Join Jeff Malec for a special solo “6-pack” episode where he tackles six topics on his mind during the summer podcast break. Jeff starts by examining the challenging trend following drawdown that’s been plaguing the markets, sharing insights from his 25 years in the space and why this one feels different. He pays tribute to Waldo Wiens, the legendary Kansas farmer who backed dozens of CTAs with hundreds of millions and helped shape the managed futures industry. Reflecting on Hurricane Katrina’s 20th anniversary, Jeff explores the storm’s market lessons and marvels at how quant models are being used to save lives in weather forecasting. He dives into AI’s growing role in finance and education, questioning whether it’s becoming a crutch rather than a multiplier and pondering its potential economic implications. Jeff makes the case for smart leverage as a diversification tool, challenging common investor misconceptions about risk management. The episode wraps up with his personal rants on everything from wind turbines (not windmills!) to highway etiquette. No guest, no agenda – just Jeff’s unfiltered thoughts on markets, life, and everything in between.
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From the Episode:
Super Storms, Mathematical Modeling, and Hurricane Hunting with Dr. Jeff Masters on The Derivative
Check out the complete Transcript from this week’s podcast below:
Solo Summer Six-Pack: Talking Trend, AI, Leverage, and Hurricanes
Jeff Malec 00:08
Hello there. So we’ve inadvertently taken a few weeks off here, summer schedules and all that interfering with podcast schedules. August would always get slow, back in my trading pit days markets dragging, and inevitably, someone would just start talking about anything but the market, and sometimes that led to the best conversations. So I have no guest view on this pod, and we’re going to try something a little different, little something I’ve seen the pod father Bill Simmons do over on his pod from time to time. A little six pack of things on my mind, kind of six quick items we can talk through without a guess. So here we go. Let’s crack open this six pack. Send it.
Jeff Malec 00:58
Okay, first up this nasty trend, drawdown. We’ve talked a lot on the pod so far this year about the drawdown and trend and it’s not quite going away yet, which has become a little disconcerting. It seems like not too long ago, when CoCo was going crazy to start off 2024 I was talking with MEB Faber and some others about doing a pod on the 10 Best trend trades of all time. Coco was in that ballpark. Trend followers were doing well, and it seemed times are good. Fast forward to October of 24 big losing month, couple big whipsaw reversals. Nothing much to write home about the rest of that year, losses to start 25 and then just insult to injury with the April tariff whipsaw moves. A few stats I have here for you, just showing how bad that April was Aussie. Dollar was spiked down 16 then back up, bounced up 22 bonds were down 630, year bonds down six, then back up, down 10, excuse me, then back up six. Crude oil down 24 then up a whopping 42 and the DAX down 17 before rallying 27 and those were all coming in long, the reverse short and the bounce back up, whipsaw city. So I’ve been doing this for 25 years, right? I put my first real money into a trend program Clark capital, which coincidentally is now O’Brien Investment Group, who we had on the pod last week, put that 2000 maybe 2001 can’t exactly remember, and started my own CTA that had heavy trend component in 2004 and ever since my head’s been completely in this space, I’ve looked At, invested in, seen the positions of and talked with pretty much everyone. Winton, Welton, quest, Dunn Mulvaney, Jerry Parker, the Turtles, you name it, European style, American style, vol targeted, not vol constrain. Classic markets, new markets have been deep in the weeds in Alba. So with all that context, what do I think about this drawdown? Glad you asked. My gut says we’ll get out of this just like we have all the rest. Trend always finds a way. But, and this is a big but it’s not shaping up to be an easy out. I don’t think. What do I mean by that? Well, trend following is not like a stock picker, right? You can’t just decide to work hard or research a new hot company find some undiscovered gem. Trend followers are surfers, right? They can’t make the waves. They just have to be ready to ride them when they show up. They need those trends to emerge. So where did the trends emerge from the current environment? What waves are they trying to ride? Well, if you look under the hood and I go to sock Jen’s trend indicator, free tool online, which is really good. Pull up that site, look at what’s going on under the hood here. Trend is using that as a proxy for trend. Trends are back to being Max long equities. They’re long the US, long Europe, long Asia, long, long, long. They’re mostly short the US dollar against everything except the Japanese in their long precious metals, short industrial metals, long energy, short grains. Here’s the kicker, the average length of all those positions is about 117 days. Think about that. It’s like we’ve already been in these trades for three, four months and haven’t had much to show for it in terms of a drawdown recovery. That’s problem number one, right? And for this to work, we to really dig out of this drawdown hole. We need, we don’t need a reverse. We need more of the same. We need those same moves we’re in right now to continue for another 100 days, and then another, probably 100 after that. And that’s where it gets a little counter intuitive, right? For trend to get its mojo back, we need equities to keep ripping higher, the very strategy people own as a crisis performer, the thing is supposed to make money when stocks go down is now in a position where for it to heal itself, really, it’s relying on some very non alt like behavior, long stocks and long bonds, right? One of the leading alts is now betting on the traditional assets to bail it out. Go figure. So.
Jeff Malec 05:03
Okay, switching gears my second bottle in the six pack. Waldo weans, I mentioned before starting our own trend program back in oh four. It was called the attain strategic diversification program. But anyway, one of our first and largest investors was a gentleman named Waldo Wiens, a farmer from Hutchison, Kansas. So Waldo passed away about two years ago, unfortunately, but he was into his 90s, so lived a good, full life. But at the time, I was bouncing around the idea of doing a special Memorial type pod for him, but couldn’t quite get it organized, get the people I wanted to come talk about him, so wanted to just use one of my six packs here to recognize and talk about Waldo. So Waldo was no ordinary farmer, and I don’t have direct knowledge of all this, but from the bits and pieces I saw people I talked to over the years, he had somewhere between 100 and 500 million in CTAs over the years. But we’re not talking two or three super large allocations, he seeded and helped dozens and dozens of new CTAs and traders get off the ground, putting in, you know, 100k to 5 million, depending on what he was looking at and what the minimums of these different groups were. He was an anchor client for altegro. Says they got started up some cool thing he was doing center books before a lot of the multi strats and pod shops. So today we’re born. He’d see his managers too overweight in this market or that, and hedge off some of that exposure on his own, through his own account, right? Without telling the CTAs what to do or what to curtail, he’d just go ahead and hedge it on his own. He was the first person in the CTA we had, first person that we made over a million dollars for which was quite a feeling, right? This guy put his trust in us, in our strategy, we delivered the gains for him, which was hopefully a win, win. But I’ll never forget seeing that account balance ticking at seven digits and having that proud feeling, and he was having the profitable feeling, but win, win. He also had a unique leverage approach where he would look to fund another CTA or account once he’d made enough in profits to cover the margin needed for the next strategy. Forget the stated minimum. He understood notional funding, the true cost of capital before there were such things as managed account platforms, or first loss funds and all the rest. What’s more, he didn’t beat you up on fees, too bad, right? He had all the power, he had all the money to allocate. He could really make or break a young CTA, but he understood that these groups needed to keep the lights on, pay for research, build out their infrastructure. So that was good to see as sitting on the opposite side of the table from him, of course, right? It wasn’t all good. He didn’t have a magic ball. There were lots of losers to be sure. He was in at Rev CO, I think it was at MF Global for a time too. But he he never got mad. He never lost faith in the managed future space. And to me, he should be up there on the Mount Rushmore famous managed futures folks with John Henry, Ed Sequoia, David Harding and the likes. So Waldo, Thanks for backing new ideas, for being fair and honestly, for reminding me the industry sometimes really is just about trust and optimism. So rest in peace, Mr. Waldo Wiens, you
Jeff Malec 08:26
Okay, number three, pop this one open or number three, I out myself as a weather nerd. I love hurricanes, Hurricane models, Weather Channel, Jim Cantore, all that stuff. Maybe it goes back to being on the trading floor I was looking for the thing no one’s talking about. Maybe it goes back to growing up in Florida. Not quite sure how it started. But anyway, August. Here we’re recording August 28 August is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I vividly remember I was on the tarmac in Denver, just spent a weekend with my dad and brothers hiking and fishing for a little G rated bachelor party of mine. Guess that means I’m coming up on my 20th wedding anniversary, but we were headed home back to Chicago. Whatever airline we on had the TVs and back the seat. Nearly every person on the plane had the news on just watching that huge red swirl taking direct aim at New Orleans. So two things on this, one kind of the trading lesson side of it, I still to this day use Katrina as a warning of how spread trading isn’t as delta neutral, risk free as one might think. When that storm hit, it destroyed energy markets. They went crazy. Natural gas was insane. The physical production and delivery infrastructure got completely shut down. The Henry Hub in Louisiana, which is the delivery point for NYMEX futures, was flooded and inoperable, right? You literally couldn’t deliver gas. So those front month. Contracts shot up. Physical deliveries were the lowest since 92 I think it soared to over $11 per million BTU. However, they quote that as everyone scrambled to get out base and roll their positions and the gasoline market was equally wild. Refineries shut down from damage and power outages. September, gas spiked 41 cents in a single day to 250 a gallon. Think we’d take that now, but that was 20 years ago. But the point of all this is the the front month stuff, because everything was shut in and you couldn’t get to it all, the front month stuff was spiking, but the back months were not just going up less. They were actually going down, because everyone understood this oil hadn’t been destroyed, the gas hadn’t been destroyed. It was just unable to get to so as soon as the flood waters went away, soon as you could get back to these refineries, you had this massive supply that was going to hit the market. So those safe, quote, unquote calendar spreads and seemingly risk neutral arbitrage trades turned into massive P L swings overnight. So I always tell people, Hey, if you think that spread trades risk free, take a look at Katrina. Second thing from the hurricane. I just think it’s really cool how this is a spot where quant work is happening outside of finance, right with the aim of saving lives instead of chasing Alpha. Sometimes in this space, feel like we’re not really doing anything to help the world, and these quants are actually doing stuff to help the world. So the National Hurricane Center is running models that would make most hedge funds jealous. There’s a European center model, American model. NOAA has got a model and the mass incredible. They’re essentially slicing the atmosphere into three dimensional grids with cubes, 15 kilometers on each side, stacked 50 layers high, you know, creating millions of data points just from those models. And then you have the other data that’s coming from satellites, ships, commercial flights, those badass hurricane hunter pilots flying right into the storms, weather stations, ocean buoys, they’ll take it any way they can get it. Put that on the model, crunch everything up. And here’s my best part. It doesn’t just stick out one path and say, Okay, here’s where the hurricane is going. Each of those models create an ensemble forecast. They say, here’s the 20 pass that this thing could take, and then the cone you see on the Weather Channel whatnot is actually the one standard deviation of all those ensembles together. So we’re saying 66% of the models are essentially in that cone. Result forecast errors have dropped dramatically. There’s a lot of good there. What I think you could do even better is we’re still stuck with the wind speed category system, right? Katrina was only a cat three when it made landfall, but the combination of surge rainfall and New Orleans geography made it catastrophic. So what I’d like to see is a new kind of composite rating system, something that factors in the wind, the surge, the rainfall, perhaps weighted to the geography and the population density, and really give it a ranking that makes a little bit more sense. I’d also like to set them, to put all of the spaghetti models, I call them right all the ensembles on the map. People get a false sense of security from the cone. Put them all in there. And if you see one squiggly line that’s going to your hometown? Maybe you’re like, Okay, I don’t care where the cone is. I’m worried about that outlier. Last bit on that. How do you hedge all that? Right, it seems there’s more and more of these hurricanes, wildfires, everything. How do we hedge these natural disasters? We’ve done a pot on cat bonds, but you’ve got insurance companies pulling out of Florida and the like. So who knows, maybe one day we get hurricane futures or something, and speaking that, I’ll put the link to one of my favorites pods we’ve ever done with Dr Jeff masters. He was a hurricane pilot, founder of Weather Underground. So we’ll put that link in the show notes.
Jeff Malec 14:02
Okay? I think it’s illegal to have a podcast in 25 and not talk about AI, right? So pop top number four is about AI. I use AI to pull all the old blogs we wrote on Katrina and pull out the intel from the pods we’ve done on hurricanes and cat bonds. To give you the stats above, we use it 10 to 20 times a day at RCM for polishing language, pulling stats, running back tests, banging around in Excel, which, as an aside, nobody should ever not be able to do something in Excel ever again, right? AI is meant for that. Personally, I’ve set up my kids with their own AI tutors for each class, they have an AP Bio tutor, a world history tutor. You can tell it exactly what book they’re using, put in the class syllabus, etc, etc. I tell them it’s not here to do your work, right? Don’t use it to cheat. Don’t use it to write a paper. It’s a multiplier. It’s there to help you learn either better or faster or both, right? Like my example saw, was it, use it if you’re not understanding something, ask it to explain it to like. You’re in a Harry Potter book, or in volleyball terms, or whatever you’re into, which it’s super good at right? And just take those concepts and and quickly shift it around in a way that might make sense more sense to a kid or to an adult. So anyway, that’s all pretty standard stuff. It’s out there in the universe. What caught my eye recently was messing around with some portfolio modeling, especially around looking at different ways to analyze correlations. So a day or two later, at the bottom of this massive rabbit hole I dug myself. I was there doing heavy quant work with methods I barely even heard of, much less completely understood. So this was just for fun, just a rabbit hole I was randomly going down. But what struck me is that surely there’s groups and traders out there actually doing this for real, right? What happens if they don’t actually understand it? What if they’re not using it as a multiplier, but kind of rather as the answer key? They’re the kid cheating on their homework, so to speak. So I know I probably sound like a boomer shaking my fist at the sky, but surely this can and will introduce a bunch of future fragility and hidden risks in the market, I think, and at an increasing rate as the adoption increases. Last bit on AI, if I let myself get a little philosophical for a second, always dangerous. It strikes me where the AI is creating, perhaps an economy which will eventually kill itself. So I’m not talking sci fi Terminator stuff, although would love to do a pun on that. I’m talking more. I just think the end game of the AI race is massive deflation and an end possibly to the consumer economy, right? Every firm’s race and automate everything, lower their labor costs, boost their profits, automate the content, the code, the service, and it makes sense as a single company, right? Hey, I need to I’m a for profit business. I’m going to make as much money as possible. If AI helps me do that, I’m going to implement it. But if everyone does it, are you not automating away the bulk of the jobs, and then who’s left to be a customer who’s who’s earning wages. So to me, I think you’re going to get, could get this weird deflationary spiral where companies are super efficient at making things, but there’s no one left to buy them, right? It’s probably why Elon Musk has been out talking about universal basic income, all right? So someone’s left to buy his cars and his rockets. So watch for that, how the market and society handles that is, for lack of a better phrase, the big homework assignment, I think,
Jeff Malec 17:37
moving on Fifth bottle on the pack leverage, right? Four letter word for a lot of people, lot of investors, conjures up images of long term capital management blowing up the world, or Bill Huang’s Arctic ghost. Is that? How I say that imploding in spectacular fashion, because of all that, because of the news, usually, a lot of investors have this almost allergic reaction to the word leverage. I was going back and forth with a client the other day, super smart guy, and he had just had this visceral negative feeling about the word, like it didn’t matter what I was trying to explain just the word leverage itself. He’s like, I’m out. So I typed up a few points for him, pulling from some great stuff by PIMCO and the guys behind return stacking, and it got me thinking, like, are investors looking at this all wrong? So want to share a few of those points. First is, many people set it forward. Most of us already using leverage every single day, right? We think of it as completely normal. We have you have a mortgage on your house, you have a car loan. That’s all leverage. Put up a small amount of capital to control a much larger asset. Nobody bats an eye. But you mentioned using leverage in a investment portfolio, and people start to lose their minds. So to me, the whole point of using leverage smartly isn’t to make a concentrated, super speculative bet. Bill Huang style, right? It’s the exact opposite. It’s about enabling the diversification. It’s about capital efficiency. So right? The old way of thinking is, should I own stocks and bonds or alternatives? You have $1 you have to choose how much of it to separate into those buckets. The newer way of thinking, right, the capital efficient way, is to ask, How can I get exposure to stocks and bonds and alternatives with that same dollar. So instead of a 6040 portfolio, use a little bit of leverage to have say, 60 stocks, 40 bonds, 50 alternatives. So your total exposure just went up to 150% the allergic to leverage, people are gonna say, hey, that’s plus 50% leverage. You’re correct, but you haven’t just juiced your stock market. Bet you haven’t juiced up your existing portfolio. You’ve actually created a more diversified, more robust portfolio, because you’ve added more return drivers working for you at the same time, right? So if you can maintain that core stock and bond position while adding protective. Uncorrelated assets that, to me, is smart leverage, another piece return stacking has points out in their materials, not all leverage created equal. The guys there have a fantastic acronym lice stands for leverage combined with illiquidity, the i concentration, the C or excessive sizing, right? That’s the toxic stuff. That’s what causes the disasters, right? When you lever up a single, illiquid stock to the gills, that’s not a strategy. That’s a time bomb waiting to happen. So use modest leverage, uncorrelated assets, and you’re amplifying the benefits of the diversification, not just the returns. You’re spreading the risk, not concentrating it, right? And that’s exactly what the big, sophisticated players do, the pension funds, the endowments, they use leverage as a risk management tool to build more resilient portfolios. So to me, the conversation shifting question isn’t, is leverage bad anymore? The question shouldn’t be, is leverage bad anymore. The real question is, how much of a disadvantage Am I getting into by not using leverage intelligently, right? Smart Money is already doing it. If you’re thinking in terms of a simple 6040, chart, you might be bringing a knife to the proverbial gunfight.
Jeff Malec 21:19
Okay, let’s finish up the six pack with a few quick rants. Right? I’m on my soapbox here, so allow me the pleasure to ask the world to correct some things, if you would. Okay, first, can everyone stop calling the big white towers with rotating blades windmills? You know those things, they are wind turbines. There’s no milling. There’s no corn mill down there being milled. There’s just wind turning into power, not a mill, a turbine. Learn it, use it. Thanks. Next Costco gas. Great idea for you make the gas lines like a ski hill. Green circles, blue squares, black diamonds. If your main activity for the day is filling up at Costco, talking to the attendant, going a few cars back and seeing your buddy, please head over to the green circle line. Take as much time as you need or like if you think you’re an in the f1 movie trying to get sub two second pit stop Black Diamond lane. If you’re unsure, go ahead. Stick in the blue. Let’s speed up those lines. People. Starbucks, add fountain Diet Coke. That’s it. No notes, profits jump a few billion. Let me go in there. Get a Diet Coke. I don’t want to have to stop for half the family at Starbucks and then go drive to McDonald’s. Give me some Diet Coke in that. Lastly, keep toying with making enough money where I can take out a Super Bowl ad for this. Get out of the left lane on the highway. Please, please, please. There’s people like me that like to drive fast, faster than you, if it would just make everything much safer and easier. If you drove slow, not in the left lane, but over there in the right lane, go for your Sunday drive to Costco there in the right lane. All right, that’s all I got. Thank you for listening. If you like this, leave a comment. Maybe we’ll do one a year, if not, leave a comment and tell me to shut up. But either way, we’ll be back with a guest next week in September. Peace.
RCM Alternatives 23:12
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