Bridgewater

Alphacution’s Top Stories for 2020

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." Steve Jobs I was going to start out by saying that it's been a pivotal year for Alphacution. Problem is, I said the same things at this time last year. So, I supposed that means it's been a good coupla years. The pandemic, volatility, subsequent lockdown - and some luck in timing - drove a lot of attention towards Alphacution's content in 2020. Clearly, Robinhood and payments for order flow (PFOF) were top themes for the year. Our Feed post on Robinhood and trailing stop orders led the year in page views, and represented like no other before it what it looks like when a story goes viral. Not to be outdone, the timely post on the downfall of Ronin Capital also attracted a ton of attention. In fact, if [...]

By |2021-01-04T15:32:41-05:00December 31st, 2020|Open|

Tom Brady, Louis Bacon and the Game Changers

“From the point of ignition to the final drive, the point of the journey is not to arrive.” - Neil Peart   New clues are emerging on the nature and pace of change... Here's the setup: Unlikely and unexpected virtuosity often serves as the catalyst for a dynastic run of success. Moreover, legend has it, that it's usually the will over and above the skill that fuels the initiation and duration of that run. While skills eventually decay, it's the will to keep finding a way to win - to distinguish oneself or team relative to the competition - that's the defining factor. Of course, whether it be a football field or a market landscape, like a moving sidewalk, everything happens as the ground is constantly shifting below our feet. What happens to Tom Brady next, I'm not here to predict. He is merely a reliable hook to drag your attention to this point in the story because the debate about whether his game has changed to favor running, mobile [...]

By |2020-08-17T07:14:02-04:00January 23rd, 2020|For Subscribers|

BlackRock, Bridgewater, Citadel: The Decline of Speculation at Scale

"Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy." - former HBS professor, David Korten “The most important question facing humanity is this: Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?” - Jeremy Rifkin, principal architect, "The Third Industrial Revolution   "...Bizarre..." and "...inscrutable..." is how one notable content aggregation platform has recently described Alphacution's work (after we maxed out their popularity scores with the articles in question - and while being the youngest research and advisory group to be competing for attention with the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times, among many others). On that score, I'd say we're punching well above our weight class. But, with this - uh - compliment, it seems like as good a time as any to pause for a minute and perform a few extra Mark 'The Bird' Fidrych moves on the mound before making the pitch for today's (1st Mad Lib here) [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:30:09-04:00October 24th, 2019|Open|

#Hedgefunds: Is the Capacity of Alpha Unlimited?

Like the financial markets equivalent of "dude", or "bro" or the many satisfying derivations of "F**K," the term "alpha" seems to pepper our market discourse in a way that has few peers. Rightly or wrongly, there isn't an investment or trading context into which it is not shoehorned. We hear it everywhere, at all times, and in numerous forms: Achieving alpha... Delivering alpha... Portable alpha... (A strategy that had its heyday around 2006 and has recently tried to make a comeback.) Tainted alpha... (Not gonna go there right now.) And, my personal favorite (for its level of misguidedness), generating alpha... There are conferences named after it, like the CNBC and Institutional Investor ANNUAL Delivering Alpha Conference, now apparently in its 8th year. And, of course, some of the most brilliant and creative companies of all time have been named after it! - and, I'm not necessarily talking about firms like Visible Alpha or AlphaSense or the defunct quant strategy development platform, Alphacet... To be fair, the list of common usages [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:22:58-04:00September 23rd, 2018|Open|

α < ∞ ?

Like the financial markets equivalent of "dude", or "bro" or the many satisfying derivations of "F**K," the term "alpha" seems to pepper our market discourse in a way that has few peers. Rightly or wrongly, there isn't an investment or trading context into which it is not shoehorned. We hear it everywhere, at all times, and in numerous forms: Achieving alpha... Delivering alpha... Portable alpha... (A strategy that had its heyday around 2006 and has recently tried to make a comeback.) Tainted alpha... (Not gonna go there right now.) And, my personal favorite (for its level of misguidedness), generating alpha... There are conferences named after it, like the CNBC and Institutional Investor ANNUAL Delivering Alpha Conference, now apparently in its 8th year. And, of course, some of the most brilliant and creative companies of all time have been named after it! - and, I'm not necessarily talking about firms like Visible Alpha or AlphaSense or the defunct quant strategy development platform, Alphacet... To be fair, the list of common usages [...]

By |2020-08-17T07:14:07-04:00September 20th, 2018|For Subscribers|

Top Hedge Funds: AUM per Employee = Trading Strategy?

We have been playing with some new equations; looking to see if anything interesting can be learned from benchmarking assets per employee across various firms. (It turns out that adding this analytic to our suite of other "per employee" metrics yields significant insights.) In the figure below, we took the top 10 hedge funds ranked by assets under management (AUM) and then re-ranked that list by AUM per employee. We also tossed in Virtu Financial and KCG (Getco) for giggles - and to test the extremes. Notice anything interesting? Based on what you might know about these trading companies, how would you label the X-axis? Here's some additional data to consider: The correlation between assets and headcount is not perfect by any stretch, but it is signal-worthy. Also, this trick works best on mature, ongoing firms whose operations and business are relatively consistent. Headcount level doesn't seem to matter. Albeit at the extremes of tradings firms, Virtu Financial generated nearly US$800 million in revenue (2015) with 148 employees - so [...]

By |2020-08-17T07:14:10-04:00December 14th, 2016|For Subscribers|