Dive into the fascinating world of trend following with Jeff Malec and one of the GOATs: Harold de Boer, a pioneering systematic trader who transformed his life path from a Dutch dairy farm into the sophisticated global investment firm Transtrend. In this episode, Harold shares insights into the evolution of trend following, discussing how understanding market trends is similar to understanding herd behavior, navigating complex market correlations, and maintaining resilience during challenging periods. Learn about the nuanced approach to trading across hundreds of markets, the importance of diversification, and why trend following remains a dynamic and adaptive investment strategy. With humor, historical perspective, and deep expertise, Harold reveals the art and science behind successful systematic trading. – Don’t miss a particular riveting segment at the end of this discussion on US cinema at its best – SEND IT!
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From the episode:
Fat tails and tall heads blog post: https://www.rcmalternatives.com/2013/02/fat-tails-and-tall-heads/
Check out the complete Transcript from this week’s podcast below:
Trends, Tall Heads, and Transformations with Transtrend’s Harold de Boer
Harold De Boer 00:07
Any strategy goes wrong if you leave your strategy when it’s not working for a while, unless you have a good reason that the strategy should be adapted. But adapting a strategy should not be dependent on how it has not been working for a while adapting a strategy, because you see something is happening in the world, and you have to adapt for that. So adaptation is something you constantly have to do, but if you start to make strange moves, it’s not survived.
Jeff Malec 00:34
Welcome to the derivative by our same alternatives send it!
Harold, how are you? I’m okay, just okay.
Harold De Boer 00:56
Oh, it’s, it’s, it’s great. You see out of the window here, so you saw what nice sunshine we have,
Jeff Malec 01:07
Better than my, better than my rainy Chicago today. Yeah. I was hoping you were going to wear the wooden bow tie in some of your marketing materials. Is that actual wood in that picture? Yeah.
Harold De Boer 01:21
Yeah. But they told me that this was going to be a podcast so, but my wife also wanted me to to wear proper clothes. I say I can do it naked, because it’s, yeah, it’s just a podcast.
Jeff Malec 01:33
That’s an actual wood bow tie. You wear it around,
Harold De Boer 01:35
no, not that often, just for the it’s a real one, but it’s, I’m not wearing that that
Jeff Malec 01:42
often, and give me I’ve never been to Rotterdam, much less the Netherlands in general. So give give us the quick lowdown on what’s going on over there, what we should look for when we visit.
Harold De Boer 01:53
It’s the we say in the Netherlands, we have three big cities. We have Amsterdam, we have done ha Rotterdam and Rotterdam is where the money is made, because here’s the big Harbor, the last harbor of Europe, in that sense, is comparable to Chicago only. Or Northern Sea isn’t frozen as often as your lake. That’s the difference. The then Hague is where the money is is gathered, because that’s where the government is, and Amsterdam is where the money is spent. That’s where tourists go.
Jeff Malec 02:28
Love it. You ever read those books the coffee trader? I can’t remember. There were a few of them. It was the
Harold De Boer 02:33
Yeah, it’s a very good one. It plays partly in the Netherlands, partly in England. It’s a great book.
Jeff Malec 02:38
Yeah, I think there was a series of three of them. But, yeah, that was very interesting. Um, was touching on some ancient futures trading a little bit too,
Harold De Boer 02:47
right? Yeah, yeah. It gets spooky. The car had to fly. He fled from London because he had done something wrong. And then he ended up in the in the Netherlands, in the, yeah, and what was it? It was in the 17th century. I think it played. It’s, it’s a great book. Yeah, we’ll put a daily episode where the way the coffee all the way was was taken and it was, they should make a movie of it,
Jeff Malec 03:09
right? Let’s produce it. We’ll put the link to that in the show notes. So let’s, let’s start tell us kind of your background, very well known, but let’s hear it for our listeners, what your background is and how you got into this crazy game all started with writing a paper.
Harold De Boer 03:33
Started Yes, kind of I was. I’m born on the farm and in rental, northern part of the Netherlands dairy farms. There was four sons, and every dairy farmer wants one of their sons being the next farmer. The whole family was thinking that I was going to be the one. But at school, I was very good in mathematics, and I was then selected to be in the Dutch team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, and then somehow I wasn’t allowed to become a former then, so I kind of had to study mathematics, which is a great study as well. Yeah, my parents always told me, you can study as long as you want, and ultimately you will become a former. My name is the former anyway, so it’s happy. But then, when I was going to finish my study mathematics, the professor told me that I should find a real problem outside so I wrote some, some letters to firms that did something with mathematics, and I saw this crane trading company that wanted to do some research in futures. I also saw a dairy factory that has an project. The project for the dairy factory seemed very good to me, and I was thinking about, when I grow up, I’m going to do that as a job, and since I know nothing about futures, let’s do that as to finish my. Study. So I ended up doing that and that the three shows project that ultimately became transparent. And I’m still not grown up and working for the dairy factory,
Jeff Malec 05:13
you might still pivot back to the dairy
Harold De Boer 05:16
Wow. My eldest brother took over the farm so and he recently decided to stop and it will not be continued anymore. So the end of the family business. No one knows yet, so don’t broadcast this
Jeff Malec 05:34
breaking news the well, you have a new family business. It’s doing quite well soon. Yep,
Harold De Boer 05:40
this is a different business. It’s also great. And it’s, in essence, not much different, because cows are, are hurt animals and behave like that, and people are not much different. And to understand economy, you have you learn much more about watching cows than by watching dogs. So
Jeff Malec 06:03
really, all right, they’ll herd. They’ll move together. They
Harold De Boer 06:07
Yeah, they really do. And you also see some of the key principles in coherds are really applicable to human. Really don’t tell the human, because they don’t want to be compared with not
Jeff Malec 06:20
how many cattle did you have up there? How many? Wouldn’t call them cattle, I guess you weren’t getting the meat. But how many dairy cows did you have?
Harold De Boer 06:29
No, it was, it was, it was about milking. So it was about dairy cows. And when I was younger, my father was milking 60, and later on, it became more than 100. Wow. Well, good standard. It’s rather at a larger site for us. Standard is a very small firm, I would expect.
Jeff Malec 06:49
Yeah, did you ever mess around with milk futures?
Harold De Boer 06:53
Not in those periods? No, because the European way of handling risk in a culture, in a culture markets was as long term, be completely different from the US. Way I this is a very interesting thing. If you look around the world, how essential a cultural commodities are, because a cultural commodity is, of course, what we are all eating, because the most essential commodities there are, we can do without Bitcoin, but we cannot do without milk, certainly not without meat, although some people think so, and certainly not without wheat. So we need all these, these markets and international there have been very many different experiments to to find a way to feed all people. So the Russian communism started, they did something. The result was lot of people starving from that because they treated it wrong. The Chinese did something like that. It also ended up in many people dying in Europe after the Second World War. We had this whole experiment of building up and promising prices to farmers, which was a big success for the farming industry. It paid much study, for instance, but ultimately it ended up with having loads of butter that had to be dropped somewhere, leading to people dying in Africa and the US systems of futures markets, and starting around 1900 I really believe that’s the most successful system. It’s not a coincidence that futures markets, trading as we all know them right now, started with these crypto markets. Didn’t start with all markets. It only starts to do all trading, when they made a mess out of union trading, and Nima had to do something, but so they had no alternative. But the culture markets are at the basis of of the whole futures trading. And to really understand futures trading, you have to understand the culture markets. I believe,
Jeff Malec 09:00
couldn’t agree more. I’ve always said they should be called now’s N, O, W, now it’s not futures, because back then, the farmer wanted to get paid now, yeah, right, for what he was going to produce in the future, right? If you I talked to my neighbor, I talked to people, they’re like, Oh, you’re betting on the future price of stuff. Like, not really. We’re kind of betting on the price now of what will produce in the future, not the future price,
Harold De Boer 09:23
yeah, but it goes a step further, because it’s this price is coffee process, so this whole element of if, if this is shortage, you want to have more production. But once farmers have seeded what they have seeded, they cannot, all of sudden, decide, okay, now, no, no, probably I don’t want the cord now. Let’s make it into potatoes. You cannot do it anymore. You have to do that on forehand, small prices, coffee process. Process has to start before they start seeding. And that’s the great thing with fishers markets, this whole process of on the long term. I’m starting this price discovery process that works great with with a culture markers, it’s a little bit more difficult to fish, but it can be done very well with culture fishes, and that’s that’s really become a success.
Jeff Malec 10:12
Now, are you an accidental historian? You’ve learned this along the way, or is that, was that an interest of yours? Also, back in the day,
Harold De Boer 10:19
I always like this, yeah, it’s I’m following these things, and I to to understand the now and to understand the future. It helps to look
Jeff Malec 10:30
back. Yeah, we just did a podcast. I’m gonna forget the details, but there was future first futures market was actually in Japan, or the underpinnings of it with race, I believe. Yeah. So back to that paper. What was the paper about? So, you did it for the grain trading company?
Harold De Boer 10:48
Yeah, it was the grain Trading Company.
Jeff Malec 10:52
Was that a big like Cargill or someone? Or was it? No, no, it
Harold De Boer 10:55
was. It was an idea. The company was called, was an international cooperation this n was from the Netherlands, and the A from Argentina, and the D from georgeland. And I think they were all around the world, but they were mainly active in in the festival oils. My paper was, my research project was on the relationship between feed, so corn and soy, soybean meal and hawks and cattle. And at that in people that learn econometrics right now, they they learn about co integration, and it’s a standard thing, but co integration at that moment was something completely new. Must have been one of the first ones applying it to to futures markets. And it was, it was very well, very educative project as well to to understand how it can be used and also how it should not be used.
Jeff Malec 11:57
And what was your big takeaway? Like trend following became the takeaway, or there was steps in between. There
Harold De Boer 12:03
no no no, because in this project, we were looking at different ways. My project co integration was something that would really be applied normally, in some kind of what this is called, you buy one that’s a little bit high and lower and sell the higher ones always arbitrage kind of strategy, yeah, but I my conclusion was that this can be nice, but you cannot do it very massively in much different markets at the same time. And if you don’t do that, you end up in a situation that, once the position is going against you, you have to make a position even larger to ultimately make a profit. But that would be very extreme, very risky in the extreme anti market. Yeah, that’s typically what the LTCM later on did, so that just the way we didn’t want to go. There was also another person was working on fundamental research with Clausius. I’ve done that also myself. And we had done a very good trade in that, in which we by looking at counting the number of pigs being born, and looking what has happened on the fields, have more fundamental model of explaining that we had some very nice traits by doing that and paid our research applying that. But that’s also was something that was not very scalable. So that’s also why we didn’t really continue with that. One another route was doing in the traditional technical analysis, with head and shoulders and triangles and so on. Yeah, that’s very funny, and you can have nice talks about it. But it was very it wasn’t very well applicable in my using it, doing it with computers, because that was around 1990 was the period in which, of course, computers were really growing and becoming available for not that much money as before, and the traditional way of technical analysis in which you use the pencil and align didn’t translate as easy in making it programmable, so
Jeff Malec 14:22
makes it easier to make those nice lines. So you can kind of fudge it a little and move the slope a little. Yeah, nowadays
Harold De Boer 14:29
with pattern recognition models, you would kind of do, could do that again, make the head and shoulders and so on, and then you could do more in a technical way, but in that period, that wasn’t the right direction to choose. So that’s why we ended up with having trend following models building themselves. And we saw that the biggest advantage, and that was our lesson, is that you can apply that in many more marks at the same time and all the other ways. Was much more difficult to apply it in many more. Markets.
Jeff Malec 15:07
So let’s dive into that. When you started, how many markets? 50 or something?
Harold De Boer 15:13
Well, we had some discussion, because our at that moment, mother company, were agricultural traders. They only did agriculture markets. They had done had done a small experiment a few years before that, in stock markets. Well, if you count, well, a few years before 1989 was 1987 and they had experience with this, so they didn’t want to go in that direction. So we had to convince them to do it outside the commodity area. So initially they would like to have done it only within the commodities area. And we traded our home markets where palm oil, of course, modern company, was one of the largest traders in the world in palm oil, oats, flax seed. We did these were markets without discussion, but when we wanted to do the D Mark versus the dollar, that had more discussion, and the S, p5 100 and the Nasdaq later on was a big discussion, because there was very strange markets to them. But we did, we soon added all of those, and it became a financial markets included portfolio,
Jeff Malec 16:20
but you’re one of the now largest, right? But 700 what’s the number now? Yeah,
Harold De Boer 16:25
it’s something like that. It’s not relevant. How many you do? I look you can say, if someone trading the S, p5, 100, can also say that he’s trading 500 500 Yeah, yeah. So, so it’s if you trade 500 markets, you have not 500 different trends. And what is all about? How many different trends are we really looking at? We’re trading all these different markets can help in being active at that moment in which market so that that that helps.
Jeff Malec 16:56
And so, classic example that is, instead of just trading the 30 year bond. I’m trading 257, 1030, right,
Harold De Boer 17:07
Marcus or the
Jeff Malec 17:09
markets, yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe that’s a bad example, because you have the yield curve. And yeah, we trade,
Harold De Boer 17:14
yeah. We trade. Use curve things. We trade all kinds of synthetic markets. And if you combine one market with another market and look at this combined trend, but we it’s not that we want to trade as many as possible markets, but we want to be invested in different trends Well, or that you need different markets. But two different markets are not necessarily the same, the different trends. So it’s more than that, and having many markets also doesn’t really help if you are not sizable investigating all of them. So I’m you hear that probably a lot about sunflower, for instance, when people talk about alternative investment programs, and then there’s the story about sunflower. Well, sunflower is a nice market, but if you make $1 million in a year in sunflower, you’re a huge trader in that market. So that’s never gonna really count. It’s a very small market. So that doesn’t really turn the needle. Which
Jeff Malec 18:16
I was gonna ask, like something like Coco, right? How can you if you have 700 markets? I’m using air quotes on the PI, 700 markets, if that’s just getting 1/700 of the risk budget, how can it make enough money to capture that huge trend? Oh,
Harold De Boer 18:30
that’s why you should not do one 700 to every one of them. Yeah, the more markets are different. So that, let’s say many people think that trend following is mainly about when to buy and when to sell an individual market. But that’s what doesn’t make a difference. The difference is, how can you make sure that when there is a big trend in this example, Coco, that you are sizable, efficient in that and that’s most of the actions we do is not about getting in or out of a trend in a certain market, but to make sure that we are sizable in the area where something seems to happen and these, these are the largest part of our trading activity, stamps on that. And
Jeff Malec 19:13
so you’re looking more, less than 700 markets, and more, we have 100 independent bets, if you will. Yeah, well, I don’t know what the number is, but some other
Harold De Boer 19:24
let’s say, if you’re interested in 10 really different trends, really different trends, that’s a lot, okay, yeah, but, but sometimes, let’s say technology stocks and and energy stocks are the same trends, and sometimes they are completely different trends. So the number of different trends is not always the same as the number of different markets, and which market on the same trend can also be different from time to
Jeff Malec 19:52
time. And so that you’re What do you say? The average number of independent trends per year is only something like two or three. The
Harold De Boer 20:01
number of trends that really continue. You have those, you have those. There is also these more and more local trends that you can participate in and that continue to be local. Let’s say Coco in itself is a nice example, because it’s a pretty local trend and it’s a sizable enough but there’s also trends like that in so much smaller markets that you can participate in. But let’s say, if you would trade in still will trade in Turkey. You have some different trends. Then you have in other markets, and
Jeff Malec 20:31
then and back to your synthetic market. So if I have two independent markets, and then the combo is a third synthetic market? No, yeah,
Harold De Boer 20:44
let’s, let’s say sometimes you do a nice example is corn and soybeans. Okay, nice to be combined because of the same farmer can on the same food grow either one or the other, so the farmer has to choose between one or the other. Gordon is essentially for the energy for the for the cows, and the soybean meal is for the protein for the cow. So what’s the demand side for since they are growing in the same area history, if there is a drought in one on one field, it will be drawn on the other field as well. They grow in the same period as well, meaning that if there is an if there is a trend towards more need for protein, you can just look at the soybean meal, but you can also do soybean meal versus corn, because then you can see the same soybean trend, but it’s less sensitive to the weather developments, because you take that side out, because both of them are sensitive to the same weather. So that way you can, you can be long
Jeff Malec 21:51
meals, short corn in that example, in that case, yeah, yeah. So you’re hedging out, got it? You’re hedging out the field risk, if you will, and just insulating the protein. Yeah,
Harold De Boer 22:01
so that’s the kind of synthetic we’re looking at. It’s not about we’re not trading crude brand versus crude light, for instance, that that doesn’t make any sense to work, because there’s a kind of traditional arbitrage thing that’s completely different, but and
Jeff Malec 22:16
not like Coco and Japanese yen or something like no
Harold De Boer 22:19
LAO. We do combine commodities with currencies if we specifically, if we don’t want too much of a currency risk. So since most of the commodities in the world are expressed in us, dollar wanting, let’s say if there is an inflationary environment in which you are long commodities, we of course, want to be long commodities, but that doesn’t need that. We necessarily want to be so much short dollar. Yeah, it has nothing to do with the dollar. In that case, well, if you trade all these commodities only against the dollar, you end up with a large short dollar position. That might not be the trend at that moment. So then it’s better to trade commodities also against other currencies,
Jeff Malec 23:03
which might not have their trending going on at the same time. But so how does that work? If those trends that you’re long, the dollar short, the foreign currencies on their own, own trends, but then you have this scenario where you don’t want that exposure? Yeah,
Harold De Boer 23:18
- So that’s why, because they have to look it’s all netted portfolio is something getting too large. So if, if, if we have too much of a long dollar concentration, we have to to bring that down. If the long dollar is get too high, for instance, and you can do that by still being short commodities, but being them short versus something else, but otherwise. But it’s always the nice thing. It’s that you you can choose how you want to be infested, and using all these kinds of synthetics can help in getting sizable enough, more different positions without having one or two isolated risks that are getting too large,
Jeff Malec 24:01
and then back in Oh, 910, right? There was kind of that, it’s all just one, risk off, risk on trade. So how did things, how did you guys handle that? And think about that, that’s this would have seemed to have helped in that scenario a bit, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, we had, or did this come out of that environment? Now,
Harold De Boer 24:20
step wise, let’s say something really happened in in that period, or since that period, the first years we were trading, if we were trading, let’s say bonds or soybeans or so, these were really different markets. And these were markets in the sense that, let’s say the commodity traders were only looking at commodity price and only news they were seeing were commodity news. There were no headlines that brought all these things together over the years when the use of social media and news flows freezes through Reuters and so on. Became much more centralized. All people are aware of the same thing and tend to WhatsApp the same thing. So nice example is the credit crisis. 2007 it started. The credit crisis started interest rates markets in the last days of February. 2007 early march 2007 and it took more than a year before it really jumped to the stock markets. Yeah, these were different markets, different players, and that still could happen in that period. That meant that in those years, by trading these different markets, we were more diversified than later on. Because nowadays, if something like that would happen immediately, all these markets are starting to response. It will not take one year in between. A nice example was, was when, when there was the Brexit election, the referendum in 2016 one of the markets responding the most was the Brazil. In real was really dropping extremely and it took few hours before people realized that Brexit was not about Brazil, although it starts with beer as well. It’s just this, this reflex in which all markets are responding to the same thing. And that makes this whole, whole how to work with correlations, how to make sure that you have a diversified portfolio, more of a challenge than before, to look at correlation measurements that are not being disrupted or disturbed by these kind of short term, uh, events that in the past didn’t happen.
Jeff Malec 26:48
You think that’s because news is disseminated quicker? Or also, in my opinion, technology and risk departments are infinitely better than they were in the back in the day, right? So you’ll have, hey, here’s your portfolio wide, uh, Delta compared with the S, P or something, right? And you, if you want to lower that, you need to sell across this whole portfolio, all these positions, you could hit a button and right, make that happen. You can do it
Harold De Boer 27:14
better. But let’s say, in the past, it wasn’t necessary because people were really looking at different things, yeah, people are looking at the same thing. The average stock trader didn’t know back then that something was happening in the other markets or barrier, didn’t think it, didn’t think it was relevant. Using all these things, for instance, value at risk measures that have been used worldwide by many large firms, you immediately get if something happens in one place, it has a much more impact on the other markets. And it can sometimes take an hour, like in the Brazilian case with the Brexit, sometimes it takes more than that, a few days. But ultimately, it’s okay, yeah, they may have happened something here now in, let’s say, Brazil. But what does it has to do with the wheat production in Australia? Nothing. Is it? No, nothing
Jeff Malec 28:09
they expect first, and then think about it later. Yeah, yeah. And
Harold De Boer 28:12
that’s really changed. So it’s you can easily reduce charts that show that the correlation has been grown over the years, but you can also adapt those and realize that this, lot of those is short term events, and that that will be taken out and that improves. Where
Jeff Malec 28:34
do you think that whole piece of the market goes? Just keep going that way. We keep getting tighter and higher and higher short term correlations. I think we’re at our maximum of that. Well,
Harold De Boer 28:45
what I’ve learned over history is that don’t change constantly, but some things keep on returning. So let’s say the use of more of AI can also, again, result in different people that think they’re doing different things, or all of a sudden doing the same things. Yeah,
Jeff Malec 29:07
training on
Harold De Boer 29:08
the same they don’t realize. So it’s that will keep on coming back that and that that’s not different than with these, these cows, every time they tended to be hurt, and will will continue to be hurt even so now and then, an individual cow can do great things. And
Jeff Malec 29:27
that, to me, is why CoCo was so exciting for trend followers. It was like the first example in years, it seemed of, hey, here’s this independent, totally unique thing that’s happening outside of the macro. And it didn’t matter if the Fed was doing X, Y, Z.
Harold De Boer 29:41
But the nice thing was also that the cocoa market, for a long term, wasn’t really the trend forward best friend.
Jeff Malec 29:50
Yeah, for very long, yeah. So if
Harold De Boer 29:53
anyone did some historical optimization, would have said, Ah, we leave it out and it’s going to be better. And that’s something that’s that’s not. Of not new either. When, when we started to do our research and did the trend following techniques, we also were thinking, Oh, does it work on all markets or not? And then there was one market that was doing very, very bad in our historical testing, that was silver. It was the hunt brothers. It was because of that. And if you then say, okay, we should use it applied on all markets, but not silver, because silver doesn’t work, then essentially what you’re saying, okay, they can be hunt brothers again, and they will be in silver again. And to me, more logical, seem that there will be people like the hunt brothers again, but most likely another market than silver. So it’s better to see what happened in silver, and to see what’s the effect of using a system in markets like silver as well, and make sure that you can cope with that, because the next time it’s be it was going to be another market.
Jeff Malec 31:01
So do you guys filter out any markets? Or you say, as many markets as we can put into the universe there?
Harold De Boer 31:07
We don’t filter out markets because historically, something has happened. Yeah, we do filter out markets for other reasons. You can imagine that we have been trading ruble for a long time, but after Russia invaded Ukraine, we were among the many people that don’t want to trade rubble anymore. Yeah, and they are more markets that we are not trading when you stop trading the Turkish Lira, when Erdogan starts to have his own ideas about speculation, and that then
Jeff Malec 31:39
is that like from a safe market, from a justice standpoint, or from a right of a governance standpoint, or of a risk standpoint, of like, hey, this might go to zero, or it might go or both.
Harold De Boer 31:49
Now if, let’s say, one of the basic principles is when we are making money in a trade that then we want to receive that money, and we don’t want anyone else to take the money, because he doesn’t like us to make money. Yeah, so it has to be, has to be safe, and that that’s also a reason why, a few years ago, after the LME nickel event on alame, we completely stopped trading LME, completely LME, not only nickel. Now we completely stopped trading LME markets, and we have had some serious and long term discussions with them and see what kind of improvements they were going to make before we started trading again. That’s our way of doing that. It’s not that we are starting a law case against them. Costs lots of money and it doesn’t lead to anything. No, yeah. The market has to be reliable. We talk with our counterparties, in this case, exchanges on these elements. They don’t always like that, but it’s very fundamental that the whole idea about is is together. When you are selling at a high price, we want, we want to receive that high price. It’s not that going to be adapted and very we have been we had to be very active in that,
Jeff Malec 33:04
because trend was massively, well, maybe not massively, but trend, most trend models, were long nickel going into that, right?
Harold De Boer 33:09
Yeah. And we were one of the largest sellers in the moment when it was exploding. Because we think when a market is too high, you should sell. So that’s what we did. And so when they canceled all those prizes, we were one of the participants that lost the most due to that, not because it’s not that we had direct loss, but they took away profits. And that’s that’s not the whole idea. It’s they should have been thankful to everyone that was willing to sell when the price was too high.
Jeff Malec 33:42
They were thinking it would go higher. The day before
Harold De Boer 33:44
it ended at 50, and they were already thinking it was too high. So when it was at 100, we were one of the largest sellers, and they should be glad to the participants like us willing to sell it at high prices, because these were needed participants willing to sell and then it started to come down. It had already come down from 100 to below 80 before they decided to stop trading and throw all the trades away.
Jeff Malec 34:09
Yeah, I always joke that we trend followers always get blamed for high prices, but we never get thank you letters for low prices. Oh, yeah, where’s my thank you letter.
Harold De Boer 34:20
Sometimes you can also blame for low prices. It’s just dependent on the market. So if you’re trading stock markets and the stock markets are coming down, then it’s also true, true as well. How
Jeff Malec 34:34
do you feel when you said we thought it was too high? I’m assuming that is a model, not you’re not in a room and someone’s saying, this is
Harold De Boer 34:42
where we see yourself. Okay, this is going wrong. We, we take away. So the manual over this was, yeah, yeah. We had when, when things are going strange. We are in our models, all kind of elements, but when things are really strange, we we step in and. Overall, yeah, I
Jeff Malec 35:01
thought it was a misprint that day, right? I’m like, Oh, the screen is wrong.
Harold De Boer 35:07
We knew it was not a misprint. We had been we saw it happening, and we decided to sell it all. And we were almost finishing, finished with selling it all nice.
Jeff Malec 35:18
Well, not nice, but, and you’re that’s a big philosophy or core principle, right? Of like, it’s humans interacting with the machines, not just systematic, yeah?
Harold De Boer 35:29
Machines do nothing. Machines are like a dog or a cow now, yeah? But dogs can be you can train a dog easier than a cow. They have to do what, what you want them to do. If they start drilling around and barking against everyone, then it they are not well trained. So the program has to do what we want them to do. So they if you can train a dog to cater the sheep and she will come, but if the dog does something else, it’s not well trained. And then we are responsible. We are responsible for the sheep and the dog has to do it, and that’s our trading is the same thing. Our trading strategies are developed by us. We write all the code ourselves. So everything that the training strategy does should be what we want to happen. And we cannot manually do all these markets. We are on a normal day. We are working a few 100 orders at the same time. Most of them will not lead to fills, but we are working all of them together in all these different markets at the same time. Of course, we do not have that many traders that can do that in the old days, that would have been many to be used, but still, we are doing what we want to do, and if trade isn’t right, then we look, where did we made a mistake? Where did we go wrong? Programs don’t make mistakes. It’s people that are responsible for the program that make the mistakes. But how do you when you’re driving in a car and you drive me off the road when I’m on my bike, I will blame you. I will not blame your
Jeff Malec 37:06
car. I want to get your thoughts on Matthew vander pol later, speaking of the bike, but uh, if you started at level one on your trend following model 30 years ago, right? What? What level are you at now? Level 50. Who knows what, and what level does it go to? Right? A lot of people could argue there’s nothing left to do in trend following. Like all the Alpha has been thought of, and all the innovations been squeezed out of it. What
Harold De Boer 37:38
now? Because world, world is constantly changing, so we have to adapt constantly. When we when we started around 1990 using a computer was really an advantage. Now, being able to let people do the work is an advantage. Everyone is using computers so that the computers can run away. So we have to be more aware that it’s the people that have to do it. So it’s constantly changing how the other participants are doing different things as well. And then this is the big difference between, let’s say physics and economy. Markets is what is happening in market is the result of people doing things, and when people start to do things differently, the market becomes different. And if we want to perform we have to do different again, also.
Jeff Malec 38:37
So not a result of physical laws of nature. Physical losses
Harold De Boer 38:41
is very it doesn’t really change. Yeah, if, if you move from the Earth to the Moon, then all of a sudden things get really different. But yeah, as long as you stay on Earth,
Jeff Malec 38:52
and the physical laws, and then some physicists would probably be on here, well, actually, the physical laws get a little wonky and change also. But we’ll leave that for another podcast.
Harold De Boer 39:01
Yeah, yeah, the physical laws that are direct impact on us are not changing that much. No, no.
Jeff Malec 39:06
But so your take is it’s not necessarily right. What if I had developed the model 30 years ago, and I’m still using that classic trend model, right? It’s gonna probably still do it probably still did well in 22 and Oh, eight, but it’s going to have bigger drawdowns. Or what do you think the downside of that approach is of just the
Harold De Boer 39:26
many different thing, one the programs we are using right now, if we would have been using them 30 years ago, we wouldn’t have a computer that would have been quick enough to get all these orders out quick enough. Yeah, impossible. We we are now trading synthetic markets in which we are, let’s say, trading US bonds in combination with Australian bonds. In the early days, if I wanted to trade Australian bonds, I had to call an Australian broker and be on the line with him to. To trade the Australian market, while at that very same time, I couldn’t even trade the US market, because I had to wait till it opened, and then Australian was sleeping already. So many of the things we do right now could not be done in those days, but since they are can be done right now. The world has been changing. So you hear a lot about, for instance, China. The Chinese markets would be very interesting, because they’re also low correlated. Look at the history, how low correlated they are, yes, but they also low correlated because you’ve had a long period of time in which the Chinese markets were closed, which means automatically that they are not correlated. What’s happening outside China. But the moment these markets are open, all price in China will not move in another direction anymore. Then it will move outside China
Jeff Malec 40:44
like a law of arbitrage. They’ll just,
Harold De Boer 40:47
yeah, so the world is changing, and so it’s not, not that relevant to see. I’ve seen, of course, those publications about CTAs being calculated 200 years back or something? Well, that doesn’t make sense, because from one place in the Netherlands, you you could trade in Japan. The Netherlands did have a very good relationship with trading, relationship with Japan a few 100 years ago. But to get an order from here to Japan in those days, it cost a few weeks of sailing before it ended there. It’s not the way some big slip engines were tested. So it was technical, not, probably not, not possible. So that that makes also, that doesn’t make sense to see what happens back then you can make a nice movie. The Back to the Future has been a very successful movie, of course, but exactly it’s the but the not reality. And
Jeff Malec 41:47
so your innovation is in these markets and in this access, we still think there’s innovation inside of the core trend, following signals you said before entry exits don’t matter so much, but capturing the essence of that trend. Do you think there’s still innovation
Harold De Boer 42:02
there? Yeah, yeah, there has to be innovation there, because to make sure that we are really sizable invested in really different trends, it requires us to do the things different than before. Yeah. So you we have to do things different to get the same thing
Jeff Malec 42:21
done, the Red Queen principle, right? You have to always be rent, yeah. But it seems a lot of the innovation lately and trend following is more esoteric markets and illiquid markets and things like this, where, hey, we’re going further afield into these different markets rather than working on the signal itself. Yeah.
Harold De Boer 42:39
Well, the signal itself, the buy, sell. Well, you have to do some things there as well. You have to make sure that you don’t get disturbed by short term disturbances in markets. If the markets can be short term disturbed, you know, the flash crash we saw a few years ago. Well, the things you have to learn from events like that is, how can we make sure that we are not only losing directly into an event, but also, how can we make sure that it doesn’t have an impact a few minutes later or a few days later? And it can be on very many hidden ways that a large event in one market or in a few markets, has a longer lasting effect, which you didn’t really want to happen, and that’s something we are working on, and that can also be in the signals themselves in that individual market,
Jeff Malec 43:32
right? But that would seem counter the trend, right? Like the classic trend to me would be, I’m participating in every breakout, so I don’t miss the big one, right?
Harold De Boer 43:41
Yeah. But if you, if you, if you determine a breakout as the market makes a new low, you remember, in those in that stress crash, a few stock markets went down more than 90% for for a very short period of time, yeah. So when would you do have a sell signal after that defense in that pocket? No, thanks. It would have broken that low. No. That was then you have to make an idea about what do I how do I define a low? Do I calculate every trade, or do I take out some market trades? Yeah, that doesn’t mean that the exchange to take out these trades that right? They did that they should not take out those trades. No. But we, using that information, can choose which trades that have been traded before are relevant to us for he and which are not. And that’s a decision we can make and are allowed to make. No one says to us that it has to be a breakout because it has not traded below that price forever. Now it can also be if we take out to the strains once. I think the LV these didn’t happen in open, on the floor, these kind of trades. So it’s,
Jeff Malec 44:58
didn’t they bust those trades also they. They pulled an LME. I think they got rid of those trades. They did, they
Harold De Boer 45:04
did some, some of those. But again, that should not make a difference. It should. It should not be that an exchange starts to cut out trades and that has an impact on when we decide to buy or sell. The exchange policy is not and should not be aimed at having effect on people like us,
Jeff Malec 45:28
right? You’re the you’re a big customer, you should be helping you, right? Yeah,
Harold De Boer 45:32
- So that’s why we say if a price is if low, we so long that this, this issue, exchanges still have these strange policies about prices that are strange. And then one of the things that one of the things they do is then they call other participants. So this is an exchange that calls us as this price, this discussion about this price, what do you consider a fair price? And then, of course, the price looks somewhat high, and then we say, well, if we thought that price was too high, we would have sold there. If the buyer thought that price was too high, he shouldn’t have bit the product. Yeah, so it’s, that’s why you have a market, yeah, that’s, that’s let us not decide afterwards what we think it’s a fair price. We are in the market to help creating a fair price, and when we are doing that, we want to the other side, to be held to that price really, really something technical going on. And we have, can only very know, only very few examples where there was really something going on which allows to cancel trades. And
Jeff Malec 46:46
I’m sure somewhere on the exchanges website, there’s some language about price discovery, like that’s the point of what’s going on, not phone call price discovery. Yeah. But
Harold De Boer 46:54
exchanges, different exchanges, does have almost the same policy written. Can explain that completely differently? So,
Jeff Malec 47:06
yeah, how do you protect against all these, all this knowledge, all these filterings, like making your basically a risk free rate of return, right? Is there a point of no return, where you add so many filters and bells and whistles that it just becomes you dampen the return too much. No but of
Harold De Boer 47:27
course, you have to be if you say, if you have these extreme prices, and you hold them into your into statistics, you will end up having a very high volatility, or measure high volatility, or measure high risk, which is much higher than the real risk, yeah. And the result of that will be that you have smaller and smaller positions. And then if you then you have two small positions, and you will not make any more Yeah. So it you have to make sure that you’re not overestimating risk.
Jeff Malec 47:58
But I’m saying, even with the diversification and all the rest and the other filters, right? If you’re like, are we actually in a good trend? The what we talked about, I don’t want to be short implicitly, you’re implicitly short the dollar, right? If you start to add all that, do you start to lower the return? Where’s the goal, to increase the MA ratio, or whatever? No,
Harold De Boer 48:18
no, no. But we talked about Coco earlier, yeah, you have to make sure that when there is a big cocoa trend, as there was until earlier this year, you have to make sure that your size will position in that and we were, that’s why we made a lot of money in that market. And but if we were using exactly the same, same techniques as we did 20 years ago. We would have been in the trend, but not a sizable so we had to adapt for that, to make sure that that indeed, adding more and more markets doesn’t lead in having no sizable positions at all. You’re right.
Jeff Malec 48:55
So that’s some of the innovation of like, when making sure you don’t actually lower the profile, yeah, right, like you’re improving the profile, not lowering the overall profile. Want to talk quick the a couple of your papers. I’ll start with an old one that we did a blog post on one of my favorite pieces you did. It was an old one I called Skinny heads and fat tails. Yeah, right, which basically was during the Fed and kind of all the quantitative easing. And I think your concept was, hey, they’re just and for those listening, I’m doing a bell graph and shoving in the sides, right? They were making the head taller by dampening all this volatility. But what does that do? It sure makes the head taller, but it squishes out on the tails too. So just yeah, what’s your thoughts on that? Is that still happening a bit with with all the federal government, global government interventions,
Harold De Boer 49:55
it still can happen, and it’s coming back every now and then. But. A you have to be very careful when you, let’s say, kurtos said, this is about kurtosis. Yes, details. You should not concentrate and trying to find the fat tools. You should be aware when you see a big head. Yeah, a big head is the problem, and that can easily be found. And you have to know that, okay, if you see something like that, and this has to be part of the filters we are using. So now and then we stop trading an individual market when it’s becoming too much like that, then we know that, okay, now it’s not going to friction anymore. So that market cannot be traded. Well, as can be because, okay, you can have it in a currency When, when, when the central bank is linking it to too much to another currency. Well, then it cannot happen anymore. Sometimes you have it in interest rates instruments, short term interest rates instruments. Well, you have to avoid being in that situation. You of course, get it with an individual stock when there’s someone else that has bought the stock, and it’s of promise to buy it, and there’s an agreement about the price, it doesn’t move also. So these are the situations that you have to be careful about. So the fat tail is the result of having a peak, and that peak is something that you can recognize and
Jeff Malec 51:19
right versus another method. Some people might be saying, which markets have fat tails? Yeah, observable fat tails. And I’m going to avoid those. You’re saying it’s too late. Basically, yeah, love it. And then another paper
Harold De Boer 51:34
I was reading just there was a very there was a very nice one about the one you said about the fat tails, because there was a really fun I will cut a remark by someone who said he was statistics professor and he didn’t agree with it. He completely didn’t agree with it. And then he referred to Wikipedia that wrote a different theory, and that was correct. The English Wikipedia page had a complete different way of looking at it. The French and the German and the Dutch Wikipedia had not and then we were watching, but you can, in Wikipedia, you can see who has was changed it right? It was that same man he had adapted to the Wikipedia page to fulfill his theory, which was completely against the statistic books, yeah and but he forgot that we could read German and French as well. So we saw already. Okay, this man is having his own story.
Jeff Malec 52:38
That makes you scared of the large language models, right? If they’re pulling stuff like that from Wikipedia and are misinformed?
Harold De Boer 52:45
Well, it’s very easy nowadays to to make up a story and get it published and duplicated and let people believe in it. So it’s
Jeff Malec 52:56
what. So wait, what was his theory? He believed there was no such thing is fat tails. Or he was saying. What was he saying? He
Harold De Boer 53:02
believed, he believed that this peak in the middle was not the cause, of, of course, those of fat tails. So he had a very theoretical and arbitrary way of cutting a fat tail without his peak in the middle, which was absolutely not realistic. So most the common events are like we described it that you we gave the very simple example. We have the prices of a stock on every business day, but then we find out that never realized, but the week also has a Saturday and a Sunday. So let’s add the Saturday and Sundays to these prices, and what happens is not traded, so the price doesn’t change. So we have a new list of prices, and we include the Saturday and Sundays and no price change then and then, all of a sudden, the same stock has, of a sudden, a very high fat till the cryptos is up. The cryptos is up not because of fat tills. Now it’s up because of the peak in the middle, and that’s just how simple the statistics work. Kurtosis happens because of that. If you add zeros, you get a fat tail. And that’s a very simple thing, and that’s exactly how kurtosis is defined. I
Jeff Malec 54:17
imagine you have some big rubber curve in your office, and you can push in the push and make the head go up in the tail, square
Harold De Boer 54:24
down. Yeah. There’s other ways you can do it, but it’s
Jeff Malec 54:27
I want you to have one of the and then wanted to get your thoughts before we end up on basically replication. Right? You wrote that paper just by the index. Some great points in there. So kind of share what your thoughts were there. We’ve had Andrew beer here on the podcast, and he, he agreed, of like, I’m not trying to replace the trend following, if I, if I replace them, I can’t exist. So it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting kind of mind puzzle, right? Of how do you replicate something that you can’t replace? Yeah.
Harold De Boer 55:00
Yeah, but I think trend following is about following trends in individual markets, and the best trend followers that are working for a long time do that in many different markets. This diversification is part of the trend following strategy. There’s no trend follower that only takes a few markets and the basis of the success of all these trend followers, and they can have different ideas about styles and on the shorter term and others longer term, and some take out some markets. And there’s lots of ways we can be different. But if you just look at what is the long, lasting CTAs that are doing well, you are strength following and do it diversified. That’s a strategy. And for an investor, you get even more diversification if you invest with different transforming CTAs that are slightly different surgies, and the CTA index is the result of that. It’s diversification by the independent CTAs and even more diversification by adding these CTAs
Jeff Malec 56:02
ensembles of ensembles, basically, yeah,
Harold De Boer 56:05
you can make something that, I say, if you want to reproduce that, you have to do the same thing. You have to trade in all these different markets, and you have to do it on different ways. Then you have do the same thing as what the CTA index is, yeah, making something that is highly correlated with the index, with this particular index is not that very difficult, but correlation is something else than having the same long term return. If you take the performance of DTP and you do exactly the same, but every day you do point 1% less by making costs or whatsoever, the correlation will be 100% but point 1% every day in 250 business days a year is 25% a year, so you get 25% less return per year
Jeff Malec 56:59
with 100% correlation. Yeah, so
Harold De Boer 57:03
correlation is not the same, and is often being said, Oh, look, it’s correlated. So it’s the same, no, then you forget about the absolute level, and that absolute level is not part of correlation. And if you wanted to make as much as possible correlated, it’s not going to help you. And also our investors. And most investors want something else, something that is different. But we know our people, most people are afraid for something different, and that’s the the continuous, let’s say, problem with CTAs. Our clients want something different because they want diversification in the whole portfolio for investments they already have. At the same time, most people are afraid for something different. Well, that is a nice thing. If you say there’s an index and it will be close to that index,
Jeff Malec 57:51
but Right? I can do something different without being totally different, yeah,
Harold De Boer 57:56
but the CTAs don’t do well because they follow that index. Now, the CTAs decided to do something different than all the other investment styles, and the efforts of them doing these different things is the index. And as soon as all of us are trying to bring that index, let’s say if the whole index of CTA transformers would be consisting of participants that do like what Andrew weirdos replicating the index, then it would be a whole index of dogs running after their own tail,
Jeff Malec 58:27
right? It’s like a sci fi it’s a sci fi movie of like what came first. It
Harold De Boer 58:32
would end up nothing. So there are many ways of trading, and everyone should try his approach, but to do the index, you have to do what the index does, and that is very simple. In CTAs, you have to be invested in different markets, in different trends. And you can do that by investing with all these different CTAs. And yes, if there is 20 in the index, standard index, or 10 in the trend following index, you don’t really have to invest in all of them, but more than one is surely recommended, and it doesn’t even and if you invest in 10, it doesn’t even have to be the 10 that are in the index. There are some other ones that can add even more. I would think you can do better by that. But so do
Jeff Malec 59:17
you think the replication is, will do better, will do worse, or it’s just random, it’ll do different. The
Harold De Boer 59:24
replication is. The replication is not the moment it becomes successful, let’s say, in a commercial way, it will, in performance way, not be successful anymore, because then it becomes more of the standard, and it doesn’t work again. CTAs as a whole, we’ve had a periods in which we did very well, and periods in which we as industry did not so well. And the periods in which we did better was when we were more different from each other than in the periods we did less good. So. And then we say, well, the market is not friendly anymore, and we had all kinds of excuses. No, yeah, we have to be different animals. And we are different animals, different
Jeff Malec 1:00:09
dogs. Yeah, the And, speaking of drawdowns, trend in general has been in a drawdown. What since middle last year, basically, what you’ve been doing this 30 plus years, what’s your secret sauce for living through the inevitable trend following drawdowns? Does it still bother you or you’ve taken in strat Oh, well,
Harold De Boer 1:00:32
let’s say we are not celebrating around the table. Hey, hello, hello. How deep draw down we have. That’s absolutely not the case. Now, of course, we are all about making money and trying to make money and doing our best. Very important element is how to make sure that when you are in a drawdown, you keep on doing the best thing. And that has to do. That has is not so much the technical element is not the biggest issue. You have to make sure that the team keeps, to me, motivated and so on. And this is something we’ve been working on a lot the last years. It’s called resilience. But how do you make sure that the people, when something is happening and it’s not doing that well for peers to keep users motivated and do the right thing. Following goes wrong if you don’t, and any strategy goes wrong if you leave your strategy when it’s not working for a while, right? Unless you have a good reason that the strategy should be adapted. But adapting a strategy should not be dependent on, oh, it has not been working for a while, adapting a strategy because you see something is happening in the world, and you have to adapt for that. We stopped trading Russia, not because of we didn’t make money off in it anymore. No, because that currency was not being accepted anymore anywhere outside of Russia. So that’s why you stopped trading Russia. So adaptation is something you constantly have to do. But if you start to make strange moves, it’s not so wise. It’s like when you’re when we’re going from now, when you’re going from from Chicago to to Canada, and you can do different ways you have to cross that lake. Yeah, okay, you can take a boat. It’s very nice. Last time I took a boat, there was a sailing boat, but somehow it didn’t there was no wind, so that was not that enjoyable. Nice event. But okay, you can take a boat. If you decide to take a boat. You know, okay that this is okay if, you one time enter and it is freezing a lot, okay, then and there’s ice on the lake, which happens to now, then, okay, you will not make it to Canada that way. But that in itself, is not the reason the next time to go on ice skates, because then you will see that ice skating on water is not that successful. So you have to, you have to, you have to meet that at one time goes against you. Doesn’t mean you have to adapt yourself. If you find out that the temperature above ski Chicago is coming down constantly and all in the future, it will always be ice. Well, better to have a sledge or ice skates. But as long as that is not the case, keep on using your boat and be aware sometimes it might reach and then the boat doesn’t function.
Jeff Malec 1:03:25
The budget in his historically speaking, you have comfort from a trend following has always come back. Or do you discount that? Of like, well, it’s times are different, and we’ll see what happens
Harold De Boer 1:03:37
and now it we constantly have to have adapted, independent whether or not we did a good or not, not so good. So yes, we constantly have to change. But the underlying principle why trend following works keeps on working and will continue working, and we have to make sure that we are profiting from that.
Jeff Malec 1:03:58
And I was waiting for you to bring it full circle. The underlying reason is because we’re all cows, yes,
Harold De Boer 1:04:04
indeed, but I’m not allowed to say that too often. Once
Jeff Malec 1:04:09
or twice is fine. Okay. I want to finish up a little bit of fun. I heard you’re somewhat you mentioned Back to the Future movie. Yeah. What’s your top four movies of all time? Your Mount Rushmore, if you will, of movies? Well,
Harold De Boer 1:04:30
I can say the whole list of the coon Brothers movies. I really am a fan of the coon Brothers movies, and if I recently saw one minute of a movie that I hadn’t seen before, but immediately recognized this is Coen brothers. One of the best ones is somehow not high on the list of the
Jeff Malec 1:04:50
Coen brothers. We would say, Coen Brothers. You say, Okay, Cohen
Harold De Boer 1:04:53
brothers, yeah, yeah. And this, you would say, say, Cool, we have the OE. And this. This and COVID, you say,
Jeff Malec 1:05:02
okay, yeah, so what like Big Lebowski, what? What are some of those? Well, most
Harold De Boer 1:05:06
people talk about that one, but yeah, my favorite one is the Hertz circuit proxy. Ah, I know it the her circle proxy. And there is this, when you talk about trends, there is this scene in it. The guy has a circle. He has invented the circle. And then this becomes the hula hoop thing. This whole scene in which the hula hoop doesn’t sell at all, and all of a sudden becomes a success, and then becomes a trend. It’s such a great example of how a trend can start out of nothing. And then, and the way they filmed it, it’s, it’s almost no speaking, no spoken words in it. It’s, they often do great things without, with just pictures and not too much words. And words they use of very minimal but very exact. But here is almost no spoken words in it. In this hill scene with this, this little boy. And what’s happening with this, this circle that the hula hoop thing is, is so great, and the whole movie is great. But that’s that thing is understanding how a trend can start and how big a trend it can become. And also in this movie is, of course, some of the people there didn’t want it to become a success, and it did become a success. It tells you everything about trend following that movie, I
Jeff Malec 1:06:21
would have guessed. I could have sat here for three days and guessed movies, and that landed on HUD, sucker proxy,
Harold De Boer 1:06:27
proxy, you have to watch her. Sucker proxy. I’ve
Jeff Malec 1:06:31
watched it, but, yeah, I wouldn’t think that you would have had watched it. Oh no,
Harold De Boer 1:06:35
no, no, it’s great. And there’s another one of them. There’s also that. There’s also trading related, I said the Coen Brothers normally are not having that much text. But one of the movie is true, Chris, this girl that is trading to get her horses back, the horses of a fort about the ponies. Yeah,
Jeff Malec 1:07:01
she should have got the Oscar. I think she was so good man, and she was young at that time. Yeah,
Harold De Boer 1:07:06
see, yeah. I don’t know whether she was 14 years. Obviously, played something 14. But this negotiation scene in this movie, you should, you can. You won’t watch it up on YouTube. This whole negotiation scene, there’s many people nowadays that kind of thing. When the testing, trading thinks about the thing, you don’t have to trade, it’s a price, and you trade the price. Now, of course, price is the outcomes of a negotiation, and the negotiation in this movie when she wants her punish. So absolutely great. And this has a lot of words, but that’s, that’s absolutely great scene there. All of the movies are absolutely great. But these two is, if you want to do something with trend following and trading, of course, when someone is new in the office and doesn’t know about futures markets, we always tell them, let’s watch trading places. And exactly social exchange, yes, trading, negotiation, that’s in true credit and a trend is in the circle, proxy,
Jeff Malec 1:08:11
No Country for Old Men, too violent. It’s also,
Harold De Boer 1:08:15
very, very good. Oh, great, great one that also, yeah,
Jeff Malec 1:08:20
the I’ll send you a list we did our top trading movies of all time, a blog post once, I’ll send it over to
Harold De Boer 1:08:26
you. There was no coonrods in yet? I
Jeff Malec 1:08:29
don’t think so. No, I have to add, well, we’ll add those. We’ll update the post. We had some fun ones. We had gold finger. Yeah, right, because he’s basically trying to corner the gold market by irradiating it all in Fortnite. And then we had pretty woman, which is about a, basically a private equity guy hold up, doing a going over his deal for three days and falling in love. So yeah,
Harold De Boer 1:08:54
but this is the true crit. One is also this, of course, still discussion, let’s say on many trading floors and not many women, then you can discuss whether women would be just as good in trading as men are. Well, this girl shows that girls can do trade very well,
Jeff Malec 1:09:15
definitely. And what’s the other one? I like? There’s the Oh Fargo
Harold De Boer 1:09:19
Barco is, of course, yes, somewhat comparable with this, this police woman, that cat stays calm, the old brother, verato, black and white with these songs in it. Yeah,
Jeff Malec 1:09:36
love it all right, we will leave it there. Harold. Thanks so much. It’s been fun. I’m gonna come visit Rotterdam. We’ll do it in person next time. Yeah, by boat, by boat, no ice skates, just boat,
Harold De Boer 1:09:50
unless the Northern Sea is frozen, yes,
Jeff Malec 1:09:53
and I don’t know if that’s ever gonna happen again, right? All right, thanks so much. Okay, thank you. Bye. Take care!
This transcript was compiled automatically via Otter.AI and as such may include typos and errors the artificial intelligence did not pick up correctly.
