Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Eckhardt Trading Company (ETC) founder and Chief Research Scientist, Bill Eckhardt, is a
founding father of the CTA industry, active since its birth in the 1970s. ETC’s unique strategy
and process fuses Eckhardt’s handson trading experience with distinctive, and sometimes
iconoclastic, academic and philosophical foundations – and rapidly evolving proprietary
research.
ETC’s entirely technical, volatility trendfollowing and shortterm trading strategy has a
differentiated return pattern. ETC has not made a conscious effort to decouple from peers, as
the firm does not pay attention to what competitors are doing. But ETC has produced a
different return profile, seen markedly in the first two months of 2018. Having made c.9% in
January, ETC’s flagship Evolution strategy only gave back c.3% in February, which was the
second worst month ever for the SG trendfollowing index. “ETC’s shorter term trend, non
trend and countertrend models, helped to soften the blow of losses from its mediumterm
trend models,” says COO, Rob Sorrentino.
ETC was exclusively a volatility trend follower until 2012. ETC’s correlation to trend
following indices is pretty stable at 0.6 to 0.65. “Correlation is of limited value however, as it
measures only a common direction, and not the extent of the direction. Correlation masks
substantial dispersion in returns,” says Sorrentino.
Longer lookbacks also show a performance pattern that is somewhat atypical for CTAs.
Traditional trendfollowers’ best years of the past ten were 2008 and 2014 whereas the best
two for volatility trend follower, ETC, were 2007 and 2010. Focusing on 2007 and 2008, ETC
started to pick up on the expansion of volatility in 2007 moving into early 2008, and then
played late 2008 very differently from many other CTAs that made most of their returns in the
fourth quarter. ETC made the bulk of its profits in the first half, before dialling down exposure
later in the year to an average margin of 4% and 350 round turns per million. The tendency for
CTAs to perform well during “risk off” periods, such as late 2008, has contributed to the term
“crisis alpha”. Datahungry ETC are cautious about whether there is enough data to be
confident about this recurring.
ETC’s perspectives and performance come from diverse sources.
1
(L-R): John Fornengo, President and Chief Risk Officer; Vartan Paylan,
Deputy Chief Research Scientist; Bill Eckhardt, Chairman and
Chief Research Scientist; Rob Sorrentino, COO and CCO; Stan
Fiedor, Senior Research Scientist. Standing in front of The
William Eckhardt Research Centre, The University of Chicago.
Systematic trading with safety nets
The first 20 years of Eckhardt’s career were spent proprietary trading in Chicago. This
experience inspired his lifetime’s work of creating his Science of Trading, which is the DNA
behind the firm’s 27 year track record.
Eckhardt had been researching trading systems since his teenage years in high school. He and
Richard Dennis developed the “Turtle Trader” programme that has spawned many successful
CTAs; the two of them jointly received the 2016 Pinnacle Achievement Award, presented by
CME Group.
Having started trading with discretion in the style of a trend follower, Eckhardt set up a small
account following a mechanical system, and found it consistently outperformed his
discretionary trading, year in, year out – in mediocre years, and in banner years. “The system
outtraded me, partly because my trade sizing was based on optimism, pessimism and recent
mistakes. Trading mechanically protects against all of that so it is not so emotionally
wracking,” he says.
ETC is fully systematic yet it retains a discretionary safety valve for risk management
purposes. Eckhardt is of the opinion that mechanical trading, with a safety net of rare human
overrides, is the best approach: “if you never exceed risk parameters, it means you are trading
too small. It is better to trade closer to where you want, and then if risk rises above a
2
threshold, manually override”. When Eckhardt started trading systems in the 1990s,
interventions took place many times a year but now happen maybe once a year – and just six
times over the past five years. “We have learned to design systems that do not get you into
places where you would need to override, but we are still ready to do so should the need arise.
So, we need people who understand the tempo and feeling of systems, so they can tell when
something is off,” says Eckhardt. Historically, ETC has exercised what Eckhardt terms the
“Chernobyl option” of cutting risk by 7080%, around the second Iraq war or 9/11 – and this
involved booking big profits.
If you never exceed risk parameters, it means you are trading too small.
It is better to trade closer to where you want, and then if risk rises
above a threshold, manually override.
Bill Eckhardt
Academic influences
“Though I spent many of my early years observing both floor trading, and away from the floor
multiple other global markets, I would not be the same kind of trader without the academic
experience,” reflects Eckhardt. His academic study and research have provided the broad
analytical and intellectual framework in which ETC’s systems evolved, and also more specific
aspects such as the statistical approaches and optimisation techniques used.
Mathematics and history of science
Eckhardt acknowledges that “mathematical logic per se is ivory tower stuff that has very little
to do with futures trading but learning all kinds of maths up to the doctoral level was
invaluable for reading technical papers that have proved to be absolutely essential”.
He adds “the history of science and ideas has also helped me to form a theory of trading. For
instance, when scientists first tried to understand how cannonballs projected, they used models
with false but simplifying assumptions, with complications added later. It is similar with
trading, in that the variable we are most interested in is price – and we need to simplify, but
3
not oversimplify. The philosophy and history of ideas teaches you what sorts of inferences are
warranted, and all the mistakes you can make in theorybuilding”.
Efficient markets and hiring
In hiring, ETC also veers towards maths and science. “ETC has a bias to the hard sciences.
ETC are looking for computational, research and programming skills, which can come from
physics, maths, engineering or even linguistics,” says Sorrentino.
Bill Eckhardt has endowed the multidisciplinary University of Chicago’s William Eckhardt
Research Centre, which is mainly to further human knowledge – but also provides a powerful
resource to help with research projects. Eckhardt has an office in the building to maintain
contact with students. The cooperation is twoway, and it can sometimes add as many as six
students from the Master’s in Financial Engineering course to the ETC R&D headcount. ETC
benefits further on the recruiting side, having just employed on a permanent basis one of the
research interns on completion of their Masters. “That said, there are always exceptions of
people who are particularly curious, and demonstrate ability, with good statistical sense, who
have studied different subjects,” says Sorrentino.
ETC has a bias against hiring economics graduates and MBAs, “who need to be substantially
educated out of market orthodoxies such as the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (that in their
defence are pretty much right),” says Sorrentino. ETC characterise the EMH “as being nearly
right over long or short enough time horizons, it is hard to see price movements as anything
other than random. In signal processing language, we view 99% of price changes as noise and
1% as signal, which raises the risk of overfitting. A badly designed system may still identify
trends and patterns within the randomness, just as humans shown a random chart can point out
patterns,” says Sorrentino.
4
Bill Eckhardt speaking with University of Chicago Research students
at The William Eckhardt Research Centre.
Overfitting, Darwinist model development and the creation of “The Gauntlet”
“Even with a really powerful optimisation technique there is a danger of overfitting to some
extent. I have championed and promoted the word overfitting because curvefitting relates to
nonlinear regressions, and there are no curves. Overfitting is the biggest pitfall of all and so
many organisations perish due to it. But it is also clear that you can underfit,” says Eckhardt.
Eckhardt has developed inhouse tests aptly named “The Gauntlet” which protect against
overfitting. “If there is too much overfitting, we have to discard a model no matter how good
it looks. ETC want to distinguish between permanent and transitory features of pricing and fit
to the permanent ones. But there is no principled way to distinguish between the two, so we
end up also fitting to some transitory features,” acknowledges Eckhardt.
As a result of “The Gauntlet”, thousands of models are thrown out (or returned to the drawing
board) due to overfitting – but also for other reasons, where returns are too clumpy and
concentrated over too small a time period. “We do not want something that just works
explosively and then coasts along,” explains Eckhardt. Each potential model is subject to an
extensive team review process, multiple tests and of course whatever the outcome of “The
Gauntlet” may be the buck stops with Eckhardt. A whole library of systems is currently lying
latent but could spring into action, when and if they can be honed and refined to meet the
criteria.
Nonnormal distributions
Eckhardt’s academic study and research has helped to determine which statistical methods to
use, and which to avoid. ETC eschews the orthodox paradigm of summary statistics, normal
distributions and Value at Risk, which have proved to be pitfalls for some managers. “In the
1970s, reading Benoit Mandelbrot’s work on fractals first gave me the idea that financial
markets were far from normal, and therefore it was just crazy to use normal distributions. I
took samples of 300 trades and found levels of deviation that would not occur for millions of
years under a normal distribution. I became convinced that normal distributions had absolutely
no application to trading,” he says. From the start, Eckhardt insisted on “robust statistical
tests, procedures and estimators, such as distributionfree estimators, on the basis that it is not
possible to make assumptions about distributions (or at least not strong ones)”.
“Oversized samples are needed to have the same degree of assurance and cope with
leptokurtosis or fat tails, which make the inference problem much harder, and so require much
more data to make a warrantable conclusion. ETC need to see a huge sample of trades to have
5
confidence that a model works, and every system needs to clear through all safeguards”. ETC
generally tests over 20year lookbacks.
ETC’s universe of 72 markets including metals on LME are chosen to match its style of
trading and level of assets.
Evolutionary computing
“Eckhardt’s study of evolutionary biology and population statistics has been most directly
relevant for the algorithmic optimisation and AI components of optimisation for the ETC
project, which are a real hallmark of the approach,” says President of the firm, John Fornengo.
At first, Eckhardt had studied them for intrinsic reasons and the trading application proved to
be incidental. ETC has been using an “evolutionary computing” optimisation process from the
start. “We had to design our type of evolutionary computing from the ground up to apply to
optimising trading systems, because the popular type – genetic algorithms – was too slavishly
imitating evolutionary biology. ETC’s computing systems are designed specifically for futures
markets,” says Fornengo.
“The idea behind evolutionary computing is fairly simple: to treat the problem as a gene
sequence of numbers, with millions of possible variations being genomes. Running the system
leads to fitness, and better performance is better fitness: the performance of the best systems
in the gene pool gets better and better,” he explains.
“As in real evolution, mutations and crossovers are usually harmful, but occasionally good, so
one needs to find ways to retain them. With no mutation, there is no evolution, and some
genetic algorithms used in engineering or biology literature cannot cope with mutation. Our
evolutionary algorithms are not nearly as delicate or chancy – they can function with a 100%
mutation rate,” he adds.
6
Expected utility theory
ETC also draws on evolutionary biology in using expected utility as a yardstick for measuring
fitness, whereas other managers may use performance, Sharpe ratios and risk measures, which
could be more susceptible to overfitting, according to Fornengo.
When developing a theory of trading, Eckhardt wanted to unemotionally decide which bets
were the right ones and reduce subjectivity. He stumbled on risk aversion as part of utility
theory, which considers nonlinearity: the diminishing marginal utility of profits, and the
increasing marginal disutility of losses. “After 25 years of research, looking at all types of risk
control and performance measurement systems, we think utility theory is the right way to
think about risk,” he says. Subjectivity only comes into risk aversion, and the rest of the
theory is developed objectively.
“ETC believe their expected utility metric is rather unique and is more holistic in
incorporating performance, drawdowns and the entire distribution of results, all of which
requires decades of price data and a lot of computing horsepower,” says Sorrentino. “Expected
utility also lets us observe the fitness of recombined systems,” he adds.
Volatility prioritised
7
ETC is targeting utility, rather than returns or volatility. Some CTAs have seen their own
strategy volatility collapse in line with the markets over the past 20 years. Eckhardt has not.
Though volatility has in fact been in a fairly tight range of 1214% most of the time, this is not
by design. ETC has looked at targeting volatility but believes that this would reduce
performance. Nonetheless, ETC does have plenty of risk controls that indirectly help to keep
volatility low and within client risk appetites. From his early days observing a wide range of
commodity futures pits, when volatility was far greater than it is today, soy beans for example
at three times today’s level, Eckhardt had to know what the risks were.
The ETC volatility trendfollowing process starts with volatility, and later looks to capture
trend and other moves. Basing the whole platform of research on volatility differentiates ETC
from other trend followers and shortterm traders. The rationale is partly pragmatic: Eckhardt
finds it is easier to accurately estimate volatility, than directional returns. “Therefore, risk
control should be the primary goal, and profitability the secondary one. We spend less time on
market direction, and more time on asking if the risk is right for the situation and use volatility
for other trading decisions,” says Eckhardt.
Defining and discriminating amongst trends
Thus, ETC’s biggest differentiator is thought to be how it assesses the volatility environment,
before trying to capture trends. “This does not necessarily lead to faster signals, but better
signals,” says Eckhardt. ETC aims to both enter and exit trends earlier, and at different times,
8
than do traditional trend followers. For some trades and time periods, ETC’s trend trades will
overlap with those of other trend followers. But unlike some CTAs, ETC does not always
have positions in all markets traded.
ETC is not necessarily concerned about what proportion of trends it captures, but rather more
about whether it is taking the appropriate risk for the market environment, based on volatility.
Position sizes are also adjusted to avoid too much risk in correlated markets.
ETC is not just an opportunistic and selective trend follower however – ETC defines and
identifies trends differently. They need to occur within a specific environment, and an erratic
ness indicator is intended to reduce trend exposure in adverse environments.
Nontrend models
ETC has also recognised that in a postGFC climate that has not been conducive to trend
following in most years, trend systems needed to be complemented with other systems able to
cope with nontrending markets. Both trend neutral models, introduced in 2017, and counter
trend models, added in 2012, have been used. (The countertrend models currently are being
reviewed and may be reinstated at some stage in a modified form). “Allocations to the
systems are based on a mix of art and science, including research and historical analysis,” says
Sorrentino.
Alpha half lives and model upgrades
Eckhardt argues that traditional trend systems were already starting to get stale in the 1970s.
ETC reckon a higher volatility climate helped CTAs in the 1990s, while central bank
intervention dampening down returns has made it harder to find any profits. This underscores
the need for an evolutionary approach adapting as markets change.
ETC find that alphas now decay faster than historically, because participants are more
sophisticated, and ideas get disclosed faster. ETC do not wait for alphas to decay and degrade
before upgrading systems with improvements and replacements.
“If you wait for decay, it’s too late, like with teeth. Our constant endeavour of trying to
improve the system defensively, draws on the red queen hypothesis in evolutionary biology –
that a species has to evolve as fast as possible just to hold its own,” says Eckhardt. Major
upgrades take place every 12 or 18 months, and minor ones two or three times a year – but the
upgraded model always bears some resemblance to what was done before.
9
Bill Eckhardt with University of Chicago Research students at The
William Eckhardt Research Centre.
Commodities
Hot on the heels of the trendneutral models introduced in 2017, shortterm commodity
select models were added in 2017, with other releases expected in 2019. Commodity models
have been adapted to the unique features of these markets. When starting out, ETC “did not
have enough data to distinguish financial markets from commodity markets, and so could not
get separate inferences. Now there is more data and more liquidity. ETC uses different models
for commodities, because they behave differently in price movement, notably in terms of
asymmetry between up and down moves. They are an actual thing, and not the discounted
cashflows of a company. The risk proposition is different in terms of inherent leverage and
market structure,” says Sorrentino.
Long before adding these new models, Eckhardt was tweaking models by moving trading time
frames around. Having started with short term models around 813 days, ETC added medium
term systems with a 3050 day time frame in 2002, before shifting shorter term again to an
average holding period of 8 days for the flagship Evolution Programme. The most fruitful
timeframe has been 810 days. These changes have all been driven by research and
optimisation, and not by any discretionary decisions on trade horizons or styles.
Pure price theory
10
The changes have also stayed true to pure price theory, based on opening, closing high and
low prices. Unlike some CTAs, ETC has never used fundamental data in its systems. For
Eckhardt “how to combine heterogeneous information is a very hard theoretical problem.
There is no principled way to do it. It is naïve to think that anything thrown into a system, that
has information content, should improve that system. When you combine two systems, you
can get something worse than one of them, and sometimes worse than both of them. From the
start, the problems of fundamental data overwhelmed the advantages, so we decided it is not
viable. It may work for other people, but not for our kind of research. I would never say never,
but it seems unlikely we would revisit fundamental data”.
Eckhardt’s legacy is that the pioneering tools he developed are now
embedded in the process.
Rob Sorrentino
Investment universe
ETC’s universe of 72 markets including metals on LME are chosen to match its style of
trading and level of assets. ETC’s universe is based on liquidity and tradability to avoid undue
friction or slippage; trendedness, and correlations. There is some turnover. ETC has added
nonUS and nonEU stock indices while some markets have been removed due to temporary
or permanent liquidity issues or being performance outliers over long periods of time. ETC is
always evaluating new markets but does not always find they have long enough data histories
to get comfort.
Somewhat unusually ETC trades foreign exchange through futures rather than over the
counter. ETC has regularly investigated OTC FX currency forwards but finds sufficient
liquidity to obtain good execution through futures markets, at its level of assets. “If we ran
$40 billion we might do things differently. We could easily build an FX aggregator and take
streaming prices from multiple venues if we wanted to,” adds Sorrentino.
Automated execution
With holding periods now averaging around 8 days in the flagship program, ETC is clearly
not competing with high frequency traders in millisecond timeframes. Eckhardt’s external
hosted execution facilities are mainly for the purposes of optimising technology and helping
with disaster recovery and optimisation procedures.
11
“ETC has fully automated execution, with experienced trading and IT staff to monitor it, some
of whom have been with the firm from the start. There is a suite of execution algorithms, some
of which are tailored to particular markets. Offsetting trades are netted at the execution level,”
says President John Fornengo.
Slippage is monitored on every trade and has been declining over time (though it went up in
one year). In addition, ETC’s University of Chicago collaborative research team was given a
project to improve execution techniques which resulted in a variety of new research expanding
in many directions.
Growing product suite
Execution techniques have increased potential capacity to $3 billion or so. ETC had
previously been closed at peak assets around $1bn in 2008 and 2006. Historically, the
commodities exposure was one capacity constraint, as Eckhardt judged that larger assets could
lead to wider spreads when trading commodities.
ETC has been open to investment since 2008 and has recently hired Nick Bolton to help
expand its global presence. His considerable range of experience and skills are currently
focused on raising assets globally. Already ETC are getting requests for new product,
customised vehicles including managed accounts, and importantly in the UCITS space
without commodity exposure. “There are relatively few investable shortterm programs
available in UCITS format currently that have the outstanding track record that ETC has
behind it. ETC may well offer some models on a standalone basis, but freestanding versions
look different and serve different purposes for investors than those in the context of our
flagship multistrategy vehicle,” says Sorrentino.
ETC are open minded about launching liquid alternatives vehicles and are in the early stages
of seeking a UCITS partner. ETC could also contemplate launching a lower fee, or flat fee,
alternative risk premia (ARP) strategy with the right partner. ETC might talk to providers of
seed or acceleration capital for new strategies or vehicles.
ETC have also been approached by several potential strategic JV partners to develop programs
that would trade local Asian futures markets. “This is due to Bill Eckhardt’s reputation as a
pioneer in the space which has for years created a strong following,” says Sorrentino. Some of
these markets exhibit price behaviour thus trading opportunities akin to that of Western
12
futures markets back in the 1990s. We understand negotiations are in hand as testing has
shown very interesting results; however, it’s too early to report the final outcome.
Institutionalisation
Many CTAs were used as ATMs during and after the financial crisis, and Eckhardt is no
exception. Subsequently, the big have got bigger, and many smaller CTAs have struggled to
attract assets – even when they performed well. Postcrisis, Eckhardt has generated single
digit annualised returns and has outperformed some larger CTAs.
Recently, the firm resolved to institutionalise its structure, to become more attuned to the
typical criteria of institutional allocators. “We recognise that institutional due diligence these
days is very different from before the GFC, and that institutions have different requirements
from high net worth individuals. We want to make sure that boxes are ticked,” says Bolton.
This entails some organisational change. In common with many smaller hedge fund managers,
Eckhardt historically had a fairly horizontal organisational structure – but is now making
specific heads of business units accountable for different activities within the firm. Eckhardt
as Chief Scientist and Head of Research, continues to be fully focused on research and
trading, spending less time on operational issues. It is now very much “Team Eckhardt” with
daytoday management run by President, John Fornengo.
13
The firm can rely on a number of key principals many of whom have a 25+ year history with
ETC. These include Audrey Gale, Principal for Client Services, Administration and Business
Development (who is also coGP on two ETC funds), and more recent hire COO Rob
Sorrentino. A strong internal compliance team is complemented by an external compliance
consultant. “Eckhardt’s legacy is that the pioneering tools he developed are now embedded in
the process,” says Sorrentino.
The new structure might sound siloed, but it is not. The 23 staff across all trading and non
trading functions who once straddled two offices, are now being centralised into one office in
central Chicago, at 300 South Wacker Drive, a few blocks down from CME Group. It is a
modern, wellequipped building, with plenty of space for collaboration between research and
trading. This is a good environment for clients to conduct due diligence. Technology has also
been upgraded, for processing and transmitting orders, hardware, and hosting.
Customised risk reports are provided by administrator NAV Consulting. ETC has a long
relationship with Societe Generale Prime Services (SGPS), including its forerunners, FIMAT
and CALYON, who helped launch a Cayman fund and also assist with capital introductions.
Sorrentino worked with SGPS on reorganising the structure at his previous employer, FORT
LP. “SGPS and Goldman Sachs are important strategic partners,” says Sorrentino. ETC also
participate in events such as MFA Miami and are sought after as speakers at various
conferences and capital introduction events. ETC are now actively engaged in a fresh
marketing phase. Nick Bolton, an experienced strategic partner based in London, is now
representing and expanding the ETC brand in Europe where institutional allocators are
welcoming the ETC story.
Systematica
Sarting Systematica in 2015 was a big step, as I joined BlueCrest in the early days and helped
to build up the business there too,” says chief executive officer, Leda Braga, whose stature
and success at BlueCrest helped her to feature in The Hedge Fund Journal’s “Leading 50
Women In Hedge Funds” in all three of the biannual surveys (2013, 2011 and 2009).
BlueCrest had systematic and discretionary strategies under one roof, and spinning out of
BlueCrest (which retains some ownership in Systematica) was partly motivated by how the
14
hedge fund industry is changing in general – “The industry is going through intense
transformation, with investors more aware of performance and fees, pressure on fees, more
audits and oversight from regulators.”
Against this backdrop, Braga argues that a firm focused solely on systematic fund
management has “advantages of scale, and can design products in a more granular and
specific way, so now is a good time to monetise those advantages.” Braga thinks that
discretionary and systematic asset management are culturally different, in that “team work is
essential on the systematic side, whereas the discretionary side is a collection of people doing
different things.” Chief investment officer, David Kitson agrees that “the priorities of a
discretionary group are quite different,” and reckons that a purely systematic business is well
positioned to meet the demands of increasingly sophisticated and institutionalised hedge fund
investors, such as pension funds. Head of trading and counterparty management, Bertil
Meijer, opines that branding as a focused systematic shop is valuable, and finds that a
specialised environment allows him to hone and refine multiple facets of the trade execution
process that bring benefits including lower trading costs. Chief operating officer, Matt Kilsby,
also relishes the freedom he has to finetune the third and future generations of the trading
platform, and other technological infrastructure, to highly specific requirements of systematic
trading, without worrying about the bespoke quirks of discretionary traders.
Teamwork is prized
THFJ met these four partners of Systematica at their Geneva offices. Braga pithily
summarises her approach to team building by saying, “We let smart people understand where
we are going and then let them get on with it.” Drawing parallels with dance, she says, “we
incorporate each person’s expertise into the choreography.” In broad terms there are three
functional divisions: research, trading and technology. Braga and former J.P. Morgan
proprietary trader Kitson have oversight of the whole product including research, investment
decisions and portfolio construction; trading platformsexpert Meijer executes macro and
single equities, while technology expert Kilsby is constantly improving technology across all
of the funds. An example of how the team works shows how it is far more collegiate than
siloed, illustrating how Kitson finds systematic fund management to be far more collaborative
than it is discretionary. Meijer might flag up that a particular asset or sector is becoming more
expensive to execute. Kitson could then ask researchers if that market could be traded on
slower timeframes. The baton is then handed onto Kilsby, who makes sure the technology
systems can accommodate the rollout of the slower models.
15
This dialogue is not restricted to the four partners – Braga makes efforts to ensure connectivity
throughout Systematica’s global offices (Geneva, London, Jersey, Singapore and New York).
“We have to ensure information flow amongst the offices, otherwise people are remote and
unplugged,” she stresses. So there are weekly calls with overseas offices, and offsite
weekends for everyone to discuss everything in close proximity. Yet some activities need to
stay in one office. All trading in European and US markets is still done from the Geneva
office between 8am and 10pm on shifts. Meijer insists that “there would be no benefit in
transporting a team to New York City, as we would lose efficiency and communication, and
news would not make it back to David and Matt.” Braga admits that “it is a balancing act to
have a few bases and tap into the talent,” and is confident that Systematica is striking the right
balance. Systematica’s global office network is partly a consequence of BlueCrest’s decision
to diversify its own office locations after a discussion process. “BlueCrest has a very global
investor base, but was super Londoncentric,” recalls Braga. Each of Systematica’s locations
provides advantages. “The parent company and head office is now Jerseybased; the UK is a
great place to base a business; Geneva has lots of private wealth clients and we have hired
some people from CERN laboratory, especially on the technology side; and Singapore is
useful for 24hour trading, as we do not want to work staff round the clock.” But Systematica
has not inherited all of BlueCrest’s offices. A Sao Paolo office was set up to trade Brazilian
interest rate products, but although Braga was born in Brazil there is no business rationale for
Systematica to open an office there when it trades only two products in the region.
CTA feast and famine
Systematica accepts the industrystandard explanations for why CTAs had a stellar 2008
16
(when the BlueTrend programme made over 40%) and then generally struggled between 2009
and 2013, before strongly recovering in 2014. Says Kitson, “post2008 central bank
intervention was stabilising assets, but since 2014 we see the release of some pentup pressure
as the US government eases off intervention.” He adds that volatility has started to move up
from the depressed levels seen three or four years ago, and interestingly this year increased
volatility has gone hand in hand with new highs for the equity markets, contrary to the usual
inverse link. Kitson surmises that more volatility is creating better trends.
Braga agrees, citing a strong inverse correlation between waves of QE and CTA
underperformance that she recently discussed on a panel at the MFA (Managed Funds
Association) Conference in Miami. But Systematica admits that QE alone cannot explain their
2013 performance, which Braga describes as “our first and hopefully our only down year.”
The way in which trends reversed after Bernanke’s taper tantrum was obviously bad for trend
following, but what made 2013 worse was the breakdown of correlations. This double
whammy was without historical precedent, Braga reflects, but the team’s response was swift:
“Since 2013, modules have been added to the BlueTrend trading programme to mitigate the
impact of trend breakdown and correlation breakdown, but this combination is still likely to be
painful.” Braga admits that the 2013 drawdown was no surprise statistically, representing less
than the fund’s annualised volatility, but says “the statistical argument does not apply when
you are losing money, as it just feels awful.”
This shows how BlueTrend’s models are constantly evolving. Being on the right side of big
market moves such as the oil price crash in 2014 may have grabbed the headlines, and Braga
recalls how in the early days 14 years ago she was focused mostly on the glamourous side of
forecasting market moves. But gauging volatility and correlation are as important as market
direction for several reasons. “Directional market signals often have quite low signal to noise
ratios so portfolio construction is important,” says Kitson, whose PhD was in theoretical
physics. “We have to pull together the directional signals, volatility and correlation to create
the offering.” Adds Braga, “even if you have a phone line to God, a great forecast can be
destroyed if you fail to size positions in the context of the portfolio.” Braga sums up: “if
forecasting is 90% on a glamour scale, in reality it’s only 50%, with risk management the
other 50%.”
Braga enjoyed studying engineering to PhD level, at Imperial College London, and lecturing
there, because “I like to solve problems and mathematics is a fantastic language to express
thoughts in.” She has no idea why women are less likely to pursue science at postgraduate
level. While Systematica does have some bias towards hiring PhDs from maths, physics and
engineering, the firm has a wider mix of disciplines, hiring from economics, finance,
computer science and signal processing as well. The team reads huge amounts of academic
17
research, but Kitson stresses that “we do not take canned research, but can get the initial
inspiration from academic journals.” The way in which Systematica applies the raw research
ideas differentiates it from other quant shops.
Selective discretion
Although the models are completely systematic, like most CTAs Systematica clearly does
exercise some discretion, including over how the models evolve, rebalancing amongst alpha
models, and selecting the investment universe of markets trading. Timing the alpha models is
not a huge source of returns for Systematica. Says Kitson, “the investment committee sets the
mix of alphas, tailored to the market environment.” But Braga stresses that the rebalancing
amongst models is marginal and incremental, and does not go for very aggressive shifts
towards or against particular models and, unlike markets, models will never be relegated to a
zero weighting. This is because Kitson reckons “it is superhard to time alphas,” and adds that
“if we had the ability to time the alphas systematically that would be embedded in each alpha
construct and not done externally.”
Whether the rebalancing of alphas has done better than a fixed mix is hard to judge, as each of
the models is continually varying. But when Systematica backtested today’s suite of models
against those prevailing historically, they estimated returns would have been as good or
slightly better in all years and worse in none – which reassures Kitson that “the research
process is working,” and suggests that improving the models matters more than timing them.
Systematica reviews the universe of instruments traded each quarter, and can exercise
18
discretion to add new markets or remove them, albeit based mainly on quantitative criteria
such as open interest, daily liquidity, volatility and how well markets trend.
For instance, gold, oil and kerosene on the Tokyo Commodities exchange were removed after
their liquidity declined. As well, Meijer has noticed liquidity on the London Metal Exchange
decreasing, due, he thinks, to a number of banks withdrawing from LME market making. So is
liquidity in general dropping as regulations force banks to retreat from market making? Meijer
sees a mixed picture, and points out that it partly depends on which measure is used. Granted,
volumes in the German bund future were down to 750,000 per day in January 2015, from one
million back in 2011. But Meijer points out that the notional exposure remains similar – as the
contract price has increased to 160 from 125. And some markets are seeing noticeable
increases in trading volumes – liquidity in the VIX future keeps on increasing, for instance. As
CTAs are essentially long of volatility and are not selling it, they need price movement to
make money, so markets that are too quiet can be removed. Back in 2003 the BlueTrend
programme removed shortterm Japanese interest rates from the strategy, as their price was
too stable to be of interest. The BlueTrend programme also ceased trading the short end of the
US interest rate curve after the zero interest rate policy was introduced. Right now it also
sounds as if shortdated government bonds with negative yields could be strong candidates for
removal.
The ultimate case of a nonvolatile market is, of course, a pegged currency, and Systematica
avoids trading these markets. Hence when the Swiss franc was pegged to the euro in
September 2011, the team intervened to almost entirely remove the currency from their
models. The rationale was simply that “the models would have no conception of how history
would predict the future,” recalls Kitson. Systematica had not reintroduced the Swiss franc
when we met, as they did not think it had sufficient recent history as a freely floating
currency. The partners at Systematica agree that trend following continued to work well post
crisis in over the counter (OTC) nonfutures markets, but Kitson is “not sure what mechanism
was at work or why the OTC markets did better.” Nevertheless, he says, “You cannot argue
with the returns,” so Systematica is increasing its suite of OTC markets. The BlueTrend
programme has always traded interest rate swaps and currency forwards, and coming from an
investment banking background, the team is comfortable with OTC trading. Braga points out
that the barriers to entry are higher for OTC trading, as you need a range of ISDAs and
execution capabilities, and more importantly, “You need to be big enough for banks to find
you a worthwhile counterparty to trade with.” Options, however, are not on the menu for now.
Athough Kitson has traded options at J.P. Morgan, and Braga has modelled and valued them,
at Cygnifi, for now the BlueTrend and BlueMatrix programmes will trade linear, delta one
instruments.
19
Despite these various differentiators, Systematica expect their returns to continue showing
some correlation with those of other trend followers, but Braga points out that “small changes
in setting and speed can impact the profile by a lot” and may explain some periods of
decoupling between the BlueTrend programme and other CTAs. She observes that some
CTAs are decorrelating because “they mix single stocks with futures and we think that’s very
bold”. Systematica prefers to trade single stocks in a separate programme – BlueMatrix, which
we touch on later. Some CTAs have also diverged from their peers by deemphasising
momentum models but BlueTrend will stay true to its name with a substantial trend
component. Trend followers are agnostic on market direction and Braga thinks the ability to
go short is particularly useful as a diversifier for institutional investors that have large long
weightings in equities. Scope to short is useful as “it is not human nature to bet against things,
it is human nature to buy things that you like”.
Liquid alternatives: LSE listed closedend funds, UCITS, ’40 Act and BlueMatrix
Systematica is actively exploring the possibility of UCITS vehicles for its strategies, and is not
put off by having closed the BlueTrend UCITS in 2010. Going forward, Kitson is reassured
that “the UCITS rules are now much clearer and evolved, so it is much easier to design a
compliant product.” As far as commodity exposure is concerned, Systematica would seek
“welltrodden routes to obtain the exposure, and will not do anything trailblazing on the
structuring side.”
BlueTrend already has a London Stock Exchangelisted closedend fund, with ticker BBTS,
that can be owned by anyone with a brokerage account, and Systematica continues to receive
suballocations from BlueCrest’s LSElisted AllBlue, which has tickers BABS, BABE, and
BABU for its sterling, euro and US dollar share classes. Systematica already has a ‘40 Act
product via the Equinox platform for the US market. Unlike the old UCITS, this fund is not
intended to be a replica of the main BlueTrend programme, as the strategy includes elements
of systematic macro.
20
The first UCITS launch from Systematica is set to be a wrapper for their BlueMatrix fund.
This will be an independently run, Irishdomiciled UCITS rather than on any platform. Kitson
estimates capacity for the BlueMatrix strategy, which currently runs $600 million, could be as
high as $2 billion, but acknowledges that this will only be discovered through experience.
In 2007 the BlueMatrix programme started out doing what is often termed “statistical
arbitrage”, entailing shorterterm price mean reversion, but quickly found this was a capacity
constrained strategy that was also challenged by the risk on/risk off world increasing
correlations between securities through time, and reducing crosssectional correlations
through space. Braga’s response was that “we upgraded the fund with multiple alpha sources,
of which mean reversion was only one, so the BlueMatrix programme should now be seen as a
more diversified quantitative equity programme.” A variety of technical and fundamental
signals are used, including some innovative ones, across global developed and emerging
equity markets.
Fundamental data, including corporate accounting data, is one input, with analyst earnings
revisions making up perhaps 20% or 30% of inputs. Of course, “cleaning the data is super
important,” stresses Braga. The BlueMatrix programme is also thinking laterally, throughout
the supply chain, and using data from suppliers or customers to draw inferences about
probable implications for other companies along the chain. Furthermore, the BlueMatrix
programme is moving into the new frontiers of researching news, events and sentiment. Each
of these inputs is complementary and, drawing analogies with classical antiquity this time,
Braga says, “If you have oracles you must let them talk to each other.” Beta is near zero at the
market and regional level, and is pretty low at the sector level. While BlueMatrix pays some
homage to trend following via the momentum signals, trend will never become a large part of
the strategy.
21
Liquid alternatives is one of many directions in which Systematica is developing, but high
frequency trading is not one of them. As aforementioned, adding more over the counter
markets to the investment universe is an ongoing project, and Systematica feels confident
about obtaining access to these markets. More radically, Braga says the firm is looking into
products that might be viable to run without any performance fee. And a longonly offering
could be considered for the pension fund market. Systematic and Braga may be, justifiably,
most renowned for the BlueTrend programme, but their research, trading and technology
resources are making strides into “quantamental” or quant fundamental strategies, including
systematic macro and single equities, as well as more traditional asset management.
Systematica aspires to build a powerhouse straddling longonly and absolute return as well as
hedge funds – and catering for a continuum of clients from the smallest retail investor to the
largest institution.
Trading and technology
Trading and technology also set Systematica apart from other managers. “We can streamline
our technology and operations around a STP (straightthrough processing) engineered
systematic approach,” says Kitson, “which is more efficient than discretionary businesses that
are trading new and exotic instruments every day.” Meijer, a Dutch national who previously
worked for Europe’s largest pension fund manager, APG Asset Management, thinks that
greater centralisation is the main difference between systematic and discretionary managers.
“While discretionary managers might sometimes delegate execution to traders or sometimes
do their own, in the systematic world centralising execution allows us to concentrate on
objectives such as internalising, netting, and automating flow, with less than 10 traders
covering 200 markets for 22 hours a day.”
Running a trading desk has manifold angles: pretrade analysis, routing via multiple trading
channels, automation, and using algorithms built by the inhouse team, but the process does
not stop after trade confirms are received. Meijer needs to be constantly alert to when and
where his execution is outperforming or underperforming its benchmarks, as these
conclusions then feed back into the start of the process – and might lead to changes. “We
might need to adjust timing, aggressiveness, or passiveness – it’s a very datadriven process,”
explains Meijer. At the same time, he is not micromanaging it to the point of being a
perfectionist with each individual trade – rather he looks at it from 40,000 feet. Meijer views
the new generation of datadriven traders as being a far cry from the noisy floor traders of
yesteryear.
22
Kitson thinks it is “a false economy to focus on cheaper funds that don’t put effort into
execution.” Obsessing over fees to the exclusion of measuring execution costs, which are
essentially dead money, is dangerous because “Once you have paid away the bidoffer spread
it’s gone forever, whereas if you can save 1% a year on execution that is a fixed 1%, which is
good.”
Systematica merely wants to obtain competitive execution for its investment strategies, and is
not seeking to enter the marketmaking of highfrequency trading game, which Meijer views
as a different business model entirely. Systematica only runs client assets, and is not doing
anything on the proprietary side. But Kitson says Systematica needs to “use highfrequency
trading techniques to avoid giving money to highfrequency traders,” and Meijer claims that
Systematica has developed systems that are aware of HFT activity in the markets and deal
with this in an appropriate manner. However, Meijer aims to “analyse the behaviour of all
participants, not just highfrequency traders.” The trading platform is nimble enough to react
when markets change, and Meijer believes the platform is more adaptive to change than many
other market participants. “Often buyside traders work with rulesof thumb such as the
assumption that they can trade 20% of average volumes without impact.”
In fact, Meijer finds that these days as little as 8% of daily volumes can have an adverse ripple
effect, so his systems are designed to adapt more swiftly. Meijer reiterates the team mantra
“that trading and execution is not just about reducing costs” – it is also a holistic part of
adding value to the portfolio construction process, helping to determine which markets are
cheaper or more expensive to trade in order to reach the optimal portfolio solution. But
netting, or internalising order flow, is one way in which Systematica can potentially reduce
costs across all markets.
Systematica is trading more than 200 assets and over 4,000 singlename equities, adding up to
a notional volume of $5 billion a day. In this environment, Braga says, “netting trades where
permitted is hugely beneficial in reducing costs,” and Systematica is now netting between
15% and 20% of its own flow. Yet netting in such a complex environment constitutes a multi
dimensional optimisation problem. When models are trading the same market at different
speeds, one model that is long can be partially offset against another that is short. But it gets
much more complicated than this, because the same strategy can be run across multiple legal
entities, including funds and managed accounts, and netting can then run into obstacles around
legal, regulatory or exchange rules. The number of dimensions and parameters entailed is
difficult for a human mathematician to keep track of, so Systematica has devised algorithms
that allow for the constraints and allocate accordingly – netting wherever possible.
23
Systematica is onto the third generation of its proprietary trading platform, but Kilsby is
looking ahead to the fourth and fifth generations, including now looking at the frontback
holistic view for the whole firm and the operational functions. He will say that key
characteristics are time to market within a robust infrastructure, and then Braga steps in to
elaborate how the platform has changed beyond recognition since the first one. “Back in 2003
we had Excel spreadsheets, Bloomberg feeds and a C++ library, and this was just not robust,”
she says.
This seems to prompt techy Kilsby, who was head of European technology for Citadel, into
spilling some key benefits: “high fault tolerance, the ability to start up engines in any location,
and safety fuses across the platform that aim to protect us from past industry experiences, e.g.,
Knight Capital, minimising the chances of a technical mistake.” Despite all of this automation,
an extra check and balance comes in the form of a team of human execution traders who still
authorise each and every decision.
The systems are ideally geared to cater for client demands of customisation that can entail
specialist mandates and constraints, via dedicated managed accounts. Braga summarises the
three key benefits of the tech platform as agility, flexibility and robustness.
Tyrus Capital
Tyrus Capital launched its flagship fund, the Tyrus Capital Event Fund, in October 2009,
barely a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused a global financial crisis. Against
this backdrop it seemed a daunting task to be starting a new fund, but Tyrus Capital surprised
many observers by catapulting assets to $1.5 billion in just three months. This success was
partly ascribed to receding risk aversion as markets were regaining composure, and investors
too were emboldened enough to resume allocations – particularly to a fund with a cohesive
team that had worked together for many years. Yet what attracted most attention was that
24
Tyrus Capital’s founder, Tony Chedraoui, had in 2008 demonstrated his versatility by
generating a return of more than 15% for investors in the Deephaven European Event Fund.
Moreover this was attained whilst staying liquid: Chedraoui managed the Deephaven fund
from its inception in June 2007 until the fund returned capital to investors – without delays,
suspensions, gates, or side pockets – in February 2009. Chedraoui attributes this strong
performance, and the low downside volatility that he has continued to provide at Tyrus
Capital, to his investment philosophy, seeking to limit the downside in each trade idea, while
creating optionality to make money.
Born in the Lebanon, Chedraoui was raised in a country wracked by civil war, and grew up
striving to create a better life for his family. At an early age his grandfather instilled in him an
ambition to attend the Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) in Paris, one of the prestigious
French “Grandes Ecoles”. However for his Bachelors degree, Chedraoui decided to study
locally, reading computer engineering at the American University of Beirut. It was in 1997
that he achieved his childhood dream when he was one of a handful of Lebanese students to
be admitted to the HEC. Following internships in strategic consulting, financial consulting and
venture capital, Chedraoui had been set upon a career in the last of these when a friend invited
him to a presentation by Lehman Brothers. Inspired by the speaker, an investment banker
named Makram Azar, Chedraoui was instantly singleminded about wanting to join Lehman,
and if possible work for Azar. Again, this ambition was realised when Chedraoui joined
Lehman’s Media and Telecoms team in London a year later. Chedraoui was highly regarded
within the group, achieving rapid promotion, but he often found himself wondering why the
market was sometimes slow to react to the benefits and synergies of announced
transformational deals. He read books about markets, traders and investment strategies, and
resolved to see if he could apply investment banking knowledge and skills to an eventdriven
investment strategy, yet he loved Lehman so much that he was loth to leave.
Fortunately, a solution was found in which Chedraoui made his first step into the buy side at
Lehman. He moved from investment banking to Lehman’s Londonbased proprietary trading
team, and this allowed him to synthesise his experience in investment banking with arbitrage
and trading techniques. Chedraoui found that he could indeed generate returns by taking
positions in companies where announced deals created value from synergies or from
realignments of their businesses, but he was also quick to appreciate the importance of using
external legal counsel to advise on deal milestones and timelines, as well as on antitrust
issues.
25
One of the lawyers that he consulted, Xavier Freixes, who at the time was a partner in one of
Spain’s leading law firms, particularly impressed Chedraoui with the quality and practicality
of the advice he gave. This emphasis on legal analysis meant that Chedraoui only felt
comfortable taking positions in companies domiciled in countries where corporate law,
especially takeover law, was clear and robust, and where there were plenty of precedents to
analyse.
Chedraoui continued to hone and refine his investment philosophy, looking for trades where
he could predefine a known and limited downside, combined with a chance to make a profit
if his thesis played out. He said that “analysing motivations of the participants in a deal is vital
when trying to assess the likelihood that a particular deal will close”, and identified that the
overcrowding in many arbitrage situations led to significant downside correlation in trades
“du jour” favoured by eventdriven managers, especially when markets turned down. He
therefore felt strongly that an eventdriven strategy should be true to its name and correlated to
the deals that it was exposed to, rather than to markets in general, and tried to construct
portfolios where he could control correlation not only with markets but also among positions.
If some managers view increasing diversification and reducing position sizes as a way to cut
correlations, this was never Chedraoui’s approach. Perhaps paradoxically, he argues that “a
concentrated portfolio of ideas that share little in common with one another is the best way to
minimise correlation to equities”.
In the summer of 2006, Chedraoui was approached by Deephaven Capital Management, a
Minneapolisbased multistrategy hedge fund which was searching for a new head of
European eventdriven investing. Chedraoui spotted the opportunity to build his own team and
was finally convinced to join. 2006 was a busy year for eventdriven managers, with frenzied
deal activity taking place on a global basis. Chedraoui started in his new role that August and
within a few months his contribution to Deephaven’s results had attracted enough interest
from investors to warrant giving Chedraoui his own fund to run: the Deephaven European
Event Fund was born in June 2007. Chedraoui had continued to use the advice of Xavier
Freixes, and at this point he persuaded the Barcelonabased lawyer to move his family to
London and to join his team at Deephaven.
Soon after the launch of his new fund, Chedraoui began to feel more cautious about the
outlook for global markets and began curtailing his exposure to longbiased value situations.
As markets started to falter in the last quarter of 2007, he grew increasingly fearful that some
of the gargantuan leveraged buyouts that were then being attempted, such as those involving
Clear Channel Communications, Bell Canada and Rohm and Haas, rested on precarious
foundations. It was clear to him that “the motivation of the participants in these deals, most
26
obviously the private equity buyers and the banks providing the finance, had changed,” and
that if they could devise ways to renege on, break or reprice the deals without exposing
themselves to litigation, they would. He therefore focused his energies on trying to identify
situations, particularly in Europe, where, he says, “the regulatory and legal environment made
it harder for deals to break”, and he also sought ways to “short and profit from deals that
looked particularly vulnerable”. This approach helped Chedraoui not only to weather the
storm, but to generate a midteens return for his investors in 2008. The sale of Deephaven to
Stark in the first quarter of 2009 gave him the opportunity to step out on his own with the
benefit of a strong track record and an established team comprising not just his analysts and
traders, but also the individuals who had provided operational support, IT, finance,
compliance, HR and investor relations to him at Deephaven.
At Tyrus Capital, Chedraoui continued to build out his investment team based on his
consistent conviction that “investment banking skills offer a critical advantage when analysing
announced deals”. He therefore hired people that he had known for a long time who had
worked in investment banking, and most of whom also had experience of working in well
established eventdriven hedge funds. In keeping with his focus on legal analysis and
determination to build a robust compliance framework, he added further lawyers to both the
business and investment teams, and Tyrus Capital now counts no fewer than six lawyers
among its 28 staff.
The operational platform that has been built by Tyrus Capital COO, Mark Madden, has really
caught the eye of operational due diligence experts. Madden and his team set out from launch
with the determination to deliver an infrastructure which can not only give the investment
team all the relevant capabilities that they need, but that can also be robust enough to survive
almost any realistic business continuity event. The team used its intellectual capital to build
proprietary systems around the traditional vendor portfolio management systems to provide
automated reconciliation tools. These create alerts enabling Madden’s operations team to
27
focus immediately on exceptions, trade breaks and operational risks in real time, while screen
based dashboards give him and his team the transparency they need to monitor every relevant
aspect of the business, including the IT and operational infrastructure.
Since launch, the Tyrus Capital Event Fund has compounded more than 8% per annum,
outperforming the MSCI World Index and eventdriven hedge fund indices, but with a
volatility of less than 7% despite the period being a difficult one for eventdriven investors
due to the paucity of deals. Chedraoui attributes this result to his investment philosophy of
looking for opportunities that combine a low downside with upside optionality. All trades
have to meet these essential criteria, and can be grouped into one of four
broad categories.
The first of these, arbitrage from hard catalysts, includes not just traditional merger arbitrage,
but also capital structure arbitrage, shareholder election arbitrage and other arbitrage
techniques, and can be expressed in takeovers, demergers and spinouts, restructurings and
refinancings, rights issues, tender offers and Dutch auctions. Chedraoui sees merger arbitrage
as “an inherently unattractive investment strategy because the risk/reward profile of small but
limited upside and larger potential downside can lead to significant and correlated volatility
across positions if markets turn fearful”. Synchronised selloffs of popular positions can be
intensified if spreads are tight and require leverage to generate a worthwhile return, so he
tends only to favour the strategy when spreads are wide and hefeels that the rewards justify
the risks. Otherwise he generally has limited exposure to pure merger arbitrage unless a deal
has “embedded complexity which makes the spread more interesting, or where there is a
genuine chance of a higher counter bid”.
Chedraoui and his team will analyse every aspect of a deal and its associated timeline before
taking a position, and may even trade in and out of a position during the life of the deal to take
advantage of spread volatility around specific milestones. But it is some of the other arbitrage
28
strategies that have provided the most interesting returns for his investors and which most
excite Chedraoui when he talks about them.
The second bucket encompasses what Chedraoui describes as “value from hard catalyst” and
harks back to his days as an investment banker at Lehman. Here he looks for deals which
create value for shareholders, and where investment banking skills such as pro forma analysis
and valuation techniques enable him and his team to identify situations where an event may
trigger significant outperformance of a market over a period of time. Convinced that equity
markets are far from efficient, Chedraoui believes that “postevent synergies can be
overlooked as eventdriven investors tend to lose interest in a deal once it has been completed,
whereas longonly investors tend to wait until sellside analysts can produce research reports
postcompletion so they can see the synergies and valuation comparisons clearly”.
This type of trade requires a “stockpickers’ market” that rewards fundamental research, and
so Chedraoui gets uncomfortable with this type of exposure if he feels that markets are
beginning to be driven by macroeconomic factors indiscriminately increasing correlations
among stocks. Consequently “we cut our value exposure rapidly at the end of 2007 and again
in April 2011,” he says. To maintain this flexibility he likes to stick to situations where
liquidity permits him to stay nimble and swiftly exit positions when he wishes to.
The next bucket, soft catalyst and opportunistic, includes value positions which have to be
smaller because of their more restricted liquidity; Chedraoui recalls “the ability to liquidate
the Deephaven portfolio in a couple of weeks in January 2009 was an important factor for my
day one investors in Tyrus Capital”. Soft catalysts can also include positions in stocks that
have been affected by significant business issues, rather than announced deals. Some of these
positions may be shortterm and tradingoriented, while others are regarded more as options
and can be held for a number of months.
The final bucket consists of what Chedraoui refers to as structured trades, and he believes
“these set Tyrus Capital apart from many other eventdriven specialists”. These positions tend
to be highly idiosyncratic, to have asymmetric risk/reward profiles and are often the largest
and most complex positions in the portfolios. As they may take months of analysis and
negotiation and rely heavily both on the internal legal resource and on external counsel,
Chedraoui expects to complete only three or four a year, but it is these trades which have
produced some of his most interesting stories and returns.
29
Chedraoui speaks passionately about the structured trades that he currently has in the portfolio
as he believes that they offer “upside optionality to a better Europe, while limiting downside
risks if macroeconomic fears resurface”. He cites the fact that although the US equity market
indices are up almost 20% year to date, the Eurostoxx is languishing scarcely higherthan the
level at which it began the year. In particular he has sought to capture upside optionality from
anomalously priced companies that boast a global franchise, but are tarred with a peripheral
European valuation.
Chedraoui continues to believe that the beauty of eventdriven investing lies in the analysis of
timelines, and he freely admits that a genuine eventdriven strategy will only make very high
returns when there is a lot of deal activity. “This strategy should correlate to events, and not
the market,” he says.
It is therefore with considerable optimism that Chedraoui speaks about the rest of the year.
The combination of the convexity of his structured trades, together with a noticeable recent
pickup in deal activity and growing evidence of a European recovery, lead him to believe that
this could be “the best year for eventdriven investing since I established Tyrus Capital almost
four years ago”.
30