This week we had the pleasure of speaking with Marcos Bueno, CIO at Ascent Systematic Advisors. Marcos has a diverse and well-rounded backgrounded in finance, and our conversation covered topics that included:

• His background at proprietary trading desks and macro funds
• Starting his career in fundamental, research-oriented investing
• Early successes during a bull market while recognizing the role of luck
• The GFC, the Volker Rule and leaving Wall Street to join Graham Capital in London
• Combining global macro with trend-following
• The different perspectives between value investors and macro traders
• Opinion vs Gospel, Humility vs Hubris
• Bitten by the ‘systematic bug’ and becoming enamored with its elegance and efficiency
• Systematic thinking as a superior approach by keeping biases in check and limiting your downside
• Why the market is always ‘right’, even when it’s ‘wrong’
• The emotional investment that comes with deep fundamental equity analysis and how it can skew investors’ perception
• How trend following takes advantage of some of the permanent features in markets
• Reflection on cognitive biases and trading intuition from a systematic perspective
• Signaling, information diffusion and self-fulfilling prophecies
• And much more…

This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day, hosted by Adam Butler, Mike Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo of ReSolve Global* and Richard Laterman of ReSolve Asset Management.

*ReSolve Global refers to ReSolve Asset Management SEZC (Cayman) which is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity trading advisor and commodity pool operator. This registration is administered through the National Futures Association (“NFA”). Further, ReSolve Global is a registered person with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.