The Derivative

How many families have two brothers who’ve been in the hedge fund game for 30+ years, much less on polar opposites of the long vol/short vol spectrum. We’re talking with the volatility loving, positive skew seeking brother in our episode today, Roy Niederhoffer. Roy is the founder and President of the eponymous R. G. Niederhoffer Capital Management, which has been coding, trading, analyzing, and i...

When you hear news about artificial intelligence (AI), it might be easy to assume it has nothing to do with you. But if you use face recognition on your phone? Check. Google auto-fills your search bar? Check. And increasingly – the asset manager you may have managing your money is using some combination of machine learning and AI. Today’s guests were early adopters of that tech and applying it to...

Forget fat tails, left tails, even tall tales. We’re going into extracting value from long tails of the distribution on the pod in this episode. Vineer Bhansali is a 29-year industry veteran, previously at PIMCO, a Forbes columnist, author of four books on finance, and is currently the founder and CEO of longtail alpha. In today’s episode, we’re talking with Vineer about abstract physics = finance...

The king of Commodities has entered The Derivative ring. You know his name, you’ve read his books, you’ve probably utilized his index, and now you’re listening to him in this most recent podcast episode. Jim Rogers is an American investor and financial commentator and was there at the start of the Quantum Fund and Soros Fund Management. In today’s episode, we’re talking with Jim about peanut sales...

We’re bringing out the cake & ice cream for this pod because it’s The Derivative’s 1 year anniversary! If you’ve been with us since the beginning – you may fondly remember our inaugural episode The Human Behind The Hedge Fund with Wayne Himelsein. So, in today’s episode, we brought back Wayne, President and Chief Investment Officer at Logica Capital Advisers, and as a special anniversary bonus...

Talking this week with Poker Pro Chris Sparks on everything from game strategy to deciphering A.I. capabilities and catching bots. With Founder, CEO, and Performance Coach of The Forcing Function we’re taking it back to the beginning where we dive in with Chris about an interesting online alias “GoMuckYourself”, grabbing seats at poker tables in Vegas, exploring his latest paper “Play to Win: Meta...

Why can't vol managers tell good jokes? Bad timing? Buh dum tsss. All jokes aside, we’re excited to be back talking Volatility on The Derivative with the Professor, the DJ, the Han Solo of Vol trading, the one and only Benn (with two N’s) Eifert. Benn is Founder and CIO of QVR Advisors and joined us to talk about VIX and options and the overall volatility space. We’re digging deep in this episode...

Bitcoin started the year with a bang, rising up above $41k before falling back into the 20ks, and settling in the mid 30ks lately. It was at $5k in March 2020! Yet it feels way different, and dare we say – less volatile – this time. How are we supposed to interact with bitcoin, how do you capitalize on the volatility, and where does it fit into investor portfolios overall? We have two big-time bit...

If you’ve been on the internet, watched TV, or talked to anyone outside of yourself in the past week and a half you can’t have missed it. GameStop stock ($GME) went from trading at a low of $3/share to +$400/share thanks to a masterful subreddit trolling from retail traders. And it’s not stopping at just GameStop, shares from Blackberry ($BB), AMC ($AMC), Express ($EXP) and Nokia ($NOK) are quickl...

Welcome to the Wizarding World of Market Wizards – and today’s special guest is head wizard who wrote the actual books on market wizards, Jack Schwager. Jack has written 6 books on the markets including his original: Market Wizards and the newly released: Unknown Market Wizards . In addition to his authoring (is that even a word?) Jack has served as a Director for futures research - meaning he kno...

2020 was ruled by global macro events – are we looking at the same fate in 2021? Our guest today can talk not only global macro, but also volatility, bond yields, correlation, oil, metals and more. To ring in the new year we’re joined by Diego Parrilla, Managing Partner at Quadriga Asset Managers and Author of " The Energy World is Flat " and " The Anti-Bubbles .” Diego isn’t just a global macro m...

We’ve already covered the first three months of 2020 with Part I of our 2020 review . We’re now heading into Part II with Jason Buck, CIO at Mutiny Fund and Adam Butler, CIO at ReSolve Asset Management discussing how the fall out of the first three months of 2020 dictated the ending 3/4 of the year. Tune into this next episode to hear more on the possible bond fallout, stimulus holding US markets...

2020 has been a year for the books – be it the fastest every market sell-off or a just as amazing tech rally from the lows. Whether you’re looking at it from a social/emotional/fiscal lens, it probably didn’t pan out the way you imagined based on your New Years Resolution. And in today’s podcast, we’re focusing out with the long lens to take a look back at the year that was 2020 to investigate wha...

It’s hard to get too far into the words Trend Following without running into the name Michael Covel . If you’ve ever looked into the strategy type, his name is there. From speeches to his many books, the aptly named Trend Following Radio and his trend following twitter thread, Michael has been digging into the philosophy and people in and around trend following for nearly 24 years. And as our gues...

Many investors look at commercial real estate as a high-risk, confusing, and sometimes scary way to invest. Our guests today show us why this isn’t the case. From commercial real estate, to mortgage-backed securities, pandemic affects, and hedging risk, Matt Lasky of Equity LLC and Darren Kottle of Caddo Capital Management are on today to go through it all. Take a listen to learn more about privat...

One of the leading volatility trading and derivatives investing events of the year wrapped up last month and we have lots of thoughts. From new vol dispersion products to  portfolio design, tail-risk management and structural vol; if it’s been a hot topic in 2020 – Global EQD covered it. We’re joined by Jim Carroll, Senior Vice President at Toroso Advisors and John Cummings, Director of Resea...

Does all this Machine Learning stuff really work? If it’s so good, why aren’t AI powered hedge funds printing money? And what is the difference between AI, machine learning, deep learning, machine trading, and more. Today’s guest is one that’s been at the center of the AI/MT/ML universe for over four decades. Ernie Chan runs a machine learning hedge fund at QTS Capital management, has authored 3 b...

Our guest today is somewhat of a modern philosopher, mapping out how the investing world sees the real world, while at the same time questioning his own place in that world and how he can change it for the better. Ben Hunt, Co-Founder of Second Foundation Partners and creator of the Epsilon Theory blog, joins us on The Derivative, offering up his fresh perspective and novel insights into market dy...

Votes are being counted, CNN and Fox are on 24-hour reporting cycles, and Tweets/FB Posts/Texts are still being sent out at lightening speeds. What happens if a winner isn’t announced for 2 or more days? What happens if President Trump remains in power? What happens if former Vice President Joe Biden takes over as POTUS? In today’s U.S. Election – What^%$# Episode we’re joined by Matt LaViolette,...

For every option buyer, there is a seller. The brave souls who are accused of picking up pennies in front of a freight train. But are they dumb? Crazy?  Or just better at timing the market than the rest of us? Understanding option strategies which involve collecting premium seems easy, but there’s way more that goes into this recipe. As Jeff Malec asked our guest in this pod “Give it to me st...

Is trend following too big? Can managed futures do it without the bond tailwind they’ve had for 30 years? Does globalization take away diversification? We’re debunking these trend following myths/truths (?) in today’s podcast – and today’s guest is ideal to take us through the ins-and-outs of these trend following theories. We’re joined by Kathryn Kaminski, PHD, CAIA, and Chief Research Strategist...

Today’s pod is all about word play playing into alternative investment. How does Jam Croissant relate to Cem Karsan? What about Vanna Charm and options definitions? Or the forever popular “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” evolving to “nothing is ever risk free”? To get together the definitions, explanations, and educated facts on all these nuances, we have FinTwit VIP & Founder and Senio...

With storms named Gamma and Delta making their way to US shores – we really couldn’t have timed this release better from a hurricane-content-meets-alts-investment podcast; it’s the: perfect storm ( buh-dum-ch ). Today’s guest is creator of Weather Underground and the Cat 6 blog, a person who has flown through an actual hurricane, and a whiz at modeling weather data in a way that us non-meteorologi...

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, it often feels like stock/bond investors are from Earth and us Alternative Investment folks are from Vulcan.  We’re digging in with the Bull and Baird blog’s author and Baird market analyst Michael Antonelli to hear how the earthlings (aka wealth management clients) actually think about investments, direct from the guy who is serving up what a whole...

We’re joined by option guru and author of ‘The Second Leg Down’ in this episode to talk through the real-time test of market crashes and volatility dynamics we’ve witnessed since February. Is our guest’s theory on volatility sequencing proving its worth in this environment of bigger VIX spikes, oil going negative, and retail trader flow? Hari Krishnan has all the insight on how to survive during v...