Colin Lancaster, Global Head of Macro, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors

Now the Global Head of Macro at Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Colin Lancaster has always found top-down investing a fascinating discipline.  Trained as a lawyer but finding his way to the buy-side in the 1990’s, Colin has spent the last 25 years in markets, allocating capital and building teams focused on macro.  Over his long career, he’s traded through his share of vol events, each a challenging experience but also formative from a risk philosophy standpoint. Our conversation is a retrospective on the nature of risks that investors are forced to confront, how discontinuities in asset prices materialize and that ever elusive search for the positive carry hedge. Exploring seismic episodes of risk-off, we also spend time on the need to anticipate the inevitable and typically overwhelming response from the Central Bank and how, post both the GFC and now Pandemic, the Fed’s interventions have increasingly crowded out the integrity of market price signals.  Lastly, we spend time on Colin’s fast paced and insightful book, “FED UP!”, a project he undertook in 2020.  In it, Colin brings to life the frenetic, all-consuming world of global macro investing in which an unwelcome portfolio move is always a bad tweet away and decisions must be made quickly and based on a vastly incomplete information set.  Weaved into “FED UP!” is a statement of concern about the widening gap of wealth inequality in the US.  In a world in which asset prices are increasingly the outcome of Central Banks who mean well but whose actions vastly benefit some versus others, a certain rethink may be in order.  I hope you enjoy this episode of the Alpha Exchange, my conversation with Colin Lancaster.