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What Ray Dalio and Art Cashin think of the latest market moves

Two articles are doing the rounds. The first is a letter from Bridgewater hedge fund titan Ray Dalio, who has long believed the world is in a great deleveraging. He doubles down today and says the next ‘big’ Fed move will be more QE.

Here’s the crux:

the ability of central banks to ease is limited, at a time when the risks are more on the downside than the upside and most people have a dangerous long bias. Said differently, the risks of the world being at or near the end of its long-term debt cycle are significant.

That is what we are most focused on. We believe that is more important than the cyclical influences that the Fed is apparently paying more attention to.

While we don’t know if we have just passed the key turning point, we think that it should now be apparent that the risks of deflationary contractions are increasing relative to the risks of inflationary expansion because of these secular forces. These long-term debt cycle forces are clearly having big effects on China, oil producers, and emerging countries which are overly indebted in dollars and holding a huge amount of dollar assets-at the same time as the world is holding large leveraged long positions.

While, in our opinion, the Fed has over-emphasized the importance of the “cyclical” (i.e., the short-term debt/business cycle) and underweighted the importance of the “secular” (i.e., the long-term debt/supercycle), they will react to what happens. Our risk is that they could be so committed to their highly advertised tightening path that it will be difficult for them to change to a significantly easier path if that should be required.

Next is NYSE floor veteran Art Cashin at UBS. Some of his comments are mute because he talks about the potential for China to cut rates and that’s already taken place. He says to watch high yield closely and Jackson Hole.

Vice-Chair Stanley Fischer will be speaking later this week at the Jackson Hole conference. I think he will be addressing the problem of inflation and that it’s not growing in the pace they want it. That will give the world a hint that the Fed is not quite ready to raise interest rates.

Are Great Traders Born or Bred?

In a recent speech to a class at Harvard Business School Mark Sellers, founder of Chicago-based hedge fund Sellers Capital, argues that great traders are born and not bred. He believes that there are seven “structural assets” that cannot be taught, adding, ” They have to do with psychology. You can’t do much about that.”

The traits:

1) The ability to buy when others are panicking, and vice versa

2) An obsession with the trading game

3) A willingness to learn from past mistakes

4) An inherent sense of risk based on common sense

5) A confidence in your convictions and a willingness to stick with them

6) An ability to have “both sides of your brain working” (i.e. to go beyond the math)

7) The ability to live through volatility without changing your investment thought process

I  think that some of the concepts discussed here are spot on (and I spend a great deal of time hammering home the importance of #7) , but I disagree with the overall idea that great traders are born, not made. I believe success in trading is not about a specific style, but rather about understanding your personality traits and then developing a trading style (and which product – i.e. stocks, commodities, fx) that fits you best.

We are who we are. That does not change throughout our life, but we can learn to wait for times when the market is paying our personality type and then generate successful returns when that window of opportunity appears.

5 Market Insights from Paul Tudor Jones

Paul Tudor Jones is one of the most emblematic figures in the hedge fund industry. His best percentage returns happened during severe market corrections: 126% after fees in 1987 when U.S. markets lost a quarter of their market cap in one day. 87% in 1990 when the Japanese stock market plunged. 48% during the tech crash of 2000-2001. He returned 5% in 2008. His funds have underperformed in the past 8 years. He charges 2.75% management fee and 27% performance fee, which significantly above the industry average of 2 and 20.

Outside of financial markets. PTJ founded the Robin Hood foundation, which attempts to alleviate problems caused by poverty in NYC.

The biggest conundrum when studying successful money managers is do you pay attention to what they are doing today or do you focus on what they were doing before they became widely popular, were managing a lot less money and had a lot higher returns?

Here PTJ talks about how new powerful trends often start – basically, a big price expansion from a long base.

The basic premise of the system is that markets move sharply when they move. If there is a sudden range expansion in a market that has been trading narrowly, human nature is to try to fade that price move. When you get a range expansion, the market is sending you a very loud, clear signal that the market is getting ready to move in the direction of that expansion.

PTJ on risk management

If I have positions going against me, I get right out; if they are going for me, I keep them… Risk control is the most important thing in trading. If you have a losing position that is making you uncomfortable, the solution is very simple: Get out, because you can always get back in.

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Book Review: Trading Bases

A timely book here just ahead of opening day, http://tradingbases.squarespace.com/. Peta relates a lifelong love of baseball and statistics, his experiences as an equity desk trader for Lehman Bros. (15 years) and his subsequent battle back from a horrifying injury sustained by being run over in the streets of NY by an ambulance –as if his Lehman experience wasn’t enough to endure. He suffered a “Theisman grotesque” leg break that left him depressed and basically rehabbing alone in his NY apartment with wife and family living on the west coast.

His passion for trading snuffed by not being able to work, hopped up on pain meds, and trapped in the apartment leads to him to watching more sports than ever before. A baseball lover at heart and a statistical junkie, Peta finds a reason to wake up in the mornings. He decides to try his hand at making a statistical model that would identify edges for baseball team wins and losses that would provide him with a betting edge over the Vegas Line.

Peta eventually creates a hedge fund that bets baseball games that returns 41% in 2011 with similar daily volatility as the S&P 500. The book outlines Joe’s views on gambling. Baseball is his preferred niche since the juice/spread is the smallest in comparison to other sports, the ability to use statistics to get an edge is available, and the natural alignment between the better and the team– rooting for your team to win versus the convolution of winning and beating a point spread. (more…)

Want to have lunch with the world's best hedge fund manager?Current Bid at $ 14000

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You and a guest will join Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates Founder, Chairman & Chief Investment Officer, for lunch in NYC or Connecticut.

Bridgewater manages approximately $154 billion in global investments for a wide array of institutional clients, including foreign governments and central banks, corporate and public pension funds, university endowments and charitable foundations. Approximately 1,700 people work at Bridgewater, which is based in Westport, Connecticut.

https://www.charitybuzz.com/catalog_items/lunch-with-ray-dalio-bridgewater-associates-founder-970922

The Great Trades Are Obvious

The great trades don’t require predictions. The Soros trade of going short the pound in 1992 was based on something that had already happened — an ongoing deep recession that made it inevitable that the U.K. would not maintain the high interest rates required by remaining in the E.R.M. Afterward, everyone said, “That was incredibly obvious.”

“Most of the great trades are incredibly obvious. It was the same in late 2007. In my mind, it was clear that the financial system was imploding and that most market participants hadn’t noticed.”

– Colm O’ Shea, Hedge Fund Market Wizards

Do you agree that the great trades are obvious? Why do so many market participants miss what is unfolding right before their eyes?

What are the elements in your process for observing, keeping tabs on, and exploiting major macro trends?

Steven Drobny, Inside the House of Money (Book Review )

If you haven’t read Steven Drobny’s Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets, newly revised and updated (Wiley, 2014) you should immediately add it to your “to do” list. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a global macro trader or not. I’m not, and yet it’s one of the very few books I keep returning to and learning from.

Originally published in 2006, the book is a collection of twelve interviews with top global macro practitioners. Although times have changed—the interviews were conducted before the financial meltdown and since then global macro has gone mainstream—the book remains a font of trading wisdom.

Few of the interviewees are household names; notable exceptions are Jim Rogers and Peter Thiel, and Thiel has since closed down his fund. The other named traders (one is anonymous) are Jim Leitner, Christian Siva-Jothy, John Porter, Sushil Wadhwani, Yra Harris, Dwight Anderson, Scott Bessent, Marko Dimitrijevic, and David Gorton and Rob Standing.

It’s, of course, impossible to summarize this book, which is one reason it’s so valuable. But, just to give a bit of its flavor, here are a couple of excerpts. (more…)

Links For Traders

Close view of links in a chain
Interesting reads:

 

Taleb reveals unsettling truths

How fragile we are. Five years on from the Lehman Brothers collapse, political and regulatory errors have made the world’s financial system even more fragile.

This alarming line of thought comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, best known for The Black Swan, which explained markets’ difficulties in pricing extreme events for which they had no precedent.

 Mr Taleb, who spoke to me in London last week, divides opinion. For some he is a genius, for others a charlatan. What seems clear, however, is that his gloriously charismatic act and polymath choice of imagery, drawn from philosophy, mathematics and the Classics, can get in the way of underlying ideas which are not in fact far-fetched. Indeed they contain a hard kernel of commonsense truth.

Here, then, is an attempt to render Mr Taleb’s poetic arguments in prose.  (more…)

DAVID TEPPER: If You Invested $1 Million In My Hedge Fund In 1993 You Would Have $149 Million Today

David Tepper, who has been running distressed debt hedge fund Appaloosa Management for the past twenty years, is crushing it this year. 

 Meanwhile, the S&P is up about 19.7% this year. 

Tepper was up 5.5% in July net of fees. 

He’s still bullish on stocks.

He told Wapner that he finds them “reasonable” and that he’s still long.   (more…)