SI380: Dispersion Is the Story This Year (Group Conversation Part 1)
Top Traders Unplugged
Trade-offs, Hindsight and Regime Risk
Richard argues design choices always involve trade-offs and warns against overfitting to past regimes.
Niels is joined by all 9 amazing co-hosts, to discuss a year that refused to behave. In part one of the annual "roundtable", Niels and the group map why 2025 produced such striking dispersion across trend followers. They revisit the Liberation Day shock and the uncomfortable truth it exposed: results often came down to unglamorous choices like market selection, time horizon, and how quickly risk is resized after clustered volatility and sharp reversals. The conversation then widens to a structural theme: the rapid growth of strategies investors hope will sit outside stocks and bonds, from managed futures and multi strats to structured products, gold, and crypto, plus the liquidity, reflexivity, and selection challenges that follow when everyone reaches for the same diversifier.
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Episode TimeStamps:
00:00 - Opening and introduction to the Systematic Investor Series
02:24 - Setting the agenda for the year-end group discussion
06:04 - Return dispersion and the shock around Liberation Day
10:41 - Market selection versus trend speed as performance drivers
15:17 - Volatility adjustment and why mid-speed models struggled
21:11 - The rapid growth of non correlated assets
26:40 - Liquidity limits and reflexive effects of large inflows
31:23 - Is dispersion healthy or a hurdle for allocators
37:17 - Investor behavior versus strategy outcomes
42:56 - Are model design choices ever truly obvious
46:22 - Objectives, factor exposure, and what investors really buy
50:49 - Dispersion as differentiation or classification problem
57:07 - Evaluating managers in a world of randomness
01:02:02 - How much data is enough to judge performance
01:11:05 - Closing remarks and preview of part two
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