BONUS: Cem Karsan - Derivatives Are The Underlying

Cem Karsan stops by The Business Brew to discuss the lens he views markets through.  Cem's viewpoint is unique compared to many guests on this program because he looks at how options dealers are positioned and considers what flows may result from that positioning.  Many guests on this show view equity valuation as the present value of the discounted cash flows available to equity.  While Cem would likely agree with that, he argues in this episode that an equity's valuation is really an output derived from the options market (which expresses probabilistic views of discounted cash flows).   We hope this episode gives you something to think about!

Cem Karsan formed Kai Volatility Advisors after two decades of experience building industry-leading derivatives businesses.  From 1999 to 2002, he worked as a volatility trader as part of RBC Dominion Securities/ Derivatives Arbitrage Group.  From 2002 to 2005, he worked under renowned Wall St. investor John Mulheren at Bear Wagner Specialists, where Cem helped expand the firm's fledgling derivatives arbitrage business into a competitive force within the industry.  In 2005, Cem took a select group from the firm's proprietary trading arm and founded Precision Capital Management, specializing in equity index volatility arbitrage.  The firm became a significant SPX market maker reaching, at its peak, a high of ~13% of daily trading volume.*  In 2010, Cem divested his stake in Precision and fouded AEGEA Capital, the precursor to Kai Volatility Advisors. *Past performance may not be indicative of future results.

Follow Cem on Twitter https://twitter.com/jam_croissant

Learn more about Kai: https://www.kaivolatility.com/contact  

This episode is brought to you by Bastiat Partners, a boutique investment banking firm.  See https://bastiatpartners.com/.  Detailed show notes below.

Album art photo taken by Mike Ando. Please see www.mikeando.com.

Thank you to @mathewpassy (on Twitter) for the show production.

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Detailed Show Notes:

Open – Cem’s background

7:25 – How Cem thinks about what matters to capital markets

13:10 – Valuations have no predictive value, short term

14:10 – What happened in 2017 and why did the market seem to go up every day?

21:40 – The counterintuitive conclusion of buying and selling volatility

23:10 – Why equities are derivatives of “derivatives”

27:10 – Why options are potentially better instruments for expressing a view

32:45 – Gamma squeezes explained

38:25 – Cem’s thoughts on where we are from a macro perspective

46:10 – The wealth gap and why

49:40 – Why we may be in a fundamentally inflationary environment

54:50 – The impacts of monetary policy and which generations have been hurt and helped by policy

1:00:40 – Why some medicine today may end up better in the long run

1:02:10 – The tension between utopia and the current (efficient) system

1:06:40 – Evolution and iteration will hopefully lead to better incomes

1:10:55 – The coming risks may come from exported inflation to emerging markets

1:13:10 – The winners of tomorrow used easy money to plant seeds over the past years

1:15:10 – More background on Cem