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Tag: managed futures

Ep. 68: Mark Shore Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Mark Shore
Mark Shore

My guest today is Mark Shore, a trader and educator whose main area of expertise is managed futures. Shore has an MBA from the University of Chicago, was the former head of risk at Octane Research (over a billion AUM), was the former COO of VK Capital (a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley), and now is an adjunct professor at DePaul University teaching the only accredited course on managed futures in the country.

The topic is his paper Decoding The Myths of Managed Futures.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Shore’s experience in getting the “a-ha” moments out of his students when teaching managed futures, and how he brings his students into the world of managed futures
  • How and why those working in the CTA/managed futures/trend following space have a firm grasp on risk management that exceeds the understanding of competitors (i.e. mutual funds)
  • How the term “managed futures” (which refers to the instrument and not the strategy) might be problematic
  • Skewness
  • Drawdowns
  • Why managed futures performance is famous for doing extremely well when chaos unfurls
  • Why the majority of the mutual fund industry hasn’t adopted CTA strategies
  • The issue of survivorship bias
  • Why certain people can’t wrap their arms around strategies not based on fundamental analysis
  • The emotional elements of trading
  • Other experiences while working at VK Capital

Listen to this episode:

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Managed Futures Describes an Instrument, Not the Strategy. It’s Trend Following

Posted on by Michael Covel

Wall Street types love to call trend following trading ‘managed futures’. That makes no sense. Futures are an instrument, NOT a strategy. The largest so-called managed futures firms are trend followers. If you want acceptance, if you want confusion alleviated, then call the strategy something that makes sense. Jerry Parker, an original Turtle who runs a trend following managed futures firm, has said it well:

“I think another mistake we made was defining ourselves as managed futures, where we immediately limit our universe. Is our expertise in that, or is our expertise in systematic trend following, or model development. So maybe we trend follow with Chinese porcelain. Maybe we trend follow with gold and silver, or stock futures, or whatever the client needs. It’s called managed futures because that was the profit center at the FCMs. We’re trading these great systems, and testing, and making sure what we do has worked in the past. And being disciplined, and unemotional, and applying our methods to the futures markets. But limiting our trading to this one group of markets. We need to look at the investment world globally and communicate our expertise of systematic trading. You have Big Blue beating the world chess champion, and everybody saying yeah, that makes sense, I can understand that. We’ve not been able to maximize our opportunities with systematic trading. People look at systematic and computerized trading with too much skepticism. But a day will come when people will see that systematic trend following is one of the best ways to limit risk, and create a portfolio that has some reasonable expectation of making money. We’ve got to be there and ready to take advantage of the opportunity. I think we’ve mis-communicated to our clients what our expertise really is. Systematic trading is going to be better for everyone in the long run. Our methods will work on lots of different markets. The ones that are hot today, the ones that are not hot today. We don’t want to pigeon-hole ourselves as managed futures or commodities.”

Excerpts: Managed Account Reports

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