
May 06, 2021•1 hr 32 min
Today’s guest is one you’ve heard many times before if you’ve listened to The Derivative, but may not necessarily know all that well. He’s and alts/managed futures veteran, having started his career in Chicago’s famed trading pits, founded a futures investment firm, and continued on to become a partner at RCM Alternatives. ,And, of course, when not doing his day job, steps in as the dynamic host of our podcast. We’re talking Jeff Malec. We thought today’s podcast would be a great opportunity to ...
Apr 29, 2021•1 hr 14 min
COVID affected a lot of ways that we interacted with the world – it changed how we worked, how we socialized, how we entertained ourselves….and if you’ve been tuned into the markets over the past year, it also changed our expectations on how in the world Oil prices could have ever gone NEGATIVE. Last year this time we put out our “ Crude Oil Goes Negative…WTF ^%$#?! Pod” and were talking with veteran trader Brent Belote about the sticky situation. In today’s episode, we brought Brent back on to ...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr 16 min
*We apologize for potential audio issues with this episode – please see the transcript HERE or go to the episode blog on rcmalts.com to download.* NOPE - we’re not just going to be talking to our typical vol guest. NOPE – we’re not going over the usual trend following or strategy. NOPE we definitely (did) find today’s guest off of VolTwit. @nope_it’s_lily is Head Researcher at Salience Capital and the creator of NOPE (Net Options Pricing Effect), a proprietary metric used to measure the notional...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr 2 min
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – the opportunities in the Asian investment landscape are nuanced, emerging, and incredibly attractive. But on top of the excitement around the opportunities, there’s also gated access and a general list of unknowns that can make investors think twice; so, in this episode we’re joined by Alvin Fan, CEO of OPIM to check off the list of questions and give you more clarity on investing in the Asian markets. Today, Alvin is giving you the inside scoop on O...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 29 min
The world of sports and finance have continually meshed together – and the Covid-19 pandemic has fast tracked that even further. Between the growth of analytics, to financiers making their way into the pro sports arena, I think we’re past a future where these two worlds will ever depart. Today’s guest is the culmination of these two worlds in one with the background (and family name) to prove it. Joe Pompliano, founder of Huddle Up – a daily newsletter breaking down the business and money behind...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 26 min
How many families have two brothers who’ve been in the hedge fund game for 30+ years, much less on polar opposites of the long vol/short vol spectrum. We’re talking with the volatility loving, positive skew seeking brother in our episode today, Roy Niederhoffer. Roy is the founder and President of the eponymous R. G. Niederhoffer Capital Management, which has been coding, trading, analyzing, and investing in futures markets since before most of us had a future. We’re talking with Roy about 100-s...
Mar 25, 2021•1 hr 17 min
When you hear news about artificial intelligence (AI), it might be easy to assume it has nothing to do with you. But if you use face recognition on your phone? Check. Google auto-fills your search bar? Check. And increasingly – the asset manager you may have managing your money is using some combination of machine learning and AI. Today’s guests were early adopters of that tech and applying it to trading algorithms. Jagdeesh Prakasam, Chief Executive Officer and Robert Rotella, Founder & Cha...
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 40 min
Forget fat tails, left tails, even tall tales. We’re going into extracting value from long tails of the distribution on the pod in this episode. Vineer Bhansali is a 29-year industry veteran, previously at PIMCO, a Forbes columnist, author of four books on finance, and is currently the founder and CEO of longtail alpha. In today’s episode, we’re talking with Vineer about abstract physics = finance, what constitutes a tail event, negative yielding debt, identifying outlier risks, option-based tre...
Mar 11, 2021•1 hr 18 min
The king of Commodities has entered The Derivative ring. You know his name, you’ve read his books, you’ve probably utilized his index, and now you’re listening to him in this most recent podcast episode. Jim Rogers is an American investor and financial commentator and was there at the start of the Quantum Fund and Soros Fund Management. In today’s episode, we’re talking with Jim about peanut sales, commodity supercycles, global debt reset, creation of the RICI , reweighting for renewables, commo...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 16 min
We’re bringing out the cake & ice cream for this pod because it’s The Derivative’s 1 year anniversary! If you’ve been with us since the beginning – you may fondly remember our inaugural episode The Human Behind The Hedge Fund with Wayne Himelsein. So, in today’s episode, we brought back Wayne, President and Chief Investment Officer at Logica Capital Advisers, and as a special anniversary bonus – his business partner Michael Green, Chief Strategist at Logica. We’re talking with Mike and Wayne...
Feb 25, 2021•1 hr 21 min
Talking this week with Poker Pro Chris Sparks on everything from game strategy to deciphering A.I. capabilities and catching bots. With Founder, CEO, and Performance Coach of The Forcing Function we’re taking it back to the beginning where we dive in with Chris about an interesting online alias “GoMuckYourself”, grabbing seats at poker tables in Vegas, exploring his latest paper “Play to Win: Meta – Skills in High Stakes Poker” and using behavioral science and system thinking to lead a new gener...
Feb 18, 2021•1 hr 33 min
Why can't vol managers tell good jokes? Bad timing? Buh dum tsss. All jokes aside, we’re excited to be back talking Volatility on The Derivative with the Professor, the DJ, the Han Solo of Vol trading, the one and only Benn (with two N’s) Eifert. Benn is Founder and CIO of QVR Advisors and joined us to talk about VIX and options and the overall volatility space. We’re digging deep in this episode about matching hoodies, delta hedging driving gamma flows, hedge funds ability to be aggressive, qua...
Feb 11, 2021•1 hr 31 min
Bitcoin started the year with a bang, rising up above $41k before falling back into the 20ks, and settling in the mid 30ks lately. It was at $5k in March 2020! Yet it feels way different, and dare we say – less volatile – this time. How are we supposed to interact with bitcoin, how do you capitalize on the volatility, and where does it fit into investor portfolios overall? We have two big-time bitcoiners on with us today to go over it all – Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, ...
Feb 05, 2021•1 hr 27 min
If you’ve been on the internet, watched TV, or talked to anyone outside of yourself in the past week and a half you can’t have missed it. GameStop stock ($GME) went from trading at a low of $3/share to +$400/share thanks to a masterful subreddit trolling from retail traders. And it’s not stopping at just GameStop, shares from Blackberry ($BB), AMC ($AMC), Express ($EXP) and Nokia ($NOK) are quickly following suit – and its leaking over into S&P futures and options. So how does this happen, w...
Jan 28, 2021•1 hr 21 min
Welcome to the Wizarding World of Market Wizards – and today’s special guest is head wizard who wrote the actual books on market wizards, Jack Schwager. Jack has written 6 books on the markets including his original: Market Wizards and the newly released: Unknown Market Wizards . In addition to his authoring (is that even a word?) Jack has served as a Director for futures research - meaning he knows soybean contract from a Spac. In today’s episode, we’re covering all things Market Wizard books, ...
Jan 21, 2021•1 hr 15 min
