Noel Smith, founder of Convex Asset Management has spent most of his career outside of the world of managing other people’s money. Instead, he traded his own capital as a proprietary trader. Prop traders are famed for generating staggering rates of return, but because they have no interest in raising money, their secrets and strategies generally remain behind closed doors. However, he has decided to bring these strategies to the hedge fund world at Convex Asset Management and while they don’t scale to produce the same level of returns their lack of availability outside the prop world gives him differentiation in the product marketplace. In this interview, Smith explains why props can make so much more money, how much harder capital raising is than he anticipated, and why he ranks relationships and likability higher than performance when it comes to hedge fund success.
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Apple Podcast https://bit.ly/4e7QJ1M
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Follow Noel Smith on Twitter: https://x.com/NoelConvex
Follow Max Wiethe on Twitter: https://x.com/maxwiethe
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:16 What is Prop Trading?
10:51 Moving to the Hedge Fund World
16:36 The Hedge Fund Popularity Contest
23:04 Volatility Trading Strategies
27:27 Extracting Information From The Options Market
32:09 Scaling Prop Strategies
34:44 Alpha Degradation
39:31 Being Good Is Not Enough
48:03 Dealing With Extreme Performance
53:28 Long-term Vision For Convex Asset Management
