What does it take to build a portfolio that can weather changing markets, and how can advisors put that idea into practice? Jeff Malec sits down with Corey Hoffstein to explore return stacking, portable alpha, and the thinking behind a more diversified approach to investing. Drawing on the Return Stacked Symposium and his experience in the field, Corey shares perspectives on portfolio construction, managed futures, and the lessons learned from past implementations. It’s a conversation about making investment ideas practical, helping clients stay resilient, and building a stronger community around new approaches. – SEND IT!
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From the Episode:
- PODCAST: Andrew Beer: Advanced Hedge Fund Replication with the Top Down
- PODCAST: Replicating Babies, Trend Following, Hedge Funds, and Warren Buffet with Corey Hoffstein
- WHITEPAPER: Seven Thoughts On Running Big Money For the Long-Term
Check out the complete Transcript from this week’s podcast below:
Cliff Asness in the house, plus return resilience, stacking, and portable alpha with Corey Hoffstein
Jeff Malec 00:09
Welcome to the Derivative by RCM Alternatives. Send it. Hello there! Welcome back to the Derivative, brought to you by RCM Alternatives, where we recently helped sponsor the Return Stack event here in Chicago. I was in attendance and asked a few questions, as I’m apt to do, from out there in the audience, and got back one answer from up there on stage saying, “I know that voice, the Derivative,” which was kind of a cool callout, and here I thought I was just on here talking to my friend George and a few of my brothers. So thanks for listening. Okay, onto this episode where we break down the return stack symposium with one of the creators of the whole concept, and I think he created the entire quant leaning podcast genre as well. Don’t quote me on that. It’s Corey Hofstein of Newfound, edition on what went down at the symposium, across all the guest speakers, panelists, and one special guest, Cliff Asness. Send it. All right, we’re here with Corey Hofstein, the best voice in podcasting.
Corey Hoffstein 01:22
That’s a intro.
Jeff Malec 01:24
That is an intro. Even at the symposium, it was like bellowing through the speaker system. It’s did you work on that, or you’ve just naturally endowed?
Corey Hoffstein 01:33
Well, I’m sure part of it is genetic. Part of it is you’re learned, as you know, when you’re a podcast host, you go into a little bit of podcast speaker voice. May not be. It’s not how I talk to my kids. That’s for sure.
Jeff Malec 01:43
It gets higher. What are you doing? Get over. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. How the kids doing? How old now?
Corey Hoffstein 01:49
I got three and a half and one and a half. And everyone, everyone always talks about the terrible twos. But I’ll tell you the the three major age is, you know, really really where they come into their own personality strong with a lot of opinions and school this year has been a little bit of a friction. Just everything’s a little bit harder, but it’s a lot of joy. It’s a lot of joy. You know, it reminds you what the meaning of life is is about.
Jeff Malec 02:13
And everyone tells you, right? My son’s a senior, had his last ever athletic event I went to this year. So you, it’s like in a second, it’s gone.
Corey Hoffstein 02:20
My my wife hates it, but I’m like, so that was like the third of the 18 summers we’ll be lucky to get with our children. You know, exactly. I counted. I’m like, we’re a quarter of the way to our son moving out of the house, and she’s like, “Why are you doing this?” I’m like, “To to make sure we appreciate every weekend.”
Jeff Malec 02:37
Yeah, leave that quant stuff at at work. Don’t bring that into the family. That’s right. And do you consider yourself a Floridian yet?
Corey Hoffstein 02:46
I guess I kind of have to. I’ve been here for four years now. Plus, I’ve I gotten flooded out of a house. I feel like that’s a real Floridian experience. Yeah, you got to stay up there. Yeah, I lost the I lost the car, my wife’s wedding dress, all my diplomas. Like, yeah, if I’m not a Flirtian, I don’t know what else I am at this point.
Jeff Malec 03:03
All all my diplomas was that that’s a little humble brag there. How many you have?
Corey Hoffstein 03:07
All two of them. All two. But it was it was funny. I was talking to someone else about this the other day. We lost the first floor of the house we were renting at the time. The first floor though was like a guest room and a ton of storage. And I said, like, in reality, it was a wonderful purge. Why was I dragging around my college and grad school diplomas with me from place to place to place to sit in storage? There was just there was no need. I never hung them up. I never cared to look at them. All right, my wife’s wedding dress. She didn’t real. She was not. She was planning on wearing it again. Hopefully, you know. So yeah, it was a little sad. I got a great photo from our balcony looking down on on our patio that I, you know, carried all this stuff out by hand, and it’s just like water sewage soaked wreckage with her wedding dress, you know, splayed on top.
Jeff Malec 03:56
Yeah, that would have been good. We got
Corey Hoffstein 03:58
we got rid of quite a quite a bit of stuff we’d been lugging around for years.
Jeff Malec 04:02
We were talking about this at this symposium with someone because their office used to be in the old Revco building in Chicago. Here, were you ever in that building?
Corey Hoffstein 04:09
I don’t think so. But
Jeff Malec 04:10
they had all this crazy. I think they probably spent some customer money on art or something because then they ended up getting in a little bit of trouble. But ignoring that, they had this great art collection. But great is in air quotes because some of it was like a naked pregnant woman with a gas can on a burning pouring gas on a burning tree. So I could see your wedding dress, soaked wedding dress on the patio picture would have yeah problem. Yeah, I’m
Corey Hoffstein 04:36
sure someone could have taken a very tasteful art art photo of it all and put it in a put it in a art art gallery somewhere.
Jeff Malec 04:44
Love it. So was that just last week? I was with you here at the symposium. I believe
Corey Hoffstein 04:50
feels like it was months ago, but yeah, I guess last week was the symposium last Wednesday, october 28. Yeah. So you got out of Chicago right in time. It’s like 40s now here at Cold. We got the most unbelievable weather while we were in town. I was pretty nervous about hosting a symposium in in Chicago in late October. That was a date that worked for the venue and our speakers and putting it all together. And I’m going, this is a real roll the dice in terms of I could show up and it could be freezing and snowy in Chicago, or we could have a late summer. And we we got very lucky. Chicago put on a real show for
Jeff Malec 05:24
us. Hey, we we’re good. So wanted to have you on talk through the symposium highlights. Was I’ll just start. Overall, you guys put on a great show, like well produced. Not to say that it was overproduced or anything, but just everything was professional and on time and great. The venue was great in the CBOE old post office building. So wanted to start though with the end of the symposium, where you called in some favors or made a call and had Cliff Asness on, but your intro to him was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. Not to fluff you too bad.
Corey Hoffstein 06:11
Thank you. Yeah, well, I was gonna get you everywhere with me, but thank you.
Jeff Malec 06:14
So, what was that like to write that up? What’s your relationship with Cliff like? We can start there. How’d you meet Cliff and all that? But then I want to get into some of that intro because that was some funny parts.
Corey Hoffstein 06:23
Yeah, so I don’t want to overstate my relationship with Cliff. I’d say we’re we’re we’re we’re friends. You know, it’s not like I’m going over to his house for dinner, but you know, grab coffee with him and have certainly chatted with him a number of times throughout the years. You know, Cliff is someone who I’ve looked up to for a long time, both for his contributions to the investment field, but also, you know, someone who’s trying to run and grow an asset management business. You know, he has grown one of the largest hedge fund and asset management businesses in the world. That shouldn’t be understated. At how difficult that is. It’s not just generating the returns, but it’s it’s all the operations and compliance and everything that goes behind that and orchestrating that machine. And I know he has partners, and he would deflect, you know, owning all the credit for that. But I, you know, I recognize how difficult that is. And so, to Cliff’s credit, very early on in the oh, I call mid 2010s, there was a bunch of us who were writing research, and Cliff was very generous in sharing that research. Some of the research I wrote ended up getting shared around AQR, and and Cliff was very very public on Twitter and still is, and just sort of cross paths on Twitter and replying to each other and built a relationship naturally that way. But this
Jeff Malec 07:46
wasn’t academic reason; it’s academic level. But you guys aren’t doing it for universities or something. You’re doing it for your no, no. This is this
Corey Hoffstein 07:53
is yeah research that you’re publishing. That it’s sort of twofold. You’re you’re I mean, it is marketing truly. Like you’re trying to get people to to learn about your firm and learn about the investment acumen you have, but you’re also putting some hopefully novel ideas out in the world. I think a lot of us do this because we like to share these ideas and get feedback. You’re certainly not putting any alpha out there, but there is stuff that you know. Again, I’ll give this is Cliff’s phrase craftsmanship alpha that isn’t really true alpha, but there’s some ideas that you can share and get and share with colleagues at different firms and sharpen how you do things, and that’s the sort of stuff that we were talking about in publishing. And you know, again, Cliff just to his credit didn’t need to, but interacted with all of us who were doing it, and so I just sort of naturally built a relationship with him over the years that way, always had very positive interactions. He’s been great in giving me terrific feedback or introducing me to people at his firm who could give me feedback. So it just it just felt a very natural relationship.
Jeff Malec 08:52
And then your intro had the recurring line. Cliff did it, right? So you hammered about six of those. You wrote a lot of this pre pre AI, so you couldn’t do a search to see what he had written. Yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 09:05
the thing talk through a couple of Cliff. The thing about Cliff is that he is one of the most prolific writers and awarded authors in our field. I mean, he’s just. I made the point that he won a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to our field before he turned 40. He won it at my age right now at 39, and I’m thinking to myself, like, well, no one’s handing me a lifetime achievement award by 39. It really highlights how much research he published and contributed to the field. And so, when you are writing stuff, it’s hard not to just write something that end up being like, “Well, Cliff actually already talked about this,” and turns out he talked about it 15 years ago in some article that you’ve never heard of. And if it wasn’t Cliff, it was probably someone else at AQR because that’s just the culture that he’s helped establish there. That it’s a culture. Of publishing research, and so yeah, as a young as a young guy writing weekly research notes, it just became sort of a part of my life that almost certainly someone would say this thing you wrote reminded me of this thing Cliff wrote, and it it just sort of became a recurring joke that in my mind always reminded me of the South Park episode where they they just got compared to the Simpsons over and over and over. Yeah, Simpsons did it. The Simpsons did it. The Simpsons did it. And so for my life, it was sort of Cliff did it. And frankly, I don’t even take that as an insult. The fact that someone would say your work reminds me of something Cliff wrote, I’m like, well, I must a been on the right track, and b like that’s not an insult. You know, it reminds you of something that this you know, incredibly talented and and well known quant wrote, great. That’s that’s flattering, frankly.
Jeff Malec 10:48
And then he’s well known for some spats on Twitter and whatnot. But it sounds like you and him were always eye to eye. You never had one of these. Yeah, no, no, we’ve
Corey Hoffstein 10:58
not that I know of. I mean, maybe he he would disagree. No, but I I I think we’ve always kept it copacetic. I mean, I I have certain rules about engagement on Twitter. I don’t talk politics. I stay out of the fray in certain in certain areas. Just you know, as I as I joked with him, when my AUM is is 100x and and closer to his AUM, maybe I’ll give myself a little bit more freedom to talk politics, but I don’t. I don’t quite have the. I I can’t give myself money. Yeah, the rope to hang myself yet. So no, no, I I don’t have. I haven’t gotten into any any spats with him on Twitter, fortunately.
Jeff Malec 11:35
And then last bit on him. Part of me was weird. I was like a little fanboyish. Ooh, this is a celebrity. I’m like, and then my rebel side kind of caught myself. What? Who cares? He’s just a man. Like, is I’m excited because he’s. I’m looking at a billionaire, or am I excited because he’s a quant? Then I shook his head coming out of the bathroom. So I’m like, oh, he’s he’s a normal guy. He’s got to take a leak like the rest of us.
Corey Hoffstein 11:55
He’s a totally normal guy who just has way more money than most of us and way more success in his career than most of us, but that said, like you know, he’s got this weird, weird sort of celebrity to him, right? Which is he’s incredibly well known in our field, yeah. But he can probably walk through the streets of New York, and the vast majority of people would have no idea who he is, right? So it’s like he goes certain places, and he’s the most well-known person in the room, and he goes other places, and he’s completely anonymous. And I know, I know you get this because I heard people at my symposium going, “You’d ask a question, they go, ‘Oh, I know that voice. Oh, that’s Jeff, right?’ So you like you have you know some some celebrity as well. Now that your podcast has has taken off, people know who you are. They know your voice. You go to certain rooms like you’re known before you go come through the door, and yet the majority of places you go probably you know no one no one knows who you are, and so he’s got this unique celebrity to him. But yeah, Cliff Cliff’s a great guy. He’s he’s I’ll tell a funny Cliff story because I think it it sort of rhymes with sort of who Cliff is, but I think it’s a not most people listening won’t know this, but it’s it’s not by means any secret. A bunch of us in the industry have a recurring Dungeons and Dragons game that we play. It’s actually coming up on its seven year anniversary. Wildly enough, and Cliff was going to be part of the original group.
Jeff Malec 13:18
Oh, nice!
Corey Hoffstein 13:19
And so the very first time we went to play was November 2019. For whatever reason, his camera and mic wouldn’t work, and he just completely, in classic Cliff fashion, rage quit out of the game. Said, “I’m not doing this,” and then and then was like, “No, I’m not. I’m I’m out. I can’t do this anymore.” And and so he had he had like created a character. There was backstory, and so we were just like, I guess we’re just free to do with whatever we want with his his little dwarf character that he had created. But it was pretty funny. Classic Cliff of just like complete rage quit. I think I think going through the quant winter at that time, his temper was a little shorter. I think now where things are going really well for their returns, maybe he would have a little bit more patience with his computer not working, but it was a it was a pretty funny experience.
Jeff Malec 14:06
And then putting a bow on it, you had him on because he had written a paper however many years ago. You’ll know the answer, but a lot of it was the genesis, right, of return stacking, portable alpha, all these concepts he was talking about 30 years ago.
Corey Hoffstein 14:20
Yeah, so there was it was twofold. Cliff has written about all these ideas before. There’s there’s a paper that he wrote back in either 94 or 96 called “Why Not 100% Equities,” and there he talks about you know why applying leverage even just to a stock bond portfolio is both ex ante expected to be a better portfolio and empirically has been long term a better portfolio, but he also wrote this great paper called “Seven Ideas for Running Big Money for the Long Term.” And the reason I really like this paper is because one, it’s largely been taken offline. AQR’s compliance pulled it down for a variety of reasons, so most people actually haven’t read it. So that’s what I think makes. A great paper to talk about, but two, it just reinforces all these great fundamental ideas about investing. That for those of us who have been in the industry for a long time, it doesn’t hurt to get a refresher on some of these core ideas. And some of them are as simple as like, if you want to earn return, you have to take risk. And I think sometimes we just forget that. Yeah, you got to stomach the drawdowns. You know, you’re. portfolio is better off diversified and levered, but the reality is most people are going to struggle with leverage. Your portfolio doesn’t really know the difference between alpha and novel forms of beta. So go find the low hanging fruit and add them to your portfolio. All these sort of like great ideas that I I don’t think it hurts us to just remind ourselves of, and so that was that was the idea of what my fireside chat with him was going to be about. And the idea was to go through the paper in order of these ideas. Of course, classic Cliff. It’s like interviewing him, trying to lasso a hurricane. Like he answers my first question, and and his like finish sort of teases me up for question seven, and I’m flipping through pages like crazy, trying to figure out where to go next with the conversation. But that’s half the fun.
Jeff Malec 16:07
You did a good. I saw you actually. I was looking at you instead of looking at him a couple times. You’re like,
Corey Hoffstein 16:11
yeah, oh my god,
Jeff Malec 16:13
where is he going?
Corey Hoffstein 16:14
Where are we going? Where am I? How am I? And how am I going to land this? You know, this this thing that was going to have a very natural conclusion. All of a sudden, I’ve I’ve already asked the last question, and I’m back to question two, and I need to figure out how to how to land this thing.
Jeff Malec 16:28
And then he had two great quotes that I’ll I think it was tied in the same thing. But he’s like, we quants we’re putting all this rationality, and then we we know that some of the alphas because the market participants are irrational, right? Greed and fear and the rest will move things outside of where they should be. That’s the what you can capture. He’s like, so you know that, but then you think they’re gonna, you know, subscribe and redeem. What do you say? He’s like, we we want them to be a Vulcan when they’re redeeming or or subscribing. Yeah, you want you you want your clients
Corey Hoffstein 17:00
to be a Vulcan, but you want everyone else to be irrational so you can make some money. Yeah,
Jeff Malec 17:04
he’s like that makes no sense. Yeah, I mean, he
Corey Hoffstein 17:07
told a great story where where he was called into a large pension, right? And they said this meeting’s really important. You know, you guys are in a big drawdown. We’re either going to redeem or double down. And Cliff said that is that’s the most logical choice, right? If you’re in a big drawdown, either right, you need to rebalance and re-up your allocation. The strategy’s not broken, and now you’re underweight, or you’ve learned something about the strategy that maybe it is now broken. That’s why it’s in the drawdown, and you should be redeeming entirely. So he said you should either be doubling down or redeeming. There’s no in between. And so when they called him to say, “Hey, that’s what we’re going to do in this presentation,” I was like, “Oh, wow, this is this is a meaningful presentation.” He’s trying to convince them to double down, and and oh by the way, excited that that they actually think about the world correctly. That is the logic of thinking about it. Yeah, they’re Vulcans, and and what do they do? They stood pat. You know, they didn’t change anything. They said, “We’re we’re not doubling down, and we’re not redeeming.” And he, well, I guess that meeting really didn’t didn’t make much of a difference. But but again, it goes to like you know you want your clients to be Vulcans, but they’re not going to be. That’s just not human nature.
Jeff Malec 18:12
Are you a Star Trek fan as well as a Dungeons and Dragons nerd?
Corey Hoffstein 18:15
I am not. I’m. I am. But you know what a
Jeff Malec 18:18
Vulcan is. What a
Corey Hoffstein 18:19
Vulcan is. I I would say you know sort of grow up with that stuff like with what your parents were into and I think my parents weren’t really into Star Wars or Star Trek we were you know they showed me Star Wars I’ll tell you Darth Vader scared the pants off of me as a young kid but we never really got into Star Trek
Jeff Malec 18:38
the and then his other great line was he’s like still to this day he flips out it’s like a red minus 12 bips and he emotionally can’t handle it and I’m like here’s this guy who’s had all this success thinks about long term compounding of gains and no behavioral biases all of this and he’s still the lizard brain sees a red number and he he loses it a little bit, and
Corey Hoffstein 19:01
don’t don’t we all right? I think his point was five bips up and five bips down. It’s all flat, but he’d much rather be five bips up than five dips down at the end of the day. And I and you all know what I agree with him. There’s nothing that annoys me more than just being slightly down. At least when you’re when you’re down big, you can like decompose where it came from slightly down. You’re like, couldn’t I have just ended it today slightly up? I’d feel so much better about that.
Jeff Malec 19:25
I want. I would wanted to. I’d already been hogging a lot of the airtime with my questions, but just have your team make anything from 15 bips up and down gray instead of green or red, right? Just add sheets. That is a
Corey Hoffstein 19:37
solution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go.
Jeff Malec 19:40
And then you had someone had mentioned that paper is still out there somewhere. A link? Can we put it in the show notes?
Corey Hoffstein 19:46
Yeah, I mean I’ve been sort of circulating this. I guess I I have a copy I can share with you, but there is one RIA out there that is hosting it on their website. That if you Google for this paper, you you can find it. It’s the only copy of the paper. That’s currently online. It’s been there for years. I don’t know if they’ll ever take it down. I’m not sure they’re even aware they’re hosting it. So it can be found. I would encourage people to go find it and download it. They will be now. We’ll we’ll put it in the show notes as well.
Jeff Malec 20:23
So, getting we started at the end. Now we’ll go back to the beginning. The first panelist was Justin from Memco.
Corey Hoffstein 20:31
Yeah,
Jeff Malec 20:32
he’s fantastic. I’m gonna get him on the pod probably sometime in the next year here. But what were some of your takeaways there? One of my favorite graphs he had was the like basically the adding of independent bets. I know sometimes we don’t want to call them bets, but independent return streams. The volatility comes down, and then he said, “and and by the way, there’s firms out there that do this out to 200.” He’s like, “This chart would go all the way to the far wall, and it loses its slope, but it still goes down that far out, yeah. So yeah, what’s funny is I
Corey Hoffstein 21:05
so so with Justin, who who’s someone I invited to come speak. I’ve I’ve Justin and I have crossed paths in in past lives as well as recently. We we both been panelists at EQ Derivatives, which is a popular, more institutional conference that happens. So I knew he’d be a great speaker, and he’s been a long-term advocate of Portable Alpha and what they do in the institutional space. And what I wanted to do was bring someone who had that institutional background to explain how institutions think about this and how they’re implementing it. But Justin also had a good grasp of what was really feasible for advisors to be able to do. Not everything an institution does, an advisor can do, but a lot of these techniques translate. So that was the goal of getting Justin in. What was fun for me is I did like a 1015 minute conversation with him beforehand, just to set up, sort of set the table for him to then go into the presentation. And then I was able to slink to the back of the room and listen to his presentation. And it always surprises me to watch what people pull their phones out and take pictures of the slide. Yeah, there was a lot
Jeff Malec 22:06
of that. And that
Corey Hoffstein 22:07
slide you’re talking about, where he showed, look, the more independent bets, more independent return streams you’re able to add, you get that vol decay, but you also get that boost in Shark, right? And I think that was very powerful to people, as we’ve been talking to people about these ideas of return stacking, right? Which is, which is saying, hey, keep your core strategic stock bond portfolio, and overlay things like managed futures, overlay things like carry or merger arbitrage or structural allocations to commodities and gold or whatever else, you know, long short equity, event driven strategies, you know, whatever it is, overlay these things instead of getting rid of the stocks and bonds. What you find, right, is as you add more and more of these independent bets, you do get that that boost in sharp. You do get that in the overlay itself that decrease in volatility, and a lot of our clients, our initial clients, were very interested only in adding trend following, right? For all the reasons the listeners of this podcast will know, right? Yeah,
Jeff Malec 23:11
and we’ll get into that next because that was the next panel. But yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 23:14
great long term track record. It’s been uncorrelated to stocks and bonds. It does well in a crisis period, both you know economic crisis periods as well as inflationary crisis periods, but the feedback was people going, “Oh, I need to really think about adding more stuff to that overlay. I maybe I’m overweight trend because their bias was towards trend following, and that’s not inherently wrong. I think trend following is probably maybe the first thing most people should look towards if they already have a stock bond portfolio, but I think Justin really convinced people, hey, that overlay that you’re putting on top of the portfolio, you should really think about how you can maximally diversify that if what you’re trying to create is not something that’s inherently always convex to stock and bond, to stocks and bonds, but more of an absolute return stream.
Jeff Malec 24:06
Ah, and I think even someone asked him there, like, well, but you can’t eat Sharpe ratio, right? Which is a famous advisor line.
Corey Hoffstein 24:12
Yeah.
Jeff Malec 24:13
Um, but he cut. I can’t remember his exact, but he cut through that well. Like, well, but your advice, you can keep the client longer, right? There’ll be a happier path. All those things. So, like, yeah, and you can have sharp
Corey Hoffstein 24:25
ratio with with leverage. Quite frankly, right? So, yeah, I’m not sure that’s that’s inherently true. And but yes, sharp ratio definitely. The more absolute return, you can create that stream. And again, I think there are limits to what can be done when you talk about doing this in mutual funds and ETFs versus what they can achieve in the institutional world, but the more uncorrelated return streams you can add, hopefully the more absolute return that overlay becomes in practice, and the easier it is to just keep the client invested in it. Yeah, and he had a bunch of stuff with a bunch of different hedge fund categories, insurance.
Jeff Malec 25:00
Link securities, multi-strats, all this stuff was part. Was it intentional? Because this is what I was feeling during the time. But to make it so complex that now return stacking seems easy in comparison to what the institutional guys were are doing,
Corey Hoffstein 25:16
I certainly wasn’t intentional with some of this stuff. Just from a compliance perspective, I have to be hands off and telling these guys what their slides can look like, right? I can’t, right, right, right. I can’t dictate to Justin what it’s going to look like. I think what Justin was trying to show was saying, look, there’s all these hedge fund categories, some of which maybe your average advisor won’t have access to, but some of them they will. Like catastrophe bonds, they can now get access to in semi-liquid vehicles, right? Those exist. They can get access to a lot of these alternative asset classes and risk premia in a variety of different vehicles that they couldn’t 10 or 15 years ago. And then it’s the question of how can you use the capital efficiency afforded to you by the different funds to introduce those return streams as overlays. I think Justin’s point was, you know, some of these maybe you have access to. Certainly, a lot of the institutions have leaned into allocating to the pod shops. That’s just not something your average advisor is going to be able to do. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use the same philosophy of, yeah, you know, let’s allocate to a diversified multi-strategy, multi-asset type overlay.
Jeff Malec 26:28
The but you can with return site get carry get merger arb right. So you’re starting to build those. I mean, we have
Corey Hoffstein 26:35
those as as turnkey solutions. But I’ll give you an extreme example. We have we have a fund that for every dollar you give us, we give you $1 of global equities and $1 of bonds. The idea there is not that we’re gonna you’re gonna use it to create a bond overlay. The idea there is that you can replace some of your stock bond exposure with this fund. Say 10% of your stocks and 10% of your bonds can be replaced by 10% in this fund, that 10% in this fund gives you the stock bond exposure back, but now you have 10% of your portfolio freed up to do with whatever you please. So maybe you take that 10% and go invest it in a cap bond strategy or fund, and the effective thing you’ve done is you’ve effectively overlaid your your betas with that cap bond allocation, and so you can as long as as long as liquid or semi liquid vehicles exist that the advisor has access to for all these strategies, they don’t have to exist in a prepackaged turnkey return stacking fund. All of this can be effectively return stacked using capital efficiency tools.
Jeff Malec 27:44
Yeah, and then I asked the question of him, which I wasn’t super pumped with the answer, but it was getting late. But I was basically did the did they try this too much portable alpha back in the 80s and early 90s and kind of got off sides with it, or did they not do enough of it? And when and his answer was like, “Oh, bonds were yielding high, and nobody cared.” But what were your thoughts on his answer, or just your thoughts in general of that of like, have institute? It seems like all these institutions, especially the groups you have, are doing it in spades now. It’s working. Everyone’s happy with it. Why weren’t they do? If it was in a paper 30 years ago, why weren’t they doing it 30 years ago?
Corey Hoffstein 28:24
Novel stuff takes a long time to catch on. There’s we know all too well there’s leverage aversion in the industry. It did catch on in the 2000s, right? I mean, I think it was like 50% of the 50% of the top 50 pensions in the U.S. were all implementing Portable Alpha going into 2008, and the vast majority were considering. I have to double check me on that stat, but it’s something to that effect, right? And the problem became the way Portable Alpha was implemented at that time ended up being its undoing. So the idea on paper was totally fine operationally, where and how it was implemented became a big problem for the sustainability, and a lot of those programs blew up. And so, post 2008, a lot of people wrote the idea off as being inherently unsustainable. We would argue it wasn’t the idea; it was the structure. And we and I could talk about this. You know what’s different today, but it took it took some turnover in people’s you know people leaving firms and new people coming in and to reintroduce an idea with a new implementation structure that is much more sustainable.
Jeff Malec 29:33
Yeah, I feel like that was the takeaway. The summary of ’08 in people’s minds was just like, oh, when they tried this before, they overlevered and it didn’t work. Like, what’s the nuanced answer there? Why? What was the structural problem?
Corey Hoffstein 29:44
So, in 2008, the way this was implemented predominantly, there is a lot of. If you go back to that period, there were a lot of weird implementations, but predominantly worked like this. We’ll
Jeff Malec 29:54
oversimplify. We’ll oversimplify the conversation. It
Corey Hoffstein 29:56
worked like this. You were a large pensioner endowment. You. Wanted to add some alpha to your risk book. You had a big chunk of S and p5 100, say $100 of it. You went to a bank and said, “I would like to get this exposure on swap. I will give you $20. You give me $100 of S and P exposure on swap. I’m now left with $80 of cash with which I can go to a hedge fund and allocate to the hedge fund. The problem with that structure is that I only have $20 of collateral. So if the S and P starts to go down and it chews through my collateral, and I get a margin call, I have to go to the hedge fund and say, “Please let me redeem.” Well, hedge funds at the time didn’t have daily redemptions, right?
Jeff Malec 30:41
Yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 30:41
or weekly. You were lucky if they had quarterly. And in 2008, a lot of them were putting up redemption gates. What ended up happening is whether that, whether it became illiquid or correlated with equities in the tail, a lot of the beta positions got blown out, and you couldn’t get access to your capital to rebalance because you were mixing liquid daily mark-to-market leverage with these illiquid funds, right? And that’s just that was inherently poison. You were under you you were under margined during this drawdown, and so a lot of these programs blew up. They wouldn’t have blown up, by the way, if instead of overlaying this on equity, if they had replaced their bonds, right? If they’d gone to a and said, “Hey, we’ve got all these treasuries. Let’s turn those into cash and buy treasury futures, or buy, you know, get the ag on swap.” That would have been fine. Unfortunately, for regulatory reasons, a lot of these places either have to have bonds if there’s insurance-based stuff going on, and/or they like to have the bonds for the pensions because they’re explicitly liability matching to the future, or just from a from a governance perspective, this made more sense to hold in the risk book to get it pushed across the line from a governance governance perspective. But either way, that mismatch was a big issue. Today, you’re seeing a lot more what we’ll call turnkey solutions, which is that alpha manager, that hedge fund manager, is now saying, “Well, just give me all $100, and I will within my fund manage both the alpha and the beta for you, and I will do the rebalancing.”
Jeff Malec 32:17
Right, and that’s exactly how, and
Corey Hoffstein 32:20
that’s exactly how we do it in our ETFs, and other people do it in their ETFs and mutual funds. That these are now turnkey solutions where it’s all being done by one manager.
Jeff Malec 32:38
Great segue, because the next panel, which you were on, I believe, was putting that in. Right, was the manager inst? You had the institutional investor standpoint. Then you had an institutional manager standpoint. How they’re implementing it. So it was J.P. Morgan and a guy from AQR. Yep, and yourself. I’m. I’m already forgot. And
Corey Hoffstein 32:57
me, Adam Butler from Resolve Asset Management, one of my partners in the return stack ETF suite was the host of the panel. I honestly, not talking about this, sounds like I was in a lot of stuff. I don’t know how I ended up in so much stuff, but yes, I was. I was a panelist on this one with Peter Hecht and Garrett Norman, Peter Heck from AQR and Garrett Norman from J.P. Morgan. Both of all three of us have a a liquid 40 act fund, either mutual fund or ETF, where for every dollar you invest, you’ll get $1 of large cap U.S. equities plus $1 of a managed future strategy.
Jeff Malec 33:33
But they also have that institutional hedge fund background, where that what you were just talking about, where they’re giving them all $100, and they’re doing the beta inside of that product,
Corey Hoffstein 33:42
yeah.
Jeff Malec 33:42
But in right, it was interesting there. It was mainly, I think, a crowd that’s drinking the trend following managed futures Kool Aid to begin with. But then u3, especially drinking the Kool Aid. But even within the u3, there’s replication. There’s a proprietary model that they don’t show to the public, and then J.P. Morgan, a model that lists the positions daily through their ETF. So that was an interesting twist to me. Of even all three of you would probably fill out the same check boxes of what you want in a platform in a program for trend following, but yet you implement it different ways. Yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 34:19
that was that was the idea. Was to say we all believe in this core concept that this is a great strategy. Again, you give me $1, I’ll give you $1 of S and p5 100 plus $1 of managed future strategy. But the implementations are very, very different, right? As you mentioned, we do it with a replication-based approach for the managed futures. The other big difference is on the equity side, we hold a lot of securities, and then we true up the missing beta with some S and P futures. AQR does it in a mutual fund, which helps shield their holdings. They trade a very long fat tail of markets. I think it’s hundreds of markets. They use. Both price and economic trend, as well as other signals that they won’t disclose, and they don’t buy any securities. 100% of their S and p5 100 exposure is through futures, which has some interesting implications from both a both a tax efficiency as well as a financing hurdle rate. And then you’ve got J.P. Morgan who says, “Well, we are going to have some secret sauce. We do trend plus this other systematic macro thing that we’re not really going to talk about, but we think there’s some alpha there.” And but their but their stock side is much more like ours, where they’re buying some individual securities and then truing up with S and P futures. So you had this the the point of the panel to me was conceptually we all agree this is a great idea where where the rubber meets the road. I’m gonna I’m just keep throwing out middle which Mike Philbrick
Jeff Malec 35:50
said way too many times. Yeah, where the rubber meets the road or
Corey Hoffstein 35:52
or the devil’s in the details, right? Like it was like let’s get into these details that actually make these funds in practice potentially quite different. The
Jeff Malec 36:01
and did you have any debates? There wasn’t any on stage, but backstage or anything of what your replication stupid or you should be doing it this way or there’s right. I mean,
Corey Hoffstein 36:12
they couldn’t say anything. I was the host, so they had to agree with everything I said, or they were getting kicked out of the conference. No, you know, I I think where we come down, and it’s interesting because a lot of our clients will say, “I really want to do this, but I can’t allocate all of my money to just return stacked.” Like the practical reality is, I know my clients are probably going to hold some of my competitors, and that’s not that’s not a problem to me because even if I do a really good job in replication, yeah, some of these other managers they may have alpha. AQR has done incredibly well. The other thing AQR has done is they’ve implemented trend following in some long short baskets that they’re able to use to make the entire product more tax efficient. There’s some really novel, interesting stuff going on that that again, it just sort of depends on what the preferences of of the client are. And so I think, yeah, it’s not. I don’t think anyone was going to aggressively say you’re wrong. This is a bad idea. I think what it came down to is like, what does the client care about most, and then pivot to okay, do you do most of it’s in replication, and you choose a manager you believe has some alpha, or do you say you want to what? I don’t want a replication. I’m going to choose three managers that I think have alpha and and rebalance them together. And end of the day, as much as I want people to buy our stuff, this symposium was about spreading the gospel of the idea, because I really believe that this is a rising tide lifts all boats, and this this idea is so nascent that we all need to be working together to really grow it in the space,
Jeff Malec 37:42
which is just as an aside, so hard for me. Of like, I’m in the bubble every day of this. So it’s like, what do you mean, nation? It’s like it’s out there. Everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s like, well, in my bubble, yes, but not in the wider lens of how many people are still just in 6040 or in some active stock picker. Yeah, we barely scratched
Corey Hoffstein 38:01
the surface, and in truth, and I would say the vast majority of people we talk to have never heard of return stacking or portable alpha.
Jeff Malec 38:09
Yeah, I invited some advisors. Never heard of them. I was like, “Come on, it’s been on my.” It’s like a friend of mine. I’m like, “He’s been on my podcast before,” and that shows me you’ve never listened. Yeah, so it’s a double strike against you. You’re you’re no longer a friend, but it it seemed like if I was on that, I’d be trying to get you to argue with them of like replication versus single strategy. But does anyone care anymore? It feels like it’s just kind of become like no people are doing replication really well, and it is what
Corey Hoffstein 38:36
it is. Yeah, I mean, full credit to Andrew Beer. I think
Jeff Malec 38:39
yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 38:40
many years ago, there was a question of can replication do it. I think Andrew has, you know, had stellar performance. Ironically, not replicated well, but done significantly outperformed his benchmark. So no one really cares. I don’t mean not replicated well as a knock. I mean like he’s just he’s somehow managed to get high correlation with meaningful alpha to his benchmark, so people are going, “Wow, this replication thing is really interesting.” We’ve now been doing replication for coming up on four years, and I think our results speak for themselves in terms of being able to replicate the benchmark and category we’re targeting. So I think it’s just with time, people have gone, “Okay, that’s that’s good.” It’s just a question of do I want the category average, or do I have conviction in a certain manager? And if someone has conviction in a certain manager, then I’m not going to try to talk them out of it. You know, that’s like that’s what they believe.
Jeff Malec 39:31
And the weird chicken or the egg thing is, you need the manager, right? You can’t all be replicators. You need the manager.
Corey Hoffstein 39:37
Exactly. I I need something to replicate at the end of the day.
Jeff Malec 39:40
Exactly. I was ready with my question of like, hey, but you guys used it as a topic, so this is super interesting to me because you probably get this all the time. Like, hey, I have my return stack stocks plus trend, half of it stocks or 100% stocks, and then you have stocks and trend. Why the double? Up in exposure, like we just saw, we’re recording on November whatever. I can’t read six, right? Yesterday, big down day in stocks. Trend was long stocks lost as well with some energy and stuff too. So that people get upset. Hey, why don’t you take out the stock? So that got talked a little bit on the panel. But what was your what’s your takeaway on that whole concept?
Corey Hoffstein 40:22
I I think it’s too myopic, right? I think we’re overly focused on the product and not thinking about the portfolio. So, what do I mean by that? We have a stocks plus managed futures fund. We also have a bonds plus managed futures fund. And if someone says to me they have no problem with equities being in my bonds plus managed futures fund, but they do have a problem with it being in my stocks plus managed futures fund. It means that they’re focused on the line item and not about what this does at the portfolio level, right? Because if you have a 6040 and you want a managed futures overlay, well, you can either sell some of your stocks and buy my stocks plus managed futures fund, or you can sell some of your bonds and buy some my bonds plus managed futures fund. Both of them are going to give you the identical managed futures overlay on top of your portfolio, right? So you can’t can’t say you like the equities in one and not in the other. It’s not really sort of a cohesive or coherent argument at the portfolio level. So then the question Becomes okay. Do you want equities in the managed futures overlay at the portfolio level? Right.
Jeff Malec 41:26
Yeah.
Corey Hoffstein 41:28
Are you going to have the same answer if you’re an you know 80% stock, 20% bond client allocator, or if you’re a 20 stock 80% bond allocator? Like, does that change your preference? That’s sort of the next level of questioning. And the reality is what what we found, and I think Quantica probably has the great public, the best published research on this, is like yes, if you take equities out, you do reduce your correlation to equities on average over time. That just makes sense, but you lose part of the diversification, and you lose some of your return driver, and the sharp of the trend program goes down. And so, yes, you might have to suffer at the line item level a little bit more volatility as markets turn over. But at the portfolio level, we think a managed futures program that includes equity indices is a more fulsome program that’s has a higher sharp and is just overall a better better program than one that doesn’t have it. A more fulsome program. It’s a good good poll. I hear those three and five year old.
Jeff Malec 42:31
Yes, screaming downstairs. The joys of working from
Corey Hoffstein 42:33
home.
Jeff Malec 42:34
The but I yeah I guess I still but you still get that question. People want like it. It just like clicks in their brain of like oh I don’t want to be doubled up. You’re like well
Corey Hoffstein 42:44
I
Jeff Malec 42:44
think
Corey Hoffstein 42:44
it came up a lot after the tariff tantrum last I guess two springs ago 2025 right
Jeff Malec 42:51
when you launched and got kicked in the yeah
Corey Hoffstein 42:54
I mean it was about a year and a half after we launched right but what what happened there is equity sold off and at the same time like when after a prolonged equity bull market, no surprise you you’re bulled up in equities in the trend program. And when they rolled over, equities might have lost 15 or 10 to 15, and trend lost 10 to 15. But it wasn’t just the equities that got kicked in the teeth. It was like copper got kicked in the teeth, and bonds got kicked in the teeth, and it was like, even when you remove the equities, there are other macro trades that are happening at the same time that are often losing money as well. And so, okay, if I get rid of the equities, I’m just increasing my risk allocation to all this other stuff, and all that other stuff isn’t always uncorrelated to equities in a drawdown. Most people say, well, it’s not equities, so it has a higher chance of being uncorrelated, and that’s true. But what we find during these periods of like big macroeconomic volatility is the number of regime bets that are being taken within a managed futures fund shrinks dramatically. And like, it doesn’t matter whether it’s like your bonds or currency or or certain commodities or equities, like they’re just such highly correlated bets to one another, you can often end up in the exact same position, and that’s that’s counterintuitive, I think, to a lot of people. But that’s just how the empirical data plays out.
Jeff Malec 44:13
That’s a great point. Yeah. Okay. Great. Now you took it out, and you’re well. There’s two points to me there. One, you’re not actually doubling up. You have some extra exposure, but it’s probably no more than 510, 15% max, maybe of that trend exposure, right? The equity piece.
Corey Hoffstein 44:29
It depends. Honestly, it depends on the time period. There have certainly been times where our our trend program has come close to an extra 100% notional of equity. Like that’s where we cap out, but it can absolutely happen. But you know, again, that just says we think equities are a great place to be, and it doesn’t mean there’s isn’t some offsetting debt in some other market,
Jeff Malec 44:48
right? And it’s temporary. Like if it switches, then we’ll be on the other side. Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Malec 45:02
Next panel after some coffee breaks, the and these guys were my favorite when you brought actual advisors onto stage, yeah, and they were sharing how they implement it, how what clients are asking for, how they put it into portfolios. Part of me, as much as I loved the institutional guys, part of me just wanted to have advisors telling those stories all day because they’re more real, right? They’re like connecting with me more. But yeah, what what were your thoughts on all those guys? That was the one guy when I asked the question. He said, “Oh, I recognize that voice.” And then I asked him after, and he’s like, “Yeah, I listen to you in the gym.” I’m like, “That freaks me out a little. I don’t know. I don’t want to know where you listen to me.” Yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 45:39
same same for my podcast. I don’t need to. I don’t need to know where it’s where you’re listening. Yeah, I mean, look, those were probably the two panels, other than Cliff, which everyone loves talking about. Cliff,
Jeff Malec 45:48
yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 45:49
those panels with those advisors were the panels we got the most positive feedback about because, again, that’s that’s like they touched on the pragmatic realities of running money, and how they think about using return stacking within their business. And when you have an audience that’s predominantly RIAs, right? That’s the language they speak. I can talk about these ideas in theory all day long, but what’s more valuable to these RIAs is hearing how another RIA is using it in in one case, how they’re using it to try to make their entire business more resilient by making client portfolios more resilient, and in the second case, how they used it to win a big client account by offering a differentiated idea compared to their competitors, right? And that’s that’s meaningful stuff for an advisor in the audience. This isn’t solely about what it does for the client. That obviously should come first and foremost. But these are some of the
Jeff Malec 46:51
yeah, yeah. I
Corey Hoffstein 46:52
mean, these are some of the knock-on effects that are important to these advisors who are running businesses. And so those were we were really really happy with how those panels turned out, and certainly something we plan on expanding at next year’s symposium.
Jeff Malec 47:06
And then the first guy, and I’m not sure if we’re supposed to share their name, so I’m not sharing it. But the it was interesting; they’re both from Napa area, where winds down 25. So I had some interesting conversations with him after about that. But right, he had a whole couple of slides on on which Med Faber brought up 10 years ago or so of like, “Hey, Mister Advisor, you’re quadruple levered to the stock market, and most don’t realize it, right? You’ve got your business, your clients’ money, your money. I can’t remember what the fourth thing is, but he had a nice charts of actually laying out that and why you need to do something about it because it’s going to hurt more than just your your clients. It hurts your bottom line too.
Corey Hoffstein 47:47
Yeah, this is something I know Meb has talked about for years. It’s actually something I’ve also talked about for years. Where it’s like you expect a portfolio manager to have 100% of money of their own money in their strategy, and I always thought that was kind of insane. It’s like, well, if anyone’s willing to do that, is it is it a sign of like their own belief or just a lack of understanding of risk? Like, do you want someone to put 100% of their retirement, and what is that going to do to how they’re going to manage the money? Right. Like, there are adverse effects of that. So anyway, so I think sometimes in this industry, we we don’t always consider sort of like what these choices have on our business values or anything like that. So for the advisors to hear, like, hey, by the way, the more resilient you make client portfolios to drawdowns, the more resilient your revenue is. The easier it is to get a loan. Like all of that stuff has knock-on effects. And again, as long as you’re starting from a place of trying to do better for the client, right? I’m
Jeff Malec 48:43
adding some weird thing just to save the business. We’re
Corey Hoffstein 48:45
trying to make the client portfolio more resilient to economic and inflationary shocks. Great, that makes my business more resilient to economic and inflationary shocks. And man, if the advisor down the street’s business loses 50% of its revenue during a big drawdown, maybe I can buy them at a point of weakness. You know, like all that sort of economic opportunity comes up in full alignment with doing better for the client, which I think is like unique, but also really profound. And that was something I think that that really came through. In and he had just Tim Ales who did the did the conversation, and he had this great framework of regime sensitivity of of the different portfolios they were building, and they were trying to move to a much more resilient, you know, score across all regimes. Yeah, that I hadn’t seen that done before, right? But was like, okay, you know, you don’t just show up and be like, “Hey, we want to make sure you’re comfortable in retirement.” Okay, what does that really mean? Like, and he actually threw each regime, which was basically like booming market, inflation, deflation, whatever, a score for each investment in the portfolio, right? For each of those regimes, and then sum them up and be like, “We’re way over here. We’re way over here.”. Yeah, and I know he went. He went to the sort of the firm because he he was recently acquired, and he went to the parent company and said, “You know, hey, by the way, we’re this big multi billion dollar shop. Here’s a projection of revenue. Let me show you what happens to this revenue in these different stress periods if we don’t make our portfolios more resilient. You know, we’re going to lose 10s of millions of dollars of revenue in a in a 2008. Like, can we survive that? Do you want to survive that? Like, that’s the nature of the business. And if we make these adjustments to client portfolios, here is an expectation. Not only potentially, by the way, how these portfolios can grow faster. We’re talking about diversification for protection. Diversification, when used as an overlay, can also enhance returns potentially. But purely on the protection side, like what what happens if we reduce our drawdown by 10% compared to our benchmark, compared to our competitors? How much of a better position does that put us in, just from an economic perspective? Yeah, I mean, super interesting. And then the second guy, right? Of this helps win clients. It’s a little weird, right? We got a lot of investors who listen here, not just advisors, but they’re not not just worried about helping. They are worried about helping the client. But how do you win new business? So that was interesting. Of like, if you just come to them with the same stuff, they’re not they’re not paying attention. Yeah, this was this was a very specific case where there was a family that they were working with part of the family. They didn’t have all the family’s money. It was a bunch of siblings, and in part of the estate plan included this something called a clat charitable lead annuity trust. I think is what it stands for, and these clats have very specific rules about how the money has to be distributed and whatever’s left over after these mandatory distributions can be given to can be bequeathed to the beneficiaries of the trust tax free, and so the idea is like let’s say you stuff 10 million into the into the clat. If you can outgrow the mandatory distributions meaningfully, now you have to make the distributions, but if you can outgrow the distributions meaningfully, you then can pass down quite a bit of money. So it’s a great way to do something charitable, but also it’s it’s a way to manage your estate and estate taxes. So the so you have to balance these two mandates, right? I want to grow this thing as much as possible for the life of the clat, which I believe is 10 years, it’s either seven or 10 years, while knowing I have to make distributions.
Corey Hoffstein 52:26
So this is a perfect sequence of returns problem for early retirees, right? Which is you start taking distributions. In this case, you can’t even be flexible about them. You can’t adjust them. They they have to get paid out. While at the same time, like the people who are inheriting this money want it to grow as much as possible over that period. But if you take the max growth plan, you could suffer a drawdown early on that could make it so right. There’s no
Jeff Malec 52:53
money left. There’s
Corey Hoffstein 52:54
no money left. You permanently impair the clat, and all of it gets spent in these distributions. If you just have it
Jeff Malec 52:59
in bonds that can pay the distributions, then you’re back to zero. Exactly. So this
Corey Hoffstein 53:02
was a question of, okay, can we think about instead of just everyone coming at this saying, well, let me give you a 6040 stock bond mix. How can we think about building an optimal mix and then adding some overlays that can both add resiliency for that sequence of return risk and over a 510 year period, have a very good chance of generating some positive excess returns. Combining things like merger arb and trend and gold and that stuff, and saying 10 years from now, I’m I’m pretty sure this combination should add you know 100 200 300 basis points of annualized return, you know per per dollar notional, and that’s I think you know. Again, just gave them the ability to go to the client with a totally novel solution that no other advisor could compete with, and they won the business.
Jeff Malec 53:51
Yeah, just awesome. Does it ever you ever sit back and be like, I actually have the easier job being a quant and running all these models and all this than the advisor has to be like tax expert, investment expert, structuring expert, and then throw in psychologist. Right, the market’s down. They’re on the phone all day talking to the client.
Corey Hoffstein 54:12
Yeah. Yes, 100%. There are so many of these unique structures, like a clap, that these advisors deal with that I’ve never even heard of, right? Like we all live, we all we all sort of live in our own unique silos in the world of investments. I mean, sometimes I’ll go talk to people who do private investments, and they’re using lingo that I’ve never heard of. You know, someone who who works in bankruptcy areas, like it’s just totally different. And we all we all think we know it all, and then you go you go outside your realm and you’re like, never even heard some of these phrases.
Jeff Malec 54:44
I’m going to recommend they come up with a better name than Clat. Yeah, I mean,
Corey Hoffstein 54:49
you know, I’ll say I just put together an illit for my for for my kids, an irrevocable life insurance trust, and it’s like one of those like again illit. Like, can we get it? I mean, I guess irrevocable life insurance trust, but like, I can’t. We need a better name. Yeah. What are you fishing for today? Ah, some illit, some illit, sampling. Hoping to grab some illit down here, and that was it. Then there was Cliff. You gonna do it again? Is this gonna be an annual? I feel like this is a curse that I got into with my podcast, which I’m sure you maybe you deal with the same thing as I did the first season of my podcast and went, man, that was a lot of work, and I’m not doing that again. Then the feedback was so good, I was like, well, I guess I’ll do a second season, and the feedback was good. No, if I’m like, I do a third season. So yeah, at least you
Jeff Malec 55:43
do seasons. I’m just always on. No,
Corey Hoffstein 55:45
now I’ve given up on seasons, and I just do it whenever I want. I mean, my podcast will never grow because there’s no. I’ll do six episodes in six weeks and then be gone for six months. It’s just totally yeah, willy nilly. But as term as far as the symposium goes, I mean, we grew probably, you know, headcount close to 50 to 75% year over year. I would hope we do the same next year. I mean, we had a huge number of people that we had to put on the wait list this year simply because of venue capacity. So we got to next year say, okay, what can that same space be reconfigured to hold more in that room. What is our real capacity limit comfortably? Do we have to find a new venue? These are great problems to have. It is a huge amount of work. I explain it’s sort of like planning a wedding.
Jeff Malec 56:32
Yeah,
Corey Hoffstein 56:33
but you know the feedback we get, particularly when we’re able to get these organic conversations that we’re not a part of, right? Be able to say like, hey, this is someone that’s been doing return staffing for three years in their business, and I know you’re new and you’re considering it. Go talk to each other. Go ask him the questions that you’re not comfortable asking us, or go ask the questions that you need to ask of another advisor that we’re not going to understand about things that you’re dealing with. And making those connections in person are just hugely valuable to us, and I think the ecosystem at large. So, yeah, we want to continue to do it. We want to continue to do it as much of an open architecture way we can, where we, I guess, invite people who are technically our competitors. But again, my view is the more we can collectively educate the world about this idea, you know, again, the the faster we’ll increase adoption across the entire space. Yeah, and it was like I was talking with a guy from North Platte, Nebraska, which I’d been to. It’s
Jeff Malec 57:30
where like there’s a huge rail station. You can go up in the tower. It’s like a aircraft controlled tower. So we were talking about that, and then the guys from Napa. So I’m like, countrywide, there’s people from all over. Yeah, which is we we had
Corey Hoffstein 57:41
people from out of the country, and not just my partners from Cayman. Like we we had people travel from different countries to get there, and yeah, it’s always humbling that people are are getting on planes and and spending their valuable time with us. And so we really want to make sure that they have some valuable takeaways. And and the feedback this year was yeah we we absolutely need to do it again next year and hopefully we’ll continue to just refine and improve the product so people walk away going like yeah I’ve gone three years in a row and every year I’ve gotten something really meaningful out of it
Jeff Malec 58:14
and the the question great right it wasn’t like these are a bunch of wallflowers just notes
Corey Hoffstein 58:19
yeah I told my team I was like you all better be prepared to ask questions if no one in the audience will. And I think the vast majority of time we had to cut questions off, which is a great problem to
Jeff Malec 58:28
have. Yeah, and they were good, smart questions, right? I mean, I know I can always count
Corey Hoffstein 58:31
on you, Jeff. Like you got to be there every year because you always ask good questions, and you’ll make sure the question gets asked. But yeah, I was I was shocked. I mean, I think with Cliff when I was on stage, I was like, “I we could probably just sit here for another hour, just taking questions from the audience.” But I gotta, I gotta get this guy home.
Jeff Malec 58:47
I was surprised that some young kid was in the audience and just shot a question right at him. Or Cliff started to give him a little ribbing of like, “Well, hold on a second.” But
Corey Hoffstein 58:55
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Malec 58:56
You sure that’s the question you want to ask? Well, great. Well, thanks for coming on. Congrats on the symposium. Did you do any recordings or anything we can put in the show notes?
Corey Hoffstein 59:05
We did. They’re not out yet, unfortunately. You know, some of our speakers can’t share the recordings. Ironically, they reached out after saying, “I really hope you recorded that. Would love to share it.” And I said, “Well, you explicitly told us we weren’t allowed to, so we didn’t.” You know, I think next year we’ll just record everything and let people choose afterwards. Yeah, delete what they don’t want. But yeah, we have some recordings, some sessions will be going out. My guess is they’ll be on YouTube or shared selectively for people who ask. Maybe we can add those to the show notes a little later.
Jeff Malec 59:36
Love it. When’s your next podcast? Unknown.
Corey Hoffstein 59:40
It’s a great question, Jeff.
Jeff Malec 59:42
After the holidays, yeah. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Corey Hoffstein 59:50
Appreciate it as always, Jeff. Great chatting.
Jeff Malec 59:53
Okay, that’s it for the pod. Thanks to Corey. Thanks to RCM for sponsoring. Thanks to the Return Stack team for having me at the. Symposium. Thanks to Jeff Burger for producing. I think we’ll be back next week talking single stock futures for the extended holiday break, where we’re off from Thanksgiving through Christmas. Peace.
