Flirting with Models

Corey Hoffstein

4.5 (4)
INVESTING
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Flirting with Models

Flirting with Models is the show that aims to pull back the curtain and meet the investors who research, design, develop, and manage quantitative investment strategies. Join Corey Hoffstein, Chief Investment Officer of Newfound Research, on a journey to explore systematic investment strategies, ranging from value to momentum and merger arbitrage to managed futures. For more on Newfound Research, visit www.thinknewfound.com.

3 MAR

Scott Phillips - Finding Ugly Edges in Crypto Markets (S7E15)

Scott Phillips is just the second independent trader I’ve interviewed for this show. Like many independent traders, Scott found that his constraints – including the size of their capital pool, the ability to execute trades efficiently, and a lack of supporting infrastructure – made trading anything but loose-pants trend following almost impossible in traditional markets. These constraints led Scott to look for easier markets to trade: markets where the edges were so big they could survive inefficient implementations. All of which brought Scott to crypto in the late 2010s. While our conversation is, at a high level, mostly about trend following, we spend a lot of time discussing what makes trading these markets unique. For example, with tens of thousands of spot cryptocurrencies, how do you choose what to trade? How do you choose which venues to trade at when liquidity is so fragmented? How do you deal with the fact that both crime and degenerate gambling are real idiosyncratic factors? More than anything, painted between the lines, Scott provides a master class in thinking about edges. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Scott Phillips.

1h 8m
3 FEB

Thao Tran – Market Making Illiquid, Non-Fungible Assets (S7E14)

Today I’m talking to Thao Tran, Co-founding Partner at Vamient Capital. This episode was born from a question I had watching the NFT market place: how do you make markets in illiquid, non-fungible assets? Clearly people were doing it and I wanted to know how it differed from traditional market making. Several people recommended I speak with Thao, and she was kind enough to oblige, despite NFT market making being just a small component of what she does. In this conversation, we walks me through how the NFT market place has evolved, how she thinks about managing inventory risk, key features that impact spreads, and how platform evolutions changed orderbook strategies. In the back half of the conversation, Thao shares her thoughts on the state of crypto markets today, the emerging opportunities in decentralized exchanges, and how the landscape of alpha opportunities has changed over the last two years. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Thao Tran.

55 min
09/12/2024

Victor Haghani – The Last of the Tactical Allocators (S7E13)

My guest today is Victor Haghani, founder of Elm Wealth. Victor is, in many ways, one of the last tactical asset allocators standing after the 2010s. That might be because Victor wouldn’t categorize himself as such. Rather, he sees his dynamic index investing approach not as a tactical alternative to traditional static portfolios, but as the rational approach for anyone starting from first principles. This conversation dances between theory and implementation. Victor is just as comfortable sharing his thoughts on where equity market risk comes from as he is defending payout-adjusted CAPE as a metric for forecasting long-run returns. If you’re passionate about asset allocation, you’ll find lots to think about in this one. Please enjoy my conversation with Victor Haghani.

1h 13m
04/12/2024

Jonathan Glidden - Saving Delta's Pension with Portable Alpha

In this episode of the Get Stacked Investment Podcast, Corey and Rodrigo have an insightful conversation with Jonathan Glidden, Chief Investment Officer of the Delta Airlines Pension Plan. Since joining in 2011, Jonathan has been pivotal in elevating Delta’s pension plan funded status from 38% to over 100%. They delve into Jonathan's unconventional career journey, his implementation of portable alpha strategies, and share valuable lessons learned from turbulent financial periods such as 2008 and 2020. Whether you're a seasoned investor or new to the concept of portable alpha, this episode provides a masterclass on optimizing pension plan management through innovative investment strategies.

1h 9m
07/10/2024

Farouk Jivraj - The Art & Science of Using Alternative Risk Premia (S7E12)

In this episode, I speak with Farouk Jivraj, Portfolio Manager and Head of Alternative Risk Premia at Fidelity Investments’ Asset Management Solutions division. After spending nearly a decade on the sell side, Farouk joined Fidelity in 2021 with the goal of building out an alternative risk premium platform, tapping into the best of what both the sell-side QIS desks have to offer and what can be built in-house. We spend the majority of the conversation peeling apart the layers of Farouk’s 5-step process for implementing alternative risk premia strategies. He shares his thoughts on how to classify different premia, why thoughtfully-constructed peer groups are an important evaluation tool, how to go about selecting specific strategies, how to construct portfolios of alternative risk premia, and the actual rubber-meets-road implementation practicalities. Please enjoy my conversation with Farouk Jivraj.

1h 11m
02/09/2024

Giuseppe Paleologo - Multi-Manager Hedge Funds & Thinking Deeply About Simple Things (S7E11)

In this episode I chat with Giuseppe Paleologo – or Gappy as he likes to be called. Currently on garden leave, Gappy has previously worked in Risk & Quantitative Analytics at Citadel, as Head of Enterprise Risk at Millennium, and most recently as Head of Risk Management at HRT. We begin the conversation with a discussion as to what a quant researcher actually does at a multi-manager hedge fund. As a semi-support role to the fundamental PMs, Gappy explains how portfolio manager coverage, factor hedging, and internal alpha capture can all work together to help maximize firm P&L. We then discuss the broad field of factor research and portfolio construction, where Gappy shares some of his strongly held views, both on how factors should be constructed as well as how they should be utilized. Topics include returns versus characteristics, mixing versus integrating alpha signals, single- versus multi-period optimization, and linear- versus non-linear models. Please enjoy my conversation with Giuseppe Paleologo.

1h 32m
20/08/2024

Talk Your Book: Return Stacking [REPLAY]

On this episode, Ben Carlson and Michael Batnick are joined by Corey Hoffstein of Newfound Research to discuss: managed futures, return stacking, using leverage effectively, and much more!

37 min
29/07/2024

Kris Abdelmessih - Life Through a Volatility Lens (S7E10)

My guest in this episode is Kris Abdelmessih, co-founder of moontower.ai. Kris began his career at SIG, where he worked as a market maker in several different option pits, before moving to Parallax where he ran a relative value commodities volatility book. For the last five years, Kris has been writing on his blog Party at the Moontower, which is one of my favorite reads for all things probability, payoff space, trading, optionality, and seeing the world through a volatility lens. Kris is a passionate educator, so it should come as no surprise that learning is a key thread throughout this entire episode. Kris discusses how learning is accelerated in the pits and how we can think about replicating it in electronic space. Kris discusses what he had to unlearn and relearn in his move from market making to relative value trading. He also shares his thoughts about how firm lineage influences how you learn to trade markets. Finally, we discuss Kris’s newest venture, moontower.ai, which seeks to provide a “volatility lens” to opinionated traders to help them better express their bets in option space. There is a lot of experience to unpack in this one. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kris Abdelmessih.

1h 13m

4.5

out of 5

4 Ratings

Flirting with Models is the show that aims to pull back the curtain and meet the investors who research, design, develop, and manage quantitative investment strategies. Join Corey Hoffstein, Chief Investment Officer of Newfound Research, on a journey to explore systematic investment strategies, ranging from value to momentum and merger arbitrage to managed futures. For more on Newfound Research, visit www.thinknewfound.com.

Creator

Corey Hoffstein
Years Active

2018 - 2025
Episodes

108
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Copyright 2025 Corey Hoffstein
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