In this episode, Niels hosts Yoav Git to explore inflation risk, bond fragility, and the changing role of trend following in a world defined by supply shocks and declining trust. Drawing on recent research and market behavior, the conversation examines why traditional bond allocations struggle during inflationary regimes and how commodity trend strategies may offer structural resilience. The discussion spans geopolitics, deglobalization, energy markets, fixed income autocorrelation, and the limits of forecasting macro outcomes. Rather than predicting inflation’s path, the episode focuses on portfolio construction that can endure multiple regimes. What emerges is a disciplined argument for robustness over precision in an increasingly unstable global system.

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Episode TimeStamps:

00:00 - Introduction and series context

01:08 - Inflation back on the radar

02:38 - Recent podcast influences and inflation narratives

06:56 - Geopolitics, trust, and market fragmentation

08:52 - Commodities, volatility, and supply driven moves

10:48 - Trend performance and early 2026 conditions

11:30 - Fixed income, FX, and emerging market trends

17:26 - The all weather portfolio problem

18:18 - Bonds, inflation regimes, and correlation breakdowns

22:39 - Commodity trend as a defensive building block

27:01 - Are markets signaling higher inflation ahead

30:04 - What commodity trend really means

33:35 - Institutional resistance to commodities

43:51 - Allocation stability versus macro forecasting

45:23 - Fixed income trends, carry, and autocorrelation

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You're about to join Niels Kostrup Larson on a raw and honest journey into the world of systematic investing and learn about the most dependable and consistent, yet often overlooked investment strategy.

Welcome to the Systematic Investor Series.

Welcome or welcome back to this week's edition of the Systematic Investor series with Yor Git and me, Niels Caster Larsen, where each week we take the pulse of the global markets through the lens of a rules based investor.

Yoav, it is wonderful to be back with this with you this week in the new year.

How are you doing?

Happy New Year, Niels.

Yes, trend has been actually quite good this year.

This year or started at least this year.

And we're going through, you know, a couple of big projects in, in Gresham and it's, it's, it's a very, very busy.

So it's a very busy start for the year, but a very good one.

Yeah, always exciting.

Excellent.

Good.

Well, we have also quite a few wonderful topics to discuss thanks to what you brought along.

So we'll be tackling them in a few minutes.

But before, as usual, we do that, I'm curious to hear what's been on your radar the last few weeks since, since we caught up last time.

Well, actually I'm going to talk a little bit about work because inflation has been on my radar.

So I'm going to plug, I'm going to plug ttu.

Wow.

I've been listening to Mark Blythe on interviewing with Alan and also Bill White who spoke a week previously.

And actually, to be honest, it gives me a bit of trepidation because following them, these are two beautiful podcasts, really, really good.

Both talking about inflation, about structural problems with US debt or UK debt in the case of Mark.

And two very different points of view.

One of them is a much more social what is the social impact of inflation from Mark and a much more conservative sort of Fed type of outlook on inflation from Bill White.

But really, really.

So in fact I ordered, I listened to it last week.

I ordered Inflation A Guide for Users and Losers by Mark Blythe and I've been reading it all night until about 3am last night.

So a lot of fun there and it's really enjoyable.

Yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree.

I think Alan did a wonderful job and the guests were just superb.

I mean, Bill White I knew of, of course we've had him on before.

Mark was new to me.

I have to say I really enjoyed it.

And when I look at the comments that we've had and the engagement we've had on that episode, that is just a sign of how much I think it kind of touched and how his style actually touched people.

Absolutely.

So I completely agree.

These were wonderful conversations.

We've got a lot of really great guests coming up, by the way, in the next few months that I already know of.

So I would say stay tuned.

My daughter, my daughter studies economics and maths and she was listening to him and she said, he's really good.

And I said, you know, maybe I should adopt a Scottish accent.

And, and my daughter, bless her, said, maybe you should start learning an English accent first.

Oh, the kids, they will, they will tell us the truth, right?

Well, I mean, she's, she's a, she's a first class student, so I really don't, I really don't complain.

No, no, absolutely.

Well, I mean, I have to say that all of the talk about Greenland has taken up a lot of the space on my personal radar in the last couple of weeks, especially the last week or so.

And, you know, on one side you have the politics of the situation, which is, I think, in a sense, very regrettable to see how seemingly allied nations are just moving further apart.

Of course, this is somewhat emotional when it's Denmark on one side of the battle, but perhaps the bigger issue is that when you look at it and we're seeing this in front of our own eyes, we're just seeing a breakdown of trust.

We're seeing a breakdown of what truth is.

And this is going to have a huge impact, I think, especially on the younger generations who may not have the same reference points as you and I have.

So, I mean, this really feels like the fourth turning that Neil Howe has been writing about and who has, of course, been a guest on the podcast in the past.

And I'm happy to say that we're bringing Neil back in early March to see or to hear what he sees now.

But then if I put on my purely, you know, investor hat, and specifically my trend following hat, I can't help to be a little bit optimistic in terms of the opportunities that this fraction of the world may lead to in terms of market moves.

And I really think that we may see many, many unimaginable moves in the coming years where we, of course, have already seen a taste of this in recent years, maybe mostly in the commodity space, but who's to say that we can't see huge move in financial markets if the world order really is breaking down?

So we're kind of back to What I said a number of years ago, and I said it many times, that we as investors, we need to imagine the unimaginable and that focusing on building robust portfolios that may not give you the highest returns but will give you or will get you through the next five, seven years safely will be the key thing to focus on.

And as I'm sure people listening to us today already know, I believe this can only be done by combining truly uncorrelated strategies and assets.

So that's really what, what I sit back with.

And of course we know the, the, the news flow is not over.

We don't even know where whatever we got from Davos last night, where that's really going to land.

These were just like headlines that sounded great and the markets reacted positively.

But once they need to get down to the detail, who knows where this will end.

But it doesn't change the fact that I think we unfortunately are just witnessing something really, really negative for how the world operates.

So we'll see how that plays out.

Yes, indeed.

Now, speaking of trend following, I think it is too fair, fair to say that this week has been a bit of a roller coaster thanks to the geopolitical noise that we've been receiving.

But I think for longer term managers that don't react on every single news item, it's probably been an okay week.

And then depending on how much you have exposed to markets like gold and silver in particular, but even also equities and perhaps the jdbs, that probably determines more or less how much you've been able to extract from these markets.

But you know, there are a few market events I think that are worth highlighting.

Maybe not everyone follows all the commodities, but this last week, net gas futures up 71%.

Now this is purely driven by the fact that the US expects a massive cold weather front coming across the, the US starting in Texas and sweeping across to the East.

So nothing geopolitical about that.

This is just how commodity markets tend to move when there are some big events and that changes the supply, demand balance, which this certainly will do.

And then of course on the other side of the Atlantic, and maybe you know more about this than I do, of course, with your focus on fixed income.

But it feels like we've had like a little mini trust moment in Japan where yields really spiked up and Suddenly we had 10 year JDBs at 241.

But you know these have an impact.

These are big, really big moves and you know, not just in the JGBs but also in the yen.

Really big moves.

Actually can I add thought to commodities like carbon emissions have also been a very, very volatile market in recent times.

So commodities for different reasons as you said, for different reasons, different risk factors, you get some really big moves.

And of course there's also gold and precious metals as well.

Yeah, the usual suspects, the usual suspects at the moment but for very different reasons.

I mean in the case of gold it's really, really the breakdown of trust in fiat currencies.

I mean if you look at Ray Delilo coming on like an interview and he says you've got to have gold in your portfolio, it's really quite impressive.

Yes.

But as I said I think this could also lead at some point to big moves in the financial markets if we really see a breakdown of some of these historical alliances and ties.

So watch this space I would say.

Anyways, my trend barometer is picking up a little bit of better conditions.

It's finished yesterday at 50 which is a good, reasonably strong reading and I think it ties in pretty well with what's going on in the, in, in the, in various indices.

I have got some numbers as of Tuesday but I think yesterday was a pretty good day from what I can tell on the early numbers.

I think it's something like that.

Although it has had a rough time.

Well you know it's not particularly risk managed but so it's a little bit all over the place.

But it's having a hell of a day.

It is, it's having a good time at the moment.

Anyways MSCI World up 1.5% thereabouts so far this year and the US Aggregate Bond Index pretty flat so far this month.

And then you have The S&P 500 total return is up about half a percent.

So interesting start to, to the month.

Now before we go on I just wanted to maybe ask you how markets trends look from your different lens than mine so far this year.

Oh I mean this year, this year has really Started well I think Japan is obviously a big story but there's you know there's trends in small countries like Taiwanese, Taiwanese dollars, interest rates.

There are trends in the US market actually, you know, but there's also trends in Turkish L. There are a lot of trends everywhere.

So fx, FX EMFX has been very, very good and credit has been choppy a little bit.

Of course it rose a little bit at the beginning of the month and then there's been a small reversal and then it's coming back again.

All based on Trump news on this one.

But the bond market is actually where there's a lot of interesting, a lot of interesting issues.

So you have the issue of debt and as you say in jap there's concerns about the spending plans for the government, about the budget.

So you see almost like a route in the Japanese bonds and then you see rerouting because Japan holds a lot of US debt.

So once the gap between Japanese yields and US yield is closing it becomes actually better to the curry trade is kind of disappearing.

And you see flows from US bonds back into Japan and that of course puts pressure on the US market.

So you see the US 10 year crore sync 4.2.

You see a little bit of a downtrend there as well.

So, so it's very interesting at the moment for in terms of debt management.

And then of course the second question is inflation.

Exactly what you said.

Su have a breakdown in trust between different parties.

You see each country becoming more interested in securing its own supply chain.

And you see, you know talking to UK we need to spend more on, you know, on military, on everything really.

Yeah, but on everything.

And I think actually that's something that Bill White spoke about in terms of we have a structural secular trends at the moment which are away from globalization, structural trends which will support inflation.

You have a huge transition from carbon based economy into metal based economy, energy markets.

So talking about electricity and storage and, and metal and Bill was saying well it takes 20 years to build a mine and that that sort of impact basically means that price needs to do a lot of trend, you know to, to do a lot of the work.

So you will get start seeing a lot of trends in, in commodity prices all over the place.

And that's one of the reasons for inflation.

Right.

So if you look at what Mark Blyth was talking about, we tend to think about inflation as being driven by demand, by just too much money chasing too few goods.

But actually it's a lot of it is at the moment it's been Supply.

Right.

In terms of gas in from the Russia stopping in terms of supply chains being compromised and we'll see a lot of the countries are sacrificing, sacrificing the efficiency of really super tight supply chains to try to a little get more security because as you say, trust is gone.

Yeah, no, no, absolutely I should know this Joa, but do you trade in your product both fixed income and currencies or is it just the fixed income?

So I view I trade curry.

So I trade.

So I traded quite a lot of things but I was responsible for both fixed income and I'm trading in the portfolio fixed income which, which is like interest rate swaps, bonds, inflation linked bonds but also fx.

I think I view it as a.

Almost a carry trade and also credit.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, no, that's kind of what I gather from what your comments were.

Okay, cool.

Now for those who don't know what the Ultimate Guide is, it's actually a kind of a little booklet which has become pretty large now because what I've done is I've gone out and found, along with my co workers here, 800 book titles.

Sorry, 600 book title is the eighth edition.

But it's 600 book titles that I think might be useful for people for to read on different topics, different categories.

And there are essentially two ways for people to get the guide and it's a free of course, either if you're subscribed to my Sunday emails, you'll get it automatically or you can basically just go to the website toptraders unplugged.com ultimate and then there is a way for you to opt in and get it free of charge of course.

Anyways, speaking of great content, free of charge, you should go to your LinkedIn profile because there's another good article from him in cooperation I think with someone called Adam Pedal this time.

I hope I pronounced that correctly.

No, you pronounced perfectly.

So you know Adam, Adam is a commodity side.

So Gresham has got a fixed income focused fund which is, which is run by me and then on there is a commodity, there's a commodity fund and Adam is a senior researcher there.

Sure.

Fantastic.

Yes.

Let me tell you what we did because I'm very excited.

Yes.

I was just going to say I can't wait to hear what it's all about.

Right.

So it's called the Eras tour.

And you can tell that I'm a swiftie.

What we're thinking about is inflation is precisely what Bill White is concerned about, what Mark Blythe is concerned about.

And I think a lot of investors are concerned about because that will really affect their bond portfolio.

And they've taken a very economic, you know, an economist's view of what the problem is.

But we kind of want to think about the solution and we're trying to think about sort of how does an allocator approach the problem of constructing a portfolio which will be robust in all weathers?

And what we mean by all weathers, we think about regimes, we talk high inflation regime, rising inflation regimes.

Okay.

I don't think people are particularly concerned about falling or low inflation errors.

I think that's not a problem at all.

I do know someone who lives in a house that is painted white that is very concerned about low inflation.

That's very true.

That's very true.

No, but as an investor, I mean, there are a few reasons why you're concerned about bonds at the moment in terms of debt, of the US debt, but also in terms of inflation.

And what we try to do is to say, okay, let's look at how do you construct an all weather portfolio?

And what I mean by all weather is a portfolio that will be consistent of a different inflationary period.

Okay, so, and the problem that you have is normally you would think, okay, my build best building blocks.

You start with equities and you start with bonds.

And what you find is equities is, is a great all weather growth portfolio.

The idea behind it is that it will essentially return to you CPI plus something.

And that something varies depending on the conditions, the growth of the economy.

It will give you 0%, essentially 0% in high inflation environments.

So CPI plus 0.

And it will give you CPI plus 10 or 12 or even 15 in low CPI environments.

So that's great.

And in between rising or falling inflation, it will give you just a little bit.

But the problem that a lot of allocators have is with bonds because although bonds are great in the periods that we've seen where interest rates have been falling and interest rates are very low at zero and suddenly bonds are really doing great.

And also of course they've got negative correlation to equity.

So it's a really great idea to put them in your portfolio.

And the problem is once you start looking at rising inflation, bonds start to underperform.

They no longer give you CPI plus, they start giving you CPI minus.

And as you reach proper inflation and I mean by proper inflation, I mean just 4.5%.

You have a situation where bonds are not only negative, quite strongly negative CPI minus big numbers, but also they become much more correlated to equities.

So putting that in the portfolio actually makes it very difficult.

Now obviously you don't really want to throw away bonds from your portfolio, but how do you create a component which is stable over different inflationary periods?

And what is very interesting is that commodities act as almost the negative mirror image of what bonds are in a sense that this is an asset class which does very well in inflationary time.

But commodities of course do very, very poorly in environments of low inflation.

But commodity trend actually is a great strategy for both inflationary times for the obvious reasons like what we see at the moment, but also during low inflation times it has a little bit less drug, a little bit less of a negative carry.

So what you do is if you put like a portfolio like simply a 50% commodities, 50% bonds, you get something which is truly all weather what it does.

It gives you CPI plus 4% in all environment regardless of whether it's high inflation, low inflation.

So in some sense you don't have to worry about what is going to play out.

It's very difficult to guess what the exact environment.

As you said, events, random events can happen, lots of things can happen.

You don't really know what you want.

So you want a sort of a defensive portfolio as a starting, as a building block which is I don't know if inflation is going to spike, I don't know if inflation is going to go down CPI plus 4%.

All I need is like a 50% bonds and a 50% of commodity trend.

And that is really quite interesting as a tool for an investor.

So normally we try to sell, you know, we try to market to our investors CTAs as a truly diversifier or maybe a little bit of convexity and a little bit of crisis alpha.

But that's sort of an equity story.

I'm here trying to think about how can we create a defensive portfolio.

And it turns out that CTAs and in particular commodity CTAs really play into into together with bonds create a really nice building block for your allocation.

So that's what the paper is about.

So I have a couple of initial observations and you can dive deeper.

The first thing I noticed in your post was you have this chart that shows the different eras of inflation, the low and the rising, the high and the falling.

And I don't know what people think is the norm but actually, when I look at your data, it almost seems like they're equal in time, meaning that you have, in the last 70 years or so, you've had as much of rising inflation as you have had falling inflation.

Even though we may not really remember much of that except for a short period of time after Covid, most people will remember kind of falling or low inflation.

Right.

But it is interesting and I guess it goes to your point about how to build portfolios for, for all environment.

Environments, because they, they should.

Well, we don't know about the future, but certainly historically in the last 70 years or so, they tend to have as much of, of one as they have of the other.

So that's kind of one thing I wanted to touch on.

The other thing I wanted to just touch on before I forget, and that is you mentioned, I heard you say, well, this is kind of why we see commodities go up right now.

But most people will say, well, hang on, we don't have inflation right now of any significance.

So I just wanted to touch on that a little bit.

Absolutely.

So the first point is that we kind of cook the books a little bit.

So we chose the boundaries for low inflation and high inflation so that the data spends 25% of the time, roughly 25% of the below 2%, and roughly 25% of the time below four and a half.

We needed like round numbers.

So that's that.

And actually what you find is interesting is that it spends more time coming down, even though, like, it's a symmetric, you know, it should be once you've, once you've declared both upper and lower bounds, inflation spikes much more quickly and, and then takes a little bit longer to come down.

So it actually spends a little bit more time coming down.

It's, it's stickier.

And that kind of translates into different economic policy as well.

So what we've seen since the 70s, we've seen the Fed essentially overshooting, having a much more, much higher real borrowing rates.

So borrowing fed funds, less inflation on the way down because it's trying to control inflation.

So, but, but, but that's, that's less, less, less of an issue.

So in a way, we cook the book.

You know, that has, that has been an interesting period, but it's not necessarily the, you know, it doesn't cover the full history.

I think Jim always talks about, you know, when you look at equity returns, when you look at bond returns, you really need to start thinking about what, what it looks like, what it looks like in a, in a deep past.

The second point is yes that in fact one of the reasons why we haven't seen necessarily commodity trends, strong commodity trends is because we have been between Covid and the Ukraine, we've seen falling inflation and falling inflation is actually kind of bad for commodity trend.

And you know that that's going historically and we can see that in the data as well.

But we are beginning to see trends and these are to do with the way that inflation is coming online.

And what, and it is about, it is really about supply, supply constraints and supply shocks which, which induce, which induce trends.

So if you talk about, if you talked about natural gas, if you have less storage and if you have a constrained supply of natural gas, suddenly when there is a cold spell in the US suddenly you're going to start seeing big, big trends in natural gas, for example.

So if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is, or maybe you're not saying it, but what I'm hearing is that inflation actually unlike what some people want, is actually not going to come down.

And what we see in the commodity markets is kind of the pre warning that inflation should, inflation numbers, I should say should be picking up.

Is that what you're saying, that the markets are ahead of time here?

So I'm saying that there are multiple reasons why you should be concerned about inflation.

We're not economists and even if we were economists, I think trying to make a prediction is always difficult.

As you said, the events overtake, eventually overtake your, your, your, what you think is going to happen.

Right.

But there are certain certainly issues in terms of quite a relaxed monetary policy actually in, in the sense that real rates are at 1% or so.

So CPI is, is nowhere near, is nowhere near what the, the Fed Target is at 2%.

And yet we see, we've, we've seen drop in the Fed rates over the last, over the last year.

So the Fed has started as like as ended.

It's the cycle sort of thing.

It took rates from zero to four and a half and now it's been taking it down consistently even though inflation is really not a target.

So certainly the Fed is very accommodating certainly US debt is sitting at 30 trillion.

Financing that debt is now costing the US about a trillion a year, which is enormous.

I mean 10 years ago it would have been like 250 billion.

It's one of the biggest ticket item at the moment for the U.S. balance.

You know, it's, it's, it's insane.

So there are many good reasons why we are likely to see inflation coming on.

But on the supply side, all the, all the things that we discussed in terms of secular trends in each country like deglobalization tariffs, all of those are things that drive sort of supply shocks on the commodity side.

And yes, these are drivers of inflation.

So these are things to be concerned about.

But I'm not saying they're going to happen.

But what I am saying is if you were to look at a mixed portfolio of bonds and commodity trend, what you get is something which is resilient to either environment.

So that if what happens, everything is hunky dory and maybe inflation is coming down and I'm completely wrong, then great bonds will do well for you.

Conversely, if inflation is going to be picking up and you're going to get high inflation, great commodity trend will do well for you.

Together you have a portfolio which is actually quite resilient to all environment.

And that's what I call all weather defensive portfolio.

When you talk about commodity trend.

Because I know this first came up in a paper a few years ago and the author's name escaped me.

Well known volatility manager who, who later closed down his fund.

But he wrote some really great papers and, and he building this 100 year portfolio.

If you couldn't change your portfolio for 100 years, how would you build it?

And he introduced this commodity trend.

But I've never quite fully understood whether when people talk about that, do they mean trend following only on commodities?

Because you are not going to find many maybe with the exception of your firm that does only commodities as trend following.

I mean we all try to combine it with some trends in financial markets.

That seems to work better certainly as a standalone portfolio.

So when you say commodity trend in your paper, are you meaning trend following on just commodities or are you yes, absolutely.

And actually very standard bcom type of commodities?

I mean it's absolutely true, right?

If you are managing a standalone fund then it may be easier for you to put together both financial assets and commodities.

And because from your perspective you're going to get, you might think that you get a better diversification.

In fact that's not necessarily the Case.

I mean, I think we all know that commodities are a great diversify and you can create a very diversified commodity, standalone trend.

But the way we think about it is in terms of what is the utility that we give to the allocators.

Right.

So it might be that from your perspective, you think, oh, it will be better to shove it all together.

And some investors want that.

They want, just give me the best version of trend.

So you can combine the, you know, both financial and the physical trend.

But some investors really appreciate a lot of the people that allocate just to the commodities.

They think about inflation and about real assets and about how that kind of combines in the sort of asset class universe.

So they really appreciate there are different risk factors.

And also we kind of trade it slightly differently.

So each, each asset class, we kind of think about exactly how it does.

So, you know, the way I trade fixed income is slightly different to the way we do things commodity because you have to think about the physical attributes of the asset class in terms of what supply shocks in commodity is not really relevant in fixed income.

What springs to mind when I hear you talk about that and obviously this is your analysis and you come up with this idea of saying, well, actually if you combine commodity trend with fixed income, then this is really a great combination.

And I'm immediately thinking about a country that I've been trying to get interested in trend following for a long time and where they have a lot of fixed income, and that's Germany.

But at the same time, most institutions will not invest in anything that has commodities in it.

Oh, yeah.

So it's very interesting that you might have a country here in Europe where they really should be thinking about combining what they have with commodities.

Yet for many different reasons which we don't have to get into right now, most of them say, no, can't do that, won't do that.

Yeah.

I think the usage regulation and actually the aversion to commodities in general rooted in the past.

But no, I'm not even talking about usage.

In usage, you can use commodities.

That's not the problem.

It's actually investing in anything that has commodities, Commodities inside it.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, what can I say?

I completely agree.

I think commodity, I think commodities are a beautiful diversifying asset class.

Yeah.

And I think that the dynamics are very, very different to the dynamics in the financial universe.

And you're talking about diversification.

It's a really true diversification.

And it's really nice to see a portfolio which you can get diversification both in terms of what type of commodity, you know, things are not fungible.

So oil this year is not the same as oil next year.

You know, the crop this year or the crop next year are affected by different things.

So you can, you can get temporal dislocations, you can get different geographical differences, you can get, you know, you can get a 61% iron ore trading differently to the 65% iron ore.

So there, there's a lot of, there's a lot of fun in commodity commodities, really a very great diversifier.

And it would be a shame not to, not, not to allocate to it.

No, it will be a shame.

And a lot of these, how should I say, pushbacks comes from philosophical beliefs is the best word I can come up with in terms of what we as managers may or may not do to commodity prices and therefore they can't support it.

But it's a little bit like the discussion that you see from time to time about people investing in the green transition, where a lot of pension funds have did well initially when green was, you know, very popular.

The last two or three years, that's not been the case.

And so those portfolios have certainly been underperforming more traditional portfolios.

And I heard the discussion once with the, the CEO of the largest public pension plan in Denmark actually, where he was asked, but what really is the mandate?

Is the mandate for you to be investing for the green transition or is the mandate for you to get pensioners in Denmark the highest possible return?

And I think from memory he said, well, when you put it like that, it is our job to give people the best possible long term return for their pensions.

And so you could kind of argue the same maybe when it comes to German investors who say, no, we won't do that, if you can, you know, show evidence that actually, no, you should do this because it will give you a better outcome.

At the end of the day, I.

Think it's, yeah, I think it's not necessarily just that.

I mean, if you think about, okay, we're trend followers, so we're quite agnostic the way the price goes.

Of course, what we do, we do provide liquidity in markets which are just emerging and are part of that green transition.

So if we think about the lithium contract, right, so there used to be lithium contracts in the US, In Europe, there was no, there was no liquidity there.

And the reason why there was no liquidity is because the, the type of lithium that it was trading was nothing to do with the type of lithium that was used for batteries.

So the physical players didn't really use that, those, those contracts in the US and then suddenly you see the Chinese market, there was a lithium contract and you know, an explosion in, in volumes because hedges really needed somehow to pre sell essentially the lithium production.

And we as trend followers, I mean we don't really, we don't really determine the price, but what we do do is we provide liquidity in the market.

So we do actually got involved in that market very early on and that's sort of a positive thing in a way.

So I think that trend followers as market participants in.

And providers in liqu.

Liquidity in markets which other funds might be more reluctant to get involved in and where we kind of try to give those risk factors because these are very diversifying.

Right.

Sort of green ification is.

Is a different risk factor to the rest of the economy.

I think, I think it is actually contributing.

And as the market exploded higher, they were selling absolutely into the rally because of risk management.

Exactly, exactly.

So, yeah, but even without this argument, I think it's important to appreciate that the CTA industry is actually not that big.

It's not big enough to really do that.

So we are trading the sort of.

The CTA industry is like what, 300 billion give or take at the last count, a little bit higher now because the trend has been doing very well for the last six months.

But also we have to remember that a lot of things that do use trend like for example the QIS desks that Nick Bolters run, they don't report their aum.

I think it is bigger than what we think it is.

That is very true.

So there is a.

Well, first of all, don't blame us for the QAs, right?

Clients want that.

No, but you're absolutely right.

There's like maybe 300 to another 300 or so in the QAS universe or thereabout.

But you know, if you think about The S and p market it's like 50, 50 odd trillion, 56 trillion.

I you know a little bit of perspective in this.

We are, we are significant players in some commodity markets and I think one that is an issue and I think the, the careful CTA manager will try to take that into account and actually try to be, to be less present in the market because we actually don't like to trade against ourselves.

One of the big indicators for poor performance of trend is actually oh you're trading against yourself.

That's always a bad and that's always a disaster happening.

So generally we try very hard to avoid market where we are like the only players in the market.

Speaking of Nick Bolters, I spoke with him recently and I think we may have put a little bit of remark out there that you might have said well this concerns me because I think we said something like the last couple of years must have been really difficult to be a trend follower in fixed income simply because when you look at the, the way at least the exposure that I see in our portfolios, how they've gyrated from being very long to very short to being very long again anyways in no means meant against you.

But no, no, no.

You may have felt it.

No.

So I actually really enjoyed that one.

So it is, you have to articulate by the way to, to your clients also why do you have just a fixed income focus?

Right, right.

And of course I think we'll come to rob cover.

So I'm kind of a big believer in fixed income markets and of course you can, you can blame me because up until three years ago fixed income really was the best asset class in terms of performance and the last three years has been a disaster.

So like the last three years in trend in general was not particularly strong and fixed income in particular within that was even worse.

Okay.

And I, I'm, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take a, it's not a huge bet for me to take that.

I think you are probably down last year in fixed income.

In fact I suspect most, most managers are but I think it shows the testament that what, what specialization and attention to detail and trading different asset class slightly differently in taking into account what's actually doing there actually can do.

So you know Saffi has been trading for three years.

Three positive years.

I mean we haven't done spectacularly well over three years.

We're like up 12% after fees but, but you know very few managers who have like a more generalistic view and, and, and trend Trade trend the same way across asset classes would have had these numbers.

And I think it's sort of, it's kind of nice to launch a fixed income fund right when the tide goes out and you see people who are swimming without the swimming trunks on.

So I really don't mind.

And you know, if that's the worst performance that we have seen on fixed income, then I'm fine with that and I'm looking forward for better times just in fixed income.

But to come to your question, it is about providing the allocators a better way to allocate.

Right?

Again, you can just put the commodities together, you can put the bonds together, you can get something which is more diversified but different investors are more interested in, let's say global macro opportunity.

And that's kind of what SAFI is doing.

That's what they value.

So giving them different risk factors and the ability to allocate separately, I think that's very valuable.

We may come to this point about whether you should trade this all markets the same or not later in our outline.

Is there anything else you want to say about your own blog post?

Is there anything that we can take away from it?

You know, inflation is persistent.

Is that why the edge is following it and not trying to forecast it?

Or you know, I, I think.

Or is it the acceleration that really is the key, not necessarily the inflation level?

So let me, let me, let me talk about allocation in general.

Right.

So one of the problems that you have in allocation is that a lot of allocators try to time their allocation to strategies.

So they say, oh, this is happening now.

So we're allocating this.

We are starting to, you know, it's very difficult.

Maybe if we have time we can talk about a paper by Gapi just, he put out a way to, maybe you can actually time your own strategies.

It's just very difficult and it's very difficult for allocators to do it.

I think stability and offering something which is, you know, CPI plus 4%, which should be as sort of a building block for covering pretty much all historical situations like in the last 70 years with very little correlation to equity in all CPI in all inflation environment.

I think that's a very valuable thing for allocators.

And you don't have to worry anymore about whether you're going to predict inflation next year or not.

Yeah, no, no, I completely agree.

Now you mentioned one of our other good co hosts, namely Rob Rocava X. I was gonna, not gonna say ex friend of yours, Ex colleague of yours and a good Friend and, and he also put out a blog post that you wanted to touch on.

So I will hand it over to you.

Yes, so, so, so Rob put out a blog post because we've, we've had quite a few heated discussions about fixed income.

What a surprise.

He used to be a fixed income trader.

I think it was in City before he went dark and went to the systematic universe.

So he was like.

And, and in fact I followed in his footsteps.

In fact our wives share birthdays.

So it's like, it's really kind of spooky a little bit.

And I say, well, I think actually I can do better in fixed income than if I concentrate on that, then I can do better than just doing the full cta.

And Rob of course doesn't do that.

Rob trades sort of 200 futures and so forth and doing very well as well.

So full kudos to Rob and he's always trying to challenge me.

So he put out this paper which is really, really nice.

And an amazing thing about Rob is the speed at which he does research.

And that was even in ahl it took him he can prototype something very, very quickly and get to the heart of the problem.

So he does two things in this blog.

The first bit is he looks at Carrie and he says does carry add value.

You know how much Curry does add value in into the asset class?

Because of course I like to trade fixed income.

I like to trade effects, especially now when interest rates are, you know, there's a gradient of interest rates across different economies.

And he says like how valuable is carry historically?

And he plots lots multiple asset classes and multiple markets.

And what you find is that if you were to look at the sharp of spot versus the sharp of what we trend followers doing, the sharp of the spot doesn't really explain what we, what we get.

It's a sort of a, it's a flat, it's a flat feat.

And then it does the same thing for the carry returns.

And again it doesn't explain particularly well what we do.

And then you look at the sharp of the underlying asset total return series.

So both carry and spot moves and trend, obviously you get this smile effect that if the sharp of the underlying market is plus one, you will get maybe 0.8 sharp into your P and L of your trend following system.

And the same if the sharp is minus one, you will get again 0.8 or thereabout.

And in the second part of the paper he also observes that different asset classes do actually perform differently.

So if you have a sharp of 1 in your underlying assets, bonds and FX and metals seems to be actually doing very well and actually able to get 0.8, whereas equities are unable to essentially to harvest the underlying trend in the asset.

And both observation by the way, I completely agree with and I think he's just like.

The first interpretation that I would like to put is in terms of the spot versus the carry.

Carry.

It's precisely what I say.

What I say is that if we have an asset class which is essentially has got very little carry or it doesn't have carry at all, then the spot doesn't really explain our own sharp and it's not a particularly good.

You don't actually perform particularly well.

And I'm not saying that carry is like the be all and end all and if you have carry in your system, you'll get a sharp seven.

That's not the case.

What we are trying to do is we're trying to take a market.

If you think about what a CTA does, this sharp of a single market that we have may be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3.

And then we diversify across our portfolio and that gives us a reduction of volatility of say three, three and a half X and that gives an increase in the Sharpe of the overall portfolio.

So my 0.2 Sharpe Sharp asset, if that's my average Sharpe and I multiply it by three and a half, I get a 0.7 sharp CTA.

And that's really the mathematics of what is going on here.

And what I'm saying is carry just gives you this little extra right in terms of instead of the average being 0.2, the average is 0.3.

And that when you multiply it by three and a half now gets me from, you know, to 1.05 sharp.

And I kind of like that.

So, so the question is, you know, do you want to tilt your portfolio to assets which are high carry?

Yes.

And does carry explain this in the same way that I would might ask do I want to tilt my location to markets which right now are in supply shock or supply demand or the structural reason why why they they they are more likely to trend.

Maybe there are more, more physical players in the market.

Various reasons why we might think about it and the aim is not to get to say, oh, I'm taking my sharp from point 2 to 0.7.

The aim is to say can I tilt?

Do we have historical reasons or fundamental underlying reasons why we understand why there is a trend?

And I think what is nice about his blog is that the answer is yes, if you look like just a spot market, you get a relatively mediocre shop.

But if you do, if you have, if you put the carry into the price time series, then you get a slightly higher one.

So that's the first part of his paper and it's a really nice one.

The second one is even more interesting because he just makes this observation and he doesn't.

He says, well I don't really understand why equity seems to have trended worse.

Right.

Long only equity has been on, on a tear, right.

So if I look historically in the last 50, I don't know, I can't remember 30 years that he's looked at really nice shop.

But trend hasn't performed that well.

And I think here is where a lot of people miss out in terms of the mathematics.

So first of all let's do the mathematics and then we can talk about the fundamental reasons why different asset classes have it.

So I put out another paper with Adam Pedle about the mathematics of, of trend following.

And you know, most people say oh, if there is a trend in the market you should be able to make money.

But actually the trend quality, the autocorrelation of the underlying price is really important.

Trend is about positive auto correlation.

And you will have markets where this auto correlation is very muted.

In equities it's actually negative.

Well at different times, at different times in a different and a different horizons.

But that negative autocorrelation translates into a lower performance.

So you're not able to harvest as a trend follower unnecessarily using a generic trend following machinery you will be able to get less trend.

Right?

Because the auto correlation will basically means price goes up, you put in a position and then you suffer a day later when price comes back down.

That's what negative auto correlation means is like on a short term basis.

Up, down, up down, up down.

That's not particularly good for trend.

Okay.

And what is observed which is true is that in fixed income we see actually a much higher autocorrelation and that means that we're able to harvest it.

So the paper we put with Adam and myself, we actually did the mathematics for that and we kind of can calculate what is the worth, what is 1% of positive autocorrelation worth to you as a trend follower?

And then there's the second question, which is a much more deeper question, is like why are different markets different autocorrelations?

And I think here is really a structural question which requires you to understand what's going on in terms of for example, rebalancing in equities, in terms of value traders, in equities in terms of day traders or zero day to expiry the option market.

So you have different players and they will have different dynamics that will feed into the price.

And once you understand that, you can think about, oh, how do I modify my trend to be able to address the structural nature of the market.

And by the way, the structure can change over time.

So it's a moving target.

But I think it's really important from our perspective is when you look at different asset classes, like, you know, you can close your eyes and say, yes, I'm going to have an inventory system on the side, but if you're saying I'm committed to trend, I really want to trade trend, then it's really important to you for you to understand, okay, what are the things that are structural in this market and how they play and how can I combine them into trend in a way that I'm still got this positive convexity, this trend dynamics, this beautiful risk management system and at the same time takes into account the physical nature of what the actual thing is and who the other players in the market are.

So I think it's a really great paper by Rob, I really enjoyed that and I think I'm looking forward to another coffee with him later on where we can discuss this blood.

So I have a question for you.

It may sound very naive when I asked this, but I know I can ask it of you.

So you say bonds have a higher autocorrelation.

So I'm thinking well, over what period?

Because haven't we just had 40 years of falling interest rates?

And isn't that really the explanation as to why quote unquote, the auto correlation seems to be higher?

No, absolutely.

So it varies over time.

Okay, as you say, it varies over time.

And I think here is what the alternative quote unquote comes into play is.

An idea is SAFI trades about, let's say north of 100, 150 market, but at any one time we will actually allocate only to meaningfully to only about 50 of those.

And the idea behind it is that when you know there are certain characteristics of the market like curry, where, which contribute.

So for example, if you look at dmfx, okay, for many, many years it was doing really badly both as trend and as a curry asset because interest rates were zero.

There was nothing.

There was no, what I would call like a, a temperature gradient that really caused prices to drift.

You know, if interest rate in the US is zero and in Europe is zero, then really it's just sort of economic news sort of noise.

But you know, certainly in EM market if I look at Turkey, I think interest rates is like 38 or something percent.

Okay, but let's, we don't have to go to that extreme.

Once you have different, even in the diem space, once you have different economies with different central banks who are trying to sort of all different for different things, then you start getting these temperature gradients and suddenly it's becoming interesting and suddenly autocorrelation picks up and suddenly there's also drift.

And you can see why this is happening because you know, Japanese investors would like to take their money and, and, and park it in the US and by the way, this, this is going away, right?

So debt is going to disappear and that's going to be less exciting to trade.

So it's a training, it's over time and different players and you just have to, you know, it's not that bonds are always going to be better.

Bonds are about fixed income.

Right.

Bonds are about the coupon, about carry, about positive carry.

So I suspect there will be carry for many, many years to come.

But so they're not and they're not the only asset class that has carry.

But I think it's important for us as investors, as trend followers to recognize the different things which are very salient for each asset that we trend and to understand how that affects the dynamics.

And maybe you don't have to do a different model for every market but broadly to understand what are the important characteristic of each one of your asset classes.

Yeah, now I like that you brought up the, the Japanese example again towards the, as we wrap up our conversation because actually I think Japan and what's happening there and the changes there is actually much more important than people may realize.

This is a topic that we started talking to our good friend Dave Dredge about two or three years Gemini and ago and, and it's actually even becoming even more important as time goes out.

And those conversations really people should go back to listen to that.

We had one out not that long ago where, where Dave and Jim talked about these things and super important and hopefully we'll get him back again in the not too distant future to talk more about it.

So anyways I think.

I think you have.

This is a perfect place to wrap up for today.

We just hit, you know, almost the hour mark, and super exciting to dive into some of these topics that you found.

Really appreciate all the hard work that goes into the preparation of these conversations.

So thank you so much.

And actually, I want to say to all the listeners that if you want to show your appreciation to Yoav and to all of the other co hosts, please go to your favorite podcast platform and leave a rating and review.

And also, of course, share the episodes with your friends and colleagues because it really does mean that more people discover the podcast and benefit from these really super experts and experienced people who come on every week and talk about these things.

And actually, just to reiterate what you started out by saying, you really should go back and listen to Bill White and Mark Blyth speaking to Alan because they were really outstanding.

Much more eloquent than myself.

No, it's always a pleasure.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you so much.

Next week I'll be joined by another expert, another fan favorite.

Katie Kaminsky will be back, and I'm sure that will be an interesting conversation.

It'll be timely, it'll be fun, insightful.

Maybe she has another paper she's been writing since we last spoke to her.

You never know.

But you have a chance to ask her questions.

And you could do that by emailing me me@infoptraders unplugged.com and I'll do my very best to bring them up to Katie.

So from Yoav, me, thank you ever so much for listening.

We look forward to being back with you next week.

And in the meantime, more important than ever, I think, in this time we live in, take care of yourself and take care of each other.

Absolutely.

Thanks for listening to the Systematic Investor podcast series.

If you enjoy this series series, go on over to itunes and leave an honest rating and review.

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If you have questions about systematic investing, send us an email with the word question in the subject line to infooptradersunplugged.com and we'll try to get it on the show.

And remember, all the discussion that we have about investment performance is about the past, and past performance does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance.

Also, understand that there's a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies, and you need to request and understand the specific risks from the investment manager about their products before you make investment decisions.

Thanks for spending some of your valuable time with us.

And we'll see you on the next episode of the Systematic Investor.