Flirting with Models

Financial experts Corey Hoffstein, Rodrigo Gordillo, Mike Philbrick, and Adam Butler discuss Return Stacking, market efficiency, and innovative investment strategies. They explore structured diversification, creating excess returns, and portfolio sustainability beyond traditional stock picking. The podcast provides valuable insights for navigating modern markets with confidence.

Markku Kurrti, a electrical engineer turned finance enthusiast, discusses analytical models on stock underperformance, active manager strategies, and the equity risk premium puzzle. He challenges traditional beliefs on diversification numbers, emphasizing the benefits for long-term success and optimizing returns. Exploring concepts like compound growth, leverage, and Kelly criterion, he provides unique insights into the financial landscape.

Otto van Hemert, Director of Core Strategies at Man AHL, discusses trend strategies, inflation resilience, seasonality in markets, and combining trend and seasonality in portfolios. He shares insights on measuring seasonality, the emergence of seasonality in commodities and financial markets, and the impact of long-term trend signals capturing seasonality effects.

Clayton Gillespie, VP at Deutsche Bank, talks about reconciling quant and fundamental perspectives in investing, incorporating survey insights into strategies, understanding regime changes, trade-offs between fundamental and statistical factors, managing risk and improving alpha signals, sticking with the factor premium, and the intersection of philanthropy and quantitative analysis.

Hari Krishnan, Head of Volatility Strategies at SCT Capital, explores developing a low carry hedge for a commodity bull market by understanding market positioning, price impacts, perishability, and seasonality. The podcast discusses depressed commodities, producers' incentives, return skewness, fundamental analysis, liquidity constraints, and low-cost, high-convexity strategies in futures and options markets.

Nick Baltas, managing director at Goldman Sachs, discusses using systematic strategies to solve asset owner problems, his research on cross-asset skewness and implementing a skewness strategy. He also shares insights on building multi-strategy portfolios and meeting client needs.

Bin Ren, founder of SigTech, discusses the design of a state-of-the-art backtesting engine and the integration of large language models into the process. Topics include modular design, strategy definition, coupling engine with data, challenges of incorporating alternative and unstructured data, understanding query and making API calls, implications of large language models in programming languages, and contrasting cultural reactions to AI.

Charles McGarraugh, CIO of Altis Partners, discusses their investment stack, comprising an upstream signal layer and a downstream strategy layer. They explore the benefits and drawbacks of this design, the operation of the signal layer, the need for adaptiveness in a rapidly changing world, integrating alternative data in market prediction, portfolio construction and risk management, and their fascination with asset duration and expectations formation.

Andrew Beer from DBi and Adam Butler from ReSolve Asset Management discuss the replication of managed futures strategies. They explore return-based and process-based replication, selecting markets for diversification, and the challenges of derisking and top-down investing. They also discuss the implementation process for replicating an index and achieving broad-based exposure to the hedge fund industry. Overall, they highlight the potential benefits and cost-effectiveness of replication in investment portfolios.

Dean Curnutt, founder of Macro Risk Advisors, discusses the nature of risk in markets, touching on various crises, reflexivity, risk recycling, and the evolving role of the Fed. They explore the 1987 stock market crash, Long-Term Capital Management, the 2008 Financial Crisis, the XIV implosion of 2018, and the 2020 COVID crisis. This episode is a must-listen for risk-focused individuals and those interested in market dynamics.