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Category: Black Swan Thinking

Revisiting Kat’s Managed Futures and Hedge Funds: A Match Made in Heaven from Sunrise Capital

Posted on by Michael Covel

Why Tactical Macro Investing Still Makes Sense — Further Revisiting Kat’s “Managed Futures and Hedge Funds: A Match Made in Heaven” (PDF):

In November 2002, Cass Business School Professor Harry M. Kat, Ph.D. began to circulate a Working Paper entitled Managed Futures and Hedge Funds: A Match Made in Heaven. The Journal of Investment Management subsequently published the paper in the First Quarter of 2004. In the paper, Kat noted that while adding hedge fund exposure to traditional portfolios of stocks and bonds increased returns and reduced volatility, it also produced an undesired side effect — increased tail risk (lower skew and higher kurtosis). He went on to analyze the effects of adding a macro investment approach known as “managed futures” to the traditional portfolios, and then of combining hedge funds and managed futures, and finally the effect of adding both hedge funds and managed futures to the traditional portfolios. He found that managed futures were better diversifiers than hedge funds; that they reduced the portfolio’s volatility to a greater degree and more quickly than did hedge funds, and without the undesirable side effects. He concluded that the most desirable results were obtained by combining both managed futures and hedge funds with the traditional portfolios. Kat’s original period of study was June 1994–May 2001. In this paper, we revisit and update Kat’s original work. Using similar data for the period Jan 2001–December 2015, we find that his observations generally hold true about 15 years later. During the subsequent 141⁄2 years, a highly volatile period that included separate stock market drawdowns of 36% and 56%, managed futures have continued to provide more effective and more valuable diversification for portfolios of stocks and bonds than have hedge funds.

More from Sunrise Capital:

Jason Gerlach appears on my podcast.

The Little Book of Trading (first chapter features Sunrise Capital).

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Ep. 59: Don’t Let Them Fuck You Around with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Don’t Let Them Fuck You Around with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Don’t Let Them Fuck You Around with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Please enjoy my monologue Don’t Let Them F*** You Around with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.

Listen to this episode:

Want to learn more Trend Following? Watch my video here.

The Illusion of Control: Dancing with Chance

Posted on by Michael Covel

From INSEAD:

First you accept that there are things you can’t control. Then you try to assess the uncertainty and finally augment your plan to make sure you manage risk more effectively.

That means using models, independent opinions, internal and external advice and any other means to assess the unknown risks and to make your business nimble and open to change when the unexpected happens.

“You are better off focusing your energy on planning for the range of possibilities that could actually happen.”

For example, he says it’s very difficult to tell which start-up businesses will be successful in the early stages. If you accept that, a better strategy is to try to diversify over a number of projects just as venture capitalists do. Not all the projects will pay off but you diversify your risk so that you have a better chance of nurturing one that will succeed.

Chance and randomness play a significant role in business and in our lives. “The point is not that the world is hopeless and you shouldn’t do anything, it’s just that we should do a more careful assessment of what we can predict and what we can’t predict. And where we can’t predict then the effort and the resources are better spent on planning,” Gaba told INSEAD Knowledge.

“Instead of trying to predict this, which you actually cannot, you are better off spending your resources and effort on planning for various contingencies.”

And when it comes to managing risk in investing, the authors have pillars of wisdom: “Be average. Be patient. Be risk aware. Be balanced.”

Another vantage to consider? “What can we learn from expert gamblers?”

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Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Rapid shifts are the hallmark of climate change, epileptic seizures, financial crises, and fishery collapses…

Posted on by Michael Covel

From SEED:

Nonlinear systems, however, are not so well behaved. They can appear stationary for a long while, then without anything changing, they exhibit jumps in variability—so-called “heteroscedasticity.” For example, if one looks at the range of economic variables over the past decade (daily market movements, GDP changes, etc.), one might guess that variability and the universe of possibilities are very modest. This was the modus operandi of normal risk management. As a consequence, the likelihood of some of the large moves we saw in 2008, which happened over so many consecutive days, should have been less than once in the age of the universe.

Our problem is that the scientific desire to simplify has taken over, something that Einstein warned against when he paraphrased Occam: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thinking of natural and economic systems as essentially stable and decomposable into parts is a good initial hypothesis, current observations and measurements do not support that hypothesis—hence our continual surprise. Just as we like the idea of constancy, we are stubborn to change. The 19th century American humorist Josh Billings, perhaps, put it best: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

Wisdom.

How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

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Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Ep. 46: Ralph Vince Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Ralph Vince
Ralph Vince

My guest today is Ralph Vince. Vince is by profession a computer programmer writing analytical programs for funds, large traders and professional gamblers. He is the author of five books on investing in his field of expertise, portfolio management and portfolio/trade optimization.

The topic is trading.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Optimal bet sizes
  • Whether Ed Thorp’s work and the Kelly criteria had any effect on Vince’s work
  • The importance of knowing the optimal spot depending on your criteria
  • Why maximizing profits can result in a large drawdown – and why you should be happy about that
  • If diversification really does give you a free lunch
  • The importance of learning the wrong approach

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Too Much Data Is Toxic–Trend Followers Get This Terribly Important Principle Deep in Their Gut

Posted on by Michael Covel

An excerpt (source):

In business and economic decision-making, data causes severe side effects —data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities.

More:

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostock. Assume further that for what you are observing, at the yearly frequency the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) —it means that about half of changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and markets price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal —which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.

More:

To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause.

Trend followers tackle the issues raised by Taleb by making their trading decisions off the market price. Boom–one piece of data for all of your trading decisions–price.

Article Source: Ritholtz.com.

How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.

Also jump in:

• Trend Following Podcast Guests
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Performance
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Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.

Ep. 22: Mike Aponte Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Posted on by Michael Covel
Mike Aponte
Mike Aponte

You can listen to my interview with famed MIT card counter Mike Aponte:

My guest today is Mike Aponte, a professional blackjack player and a former member of the MIT Blackjack Team. Aponte was featured in the bestselling book “Bringing Down The House” as the player Jason Fisher, which was adapted into the movie “21”.

The topic is investing.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Due to his systematic approach, he’s definitely not a gambler; he’s an investor
  • Aponte’s beginnings
  • The similarities between systematic card counting and trend trading; the psychology behind the two
  • How even some of the more advanced mathematicians at MIT didn’t have the risk-taking constitution it took to make the cut
  • Some revealing anecdotes along the way, including a run in with casino security that ended with them actually asking for his autograph

Listen to this episode:

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