Top Traders Unplugged

Buckle up for a fascinating conversation with Roy Niederhoffer, President of R.G. Niederhoffer Capital Management, as he shares insights on managing a billion USD through short-term trading. Discover why he's chosen this approach and how he's overcome its challenges. You'll also gain valuable insights on human biases surrounding the Sharpe Ratio, the impact of an inverted yield curve on longer-ter...

Join us for an engaging conversation with Rob Carver, where we delve into the world of systematic trend following. We explore topics like how to forecast future market volatility and the pros and cons of using a Value at Risk methodology. We also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of tail risk hedging, and whether percentage or price differences are better for estimating standard deviation. As a s...

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Professor Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economic and Political Science at University of California, Berkeley as we discuss what we can learn from economic history in the current volatile global macro environment. We discuss the uses and misuses of history and look at what history tells us about the policy response to the current strains in the ba...

Join us for an in-depth conversation with Douglas Greenig, CEO of Florin Court, as we explore their unique approach to managing $2 billion in assets using a systematic trend following program focused on alternative markets. Discover how they navigate the current macro environment by prioritizing skew over the traditional Sharpe ratio, their process for uncovering new markets, and their strategies...

Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Richard Brennan, as we explore the world of trend following and delve deep into the unusual moves in fixed income markets and its impact on trend following performance during a month of March Madness. Discover how the design of trend following strategies allow it to be “prepared” for unforeseen events without overcomplicating the investment approach, an...

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Rana Foroohar, global business columnist and author of "Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post Global World". In this episode, Rana discusses the need for a localized economy to find a balance between the power of big government and large corporations. We explore how a prosperous, localized economy can be created by retethering wealth and pla...

Get ready for an engaging conversation with Bruno Gmür, the Founder and CIO of Quantica Capital, as we explore their unique approach to systematic diversified trend following. Join us as we dive into the world of relative trend following and why volatility isn't always the right measure of risk. Bruno shares his insights on the challenges of estimating covariance matrices and expected returns duri...

Join us for an insightful conversation with Cem Karsan as he sheds light on the current financial landscape, from the recent banking crashes to Central Bank Rate Hikes and Geo-Political developments. Discover the reasons behind the unprecedented moves in the volatility space and how they're impacting different strategies, including trend following. Cem shares his thoughts on the critical importanc...

This is an episode for those who want to hear an alternative view of the world's largest country. McKinsey has said we are living in the “Indian Century”. Morgan Stanley believes 20 percent of global growth in the next decade will come from India. Our guest today, Princeton economist Ashoka Mody, has a different view, which he details in his new book: “India Is Broken”. He argues that there are tw...

Today, we are joined by Simon Judes, Co-CIO at Winton for a conversation on how they use quantitative investment strategies and statistical research to generate alpha. We discuss how the characterization of Crisis Alpha has the potential to be misleading and why the speed of your trading should be determined by your objective, their process of discovering new ideas through research and the pitfall...

Today, Mark Rzepczynsky is back with us, following a tense week with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and a few other bank emergencies. We discuss how we are in a period that Mark calls “the great bond reprising” and what this means for the economy, why the collapse of SVB was somehow "expected", if only regulators had been looking at the right data and how you build models that are well prepar...

Today we are re-joined by Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, a physical commodities research firm based in Toronto, Canada. We cover the SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) that has been actively deployed by the Biden administration over the past year, its implementation and potential impact on related economies. To what extent can the SPR influence spot and futures prices, and what are th...

Today, we are joined by Matt Dorsten, Portfolio Manager within the Quantitative Strategies group at PIMCO, for a conversation how they manage 60 billion dollars through different quant strategies, of which app. $5bn is in Trend Following. We discuss their process of constructing portfolios using a defensive approach and how they manage to simultaneously maintain a high Sharpe, keep a balance betwe...

Today, I'm joined by Rob Carver for the weekly trend following conversation, where we reflect on the takeaways from the CTA series and the performance of the year so far. We discuss parameter and markets selection through research and testing and why Rob dislikes stops in moving average systems, what happens if a brokerage firm fails. We also discuss why you have to be cautious when using dynamic...

What are some of the key takeaways when you marry global financial markets with potentially extraterrestrial influences? Global Macro investor David Dorr, has taken on that conversation. As government and national security services have begun to declassify information around UFOs, David is exploring the edge of what people are starting to talk about but financial markets haven’t yet embraced. Ener...

Today, we are joined by David Gorton, CIO at DG Partners, for a conversation on how they use trend following to achieve a multi-billion dollar portfolio. We discuss how to become a better trend follower by understanding the weaknesses of the strategy and their approach to produce positive alpha, the challenge of timing trend following and how they focus on the conceptual trend without giving up th...

Alan Dunne joins us for the weekly conversation on Trend Following, where we reflect on the broader perspective of the markets and the economy. We discuss how the unpredictablity of inflation and interest rates affect all parts of the economy and the transition from globalization to deglobalization, the size of the CTA and trend following industry and how articles on media like Bloomberg often cre...

Today, we are joined by Philip Seager, Head of Absolute Return at Capital Fund Management (CFM), for a conversation on how they incorporate trend following in their investment strategy. We discuss their research on how trend following has performed historically and how they use the data in their trading and the role trend following play in their portfolio construction. We also discuss the right wa...

Today we are joined by Nicky Ferguson, Founder of It's Not a Science, an energy markets research firm based in Basel, Switzerland. We talk about speculative positioning in oil and natural gas futures, and how to distinguish between price action driven by fundamentals and flows. We discuss real time indicators of oil supply and demand, and the time it takes various investors to absorb new informati...

Today, we are joined by Yao Hua Ooi, Principal at AQR Capital Management, for a conversation on how they use systematic tools like trend following, to take advantage of inefficiencies in markets. We discuss the pros and cons of risk premia strategies and how they manage to improve the Sharpe ratio while making sure the "dual" mandate is fulfilled, how they have moved beyond pure price trends as pa...

Today, Nick Baltas return to the show following a head scratching period for inflation and interest rates the past few weeks. We discuss the state of the environment for trend following and the best way to select a portfolio of markets to trade, the pros and cons of "trend following the trend followers". We also reflect on Katy Kaminski’s take on Crisis Alpha and discuss the evolution of trend fol...

Today, we are joined by Katy Kaminski, Chief Research Strategist at AlphaSimplex Group, for a conversation on how they approach managed futures and trend following in their programs. We discuss how they work together with their clients to find the right solution for them and why it is important to understand the true meaning of Crisis Alpha, why commodities play a crucial role in times of crises a...

Today, we are joined by Nigol Koulajian and Mike Harris from Quest Partners, for a conversation on how they use a research driven, quantitative and systematic trading approach to generate alpha. We discuss how they generate convexity and why they have chosen to focus on short-term time frames, why they believe some investors have become too focused on Sharpe and how they use trend following and cr...

Richard Brennan joins us to reflect on the learnings so far from the new CTA series. We also discuss how to set your stop loss when entering a new position and why you should not allow your trend models to go "backwards", how to fit your model to price data and why it is important to understand the signal to noise ratio in your trading to avoid overfitting. Additionally, we discuss how random entr...

Today, we are joined by Dr. Edward Tricker, Chief Investment Officer of Quantitative Strategies at Graham Capital Management, joined Top Traders Unplugged for a discussion on Graham's approach to quantitative macro investing. The discussion touches on a variety of interesting topics including the evolution of trend-following, diversification, portfolio optimization, and "crisis alpha." Dr. Tricker...