Asset Allocation | Economics & Growth
Podcast Transcript: Ken Tropin on How to Run a Successful Macro Hedge Fund
- By Bilal Hafeez
- Sign-up to discuss on Slack
- 40 min read
This is an edited transcript of our podcast episode with Ken Tropin, published 21 April 2023. Ken is a legend in the macro space. He is the Chairman and founder of Graham Capital Management (GCM) – an $18bn fund. Ken founded GCM in 1994 and over the last 28 years has grown the firm into an industry leading alternative investment manager, focusing on global macro discretionary and quantitative hedge fund strategies. Prior to founding GCM, Ken had significant experience in the alternative investment industry, including five years (1989 to 1993) as President and Chief Executive Officer of John W. Henry & Company, Inc. and seven years (1982 to 1989) as Senior Vice President and Director of Managed Futures at Dean Witter Reynolds. In this podcast, we discuss the early days of macro and CTA trading, the influence of Paul Tudor Jones, why macro is an attractive source of alpha, and much more. While we have tried to make the transcript as accurate as possible, if you do notice any errors, let me know by email.
Introduction
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Over the past five years they have together with their clients experienced multiple market cycles while the focus of Amber Group has remained the same, delivering an industry leading service for trading, hedging, and managing digital assets with a key focus on security, compliance and risk management. With a strong capital base, industry leading investor backing and deep liquidity, Amber Group looks forward to continuing to service clients whilst holding themselves to the highest standards. Now onto this episode’s guest, Ken Tropin. Ken is the chairman and founder of Graham Capital Management, a world-class macro hedge fund with $18 billion in assets under management. And prior to founding Graham in 1994, Ken was president and CEO of John W. Henry & Co. Now on to our conversation. Greetings and welcome Ken to the podcast show. It’s great to have you on.
Ken Tropin (02:11):
Oh, thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here.
Bilal Hafeez (02:14):
Great. Now before we go into the meat of our conversation, I do like to ask my guests something about their origin stories, how they started or how you started your career in finance and then how that ended up taking you to where you are now running Graham Capital.
Ken Tropin (02:28):
Sure. My career really began around 1980 when I started working for Shearson as an account executive. And two or three years after I started at Shearson, Dean Witter recruited me to take over their fledgling hedge fund practice, which was more or less allocating money to the early CTAs of that era. And I worked at Dean Witter from ’82 to ’89, and then in 1989, one of the CTAs who we were a pretty big investor with, which was John Henry, talked to me about me moving to California, taking over his firm, and I agreed to do so. So I left Dean Witter in ’89, March of ’89 to join Henry and I moved Henry’s organisation from California to Connecticut. And then in 1994, or yeah, thereabouts, John and I saw things differently.
I left at the end of ’93, briefly retired, and then I tried to figure out what I was going to do next. I wasn’t prepared to be retired. I was pretty young at the time, about 40. And I met with Paul Jones and Mark Dalton from Tudor and they encouraged me to start my own fund and they were interested in being a strategic partner and investor. So that’s how Graham got started. That was in June or July of 1994. And when we began trading based on trading systems that I designed and developed in that period while I was retired. And that’s how we got first started in quantitative trading.
And then in 1998, in an effort to diversify the sources of alpha that Graham is able to take advantage of, we began to build a discretionary business also with help from the Tudor organisation. They gave me some traders that were not big enough for Tudor to be so involved in, but they were a good place for me to start our discretionary business. And ultimately we hired a very, very successful Fed watcher named Fred Levine sometime around I would say in ’99 or something like that. And he turned out to just be an absolute fabulous trader and Fed watcher and he really, I would say was the main catalyst for our early success in discretionary trading.
The Early Days of Macro and CTA Trading
Bilal Hafeez (04:51):
Okay, that’s a great, great story. I’ve got a bunch of questions. First, as you had your career in the eighties as an account executive, then CTAs, what was it about that area of finance that attracted you? Why did you stick to that? Finance is quite a big industry. There’s different areas to go into, public markets, private market, systematic, discretionary and so on. What was it about that area that you knew, okay, that’s the area you want to be in?
Ken Tropin (05:15):
Well, there are a lot of factors. The markets were pretty inefficient back then, so it was not unreasonable to try and generate really high rates of return. And it was a young industry and it’s always exciting to be in a young industry that wasn’t mature. And I can’t say I woke up one morning and said, oh God, this is exactly what I want to do. This, what happens in people in their careers is you start focusing on something that you have a bit of an edge in and I did because I was one of the early people in the field and I got to know most of the very successful traders in the eighties and it was an exciting business back then. There was a lot of inflation. Markets were volatile, there was a lot of action by very essential banks. Currency volatility was huge. Commodity volatility was huge. So there was a lot going on, a lot to do and I found it very compelling.
Influence of Paul Tudor Jones
Bilal Hafeez (06:11):
Yeah. Yeah. And you said you started Graham in 1994. That of course was the period where Greenspan raised rates dramatically. We had the Tequilla Crisis as well. Was that a tough year to start in or did that turn out to be a good year to start in?
Ken Tropin (06:25):
Yeah, as I recall, we broke even our first six months, so I know it definitely wasn’t easy. But then in ’95, and I don’t remember exactly the market moves back then, you’ll forgive me, but that was almost 30 years ago, but we had a great ’95 in our systems and that sort of got us going. And I can remember in the early days of the business, it was so different from today where the due diligence process by some very large institution or sovereign wealth fund might take a year or two before they decide to invest with you. I started my hedge fund practice really with the help of Tudor introducing to me some of their clients that were Geneva banks, who based on their respect for Paul Jones decided to give me a chance. So it was quite interesting and quite different from what it is today.
It was a smaller industry back then, and if you think about it, the industry was really dominated by some of the fantastic discretionary macro traders of that era. People that come to mind, obviously Paul Jones, phenomenal trader then, phenomenal trader today, one of the absolute brilliant minds in our business. But there were others, Stan Druckenmiller, obviously really fabulous trader, both at Soros and at his own firm. Bruce Kovner, really, really successful, Louis Bacon. And as I think about it, what made these people so successful was they generated pretty exciting rates of return and they were totally different from anything else that people invested in, which was part of the appeal is that you could have a source of alpha, totally uncorrelated to stocks and bonds.
Why Macro Is an Attractive Source of Alpha
Bilal Hafeez (08:10):
Yeah, and actually on that point of diversification, in your mind how would you define macro? Because a lot of people now are sort of saying they’re macro traders, which is convenient given the cycle we’re in. But in your eyes, how would you define a macro strategy?
Ken Tropin (08:25):
Well, to me macro is really about trading in four asset classes, either directionally or from a relative value point of view and that would be equities, foreign exchange, fixed income, and commodities. You could be trading any of those asset classes on a short-term basis, a long-term basis or on a relative value basis, a momentum basis. There are a lot of different ways to approach macro, but I would say that it very typically is a directionally oriented strategy and not that people don’t use relative value a lot, they do, but that to me is traditional macro investing, if you will.
One of the appeals, one of the things about it that’s really unique is if you look at the hedge fund industry, macro was the dominant style in the first decade or so of the hedge fund industry going back to say the eighties and nineties. And I think the main reason for that was some of the very prominent people I mentioned had just had terrific success and unbelievable track records and were very charismatic and super bright people, but also there was no correlation to stocks and bonds. And I think one of the reasons people came to invest in hedge funds early on was that they were getting diversification from their traditional portfolio and hence the name hedge fund is that it wasn’t meant to be layering on more beta risk, it was meant to be diversifying from beta risk.
Performance Around Market Crises From 1987 Stock Crash to 2008 GFC
Bilal Hafeez (10:02):
Yeah. So on that point of diversification, how do you think macro has done since the global financial crisis? Because obviously from the global financial crisis up until say around COVID time we had ultra-low rates. Every central bank in the world had low rates, so that was a particularly unusual environment. So how did macro fare in that environment and how is today different from that period?
Ken Tropin (10:24):
Well, let’s go back to all of the crisis’ that I can think of. I’ll start with the ’87 market crash. I remember I was running Dean Witter’s hedge fund practice at that time, and I can remember that my CTAs back then, if I recall correctly, were caught wrong sided in foreign exchange, but happened to be short equities because equities have been declining a little bit before October 19th of 1987. So they did well on some of those positions. And then yields really cratered, bonds rallied a lot on the Monday following the market crash and our CTAs got long fixed income and made a lot of money. So it was an excellent diversification in those very early days of the industry that I can remember in the 2000 when the equity market in Nasdaq in particular traded in the second quarter of 2000. That was a great year for macro and particularly for CTAs in 2000, 2001, 2002, I even believe maybe 2003.
And so again, it was an example of where it was an uncorrelated way of investing and therein lies quite a bit of the appeal. Then of course we have to go to 2008 and the financial crisis. The second half of 2008 was a great period for macro and for CTAs and we generated really significant returns. And then I would say from 2010 to 2021, it was a really quiet and somewhat dull period for macro. As you mentioned, every central bank was easing and was more or less not only easing but giving forward guidance saying we’re not going to raise rates at the next meeting or two. And by the way, looking out 36 months our forecast is we won’t be raising rates. And so I can remember Fred Levine, the trader that I just mentioned earlier in our conversation, that was when he decided to retire, he said, the Fed is basically telling me there’s nothing to do for several years, I might as well retire.
So it was a quiet period. And one of the easiest ways, the most objective ways to put some numbers on this is if you look at the period between 2010, July of 2010 and July of 2021, and you look at the three major central banks, the ECB, the Fed and the Bank of England, there were a total of 1325 basis point rate hike equivalent moves in 11 years by three central banks, or put differently, there was an average of 1.2 hikes per year by three different central banks. If we look back to 2022, there were just under 50 rate hikes of 25 basis points equivalent by those same three central banks, or put differently, there was 30 times the amount of action to work with as a macro trader in ’22 as had been the case in the previous 11 years.
And so all of that easy monetary policy, the lack of inflation really sucked the volatility out of macro and conversely, since all the central banks have been moving there’s so much more to work with for macro traders and I think that’s one of the reasons that clients are more interested is the opportunity set is so much more constructive in an environment where central banks are moving a lot and there’s heightened volatility in FX, there’s heightened volatility obviously in rates, there’s heightened volatility in equities and somewhat in commodity. So our opportunity set is exponentially more interesting.
How the New Inflationary World Makes Macro Attractive
Bilal Hafeez (14:13):
And I guess that begs the question then, how long do you think this will last? Some people still have this view that we’re going to go back to low rates, that this has just been a temporary burst of inflation. Central banks will cut rates back to zero. Obviously the alternative view is no, this is a different environment now.
Ken Tropin (14:29):
I think inflation is like an ocean liner. It’s hard to move around. It was really hard for them to create it. I think it’s going to be not so easy for inflationary pressures to ease back to a 2% target. I think inflation is coming down, we see that in the data, but is it going to get back to 2% as fast as the market is expecting? I’m not confident that it will. And moreover, there are already a number of hikes continue to be priced and particularly in Europe for the second half of this year. And then the cuts priced in in the US in the second half of this year, which I may not totally agree that they’re going to happen, but we’re going to continue to see somewhat heightened volatility in the asset classes that are important to macro for a while.
And I say that based on a number of reasons. The supply chain bottlenecks are not completely resolved. The war in Ukraine is not resolved. You’ve got obviously more tension in Asia than any of us would like. You’ve got a very uncertain political landscape heading into the ’24 election. You have green energy policies in the US which we probably need to have, but nonetheless, they’re going to continue to have some inflationary pressures that result because of the lack of development of energy in the US. And so I think that for macro, maybe the next 36 to 60 months continue to look really favourable.
Mispriced Duration Risk
Bilal Hafeez (15:53):
Yeah. And in terms of asset holders, there’s been a move for them to passive over the years and big allocations to equities, slight moving away from bonds and a lot of allocations to private. Presumably going forward there’ll be more allocation to macro as a diversifier to the underlying portfolio.
Ken Tropin (16:16):
I’d like to think so. I think if we go back I wouldn’t say that macro was probably half of the industry, maybe even as high as 70% of the industry in the nineties and now it’s more like 15 or 20% of the AUM and the hedge fund industry. If the hedge fund industry is roughly 4 trillion, I would say CTAs and macro managers are probably six or 700 billion of that amount. So maybe 15, 18%. What I think is likely to happen this year is if we continue to see the opportunity set for macro to be pretty favourable, I think we’re going to see clients adjust upward their allocation. I don’t think it’d be a sea change where people are going to triple or something, but I think people will probably, if their macro allocation is 10% of their portfolio, maybe it’ll go to 15. I don’t know.
And the way I think about it is that if I’m an investor and I have this very large portfolio of beta and fixed income and I’m in an environment now where there’s some inflation, and I personally think that something that’s not priced in the market that eventually will be as duration risk, there’s no term premium. The yield curve’s inverted. So ultimately I’m uncomfortable if I’m a traditional investor today, looking ahead of the stock and bond portfolio. I think equities look really expensive. We can talk more about the market outlook in a minute, but I think equities look expensive if you think we’re heading towards a recession and fixed income as we saw with SVB.
Their duration risk wasn’t properly priced and that’s why essentially they went bankrupt is because they had a very large fixed income portfolio with a yield, it was a 10-year average duration with a yield of one and a half percent and the current markets 4. So I think investors are properly concerned about those issues and one of the ways that they can diversify I think the most successfully is with really strong macro manager funds, whether it be quantitative or discretionary because they’re just not correlated.
What Gives Graham an Edge
Bilal Hafeez (18:26):
Yeah, and in terms of what gives a macro fund an edge, obviously you’ve been around and Graham’s been for a long time, you’ve been around obviously before Graham, Dean Witter, Henry and so on. Over your career what do you feel gives a macro trader an edge or what gives Graham an edge over other funds?
Ken Tropin (18:45):
Sure. I think experience is really a big deal. The fact that we’ve been doing this for 29 years. We’ve been through a lot of market cycles, we’ve been through different risk events, we’ve been through issues such as counterparties failing, we’ve been through issues such as liquidity disappearing. If I were to give a conservative institution advice about what attributes to look for in a macro fund, I think you want experience, I think you want to have a strong management team, people that also have a lot of experience and are conservative and are steady in how they want to manage the business through thick and thin. You obviously need very talented people. We are in the alpha, we’re in the business of producing alpha.
You can only do that if you have the best people. How do you have the best people? Well, part of its compensation, part of it’s your culture. Are you a collaborative firm? Are you a place where people are happy? Is the culture of your organisation compelling such that you not only attract really talented people but you retain talented people? Risk management’s super important. We began in 2007 during the mortgage crisis that happened in the fall of that year and counterparties started having difficult situations depending on who you were dealing with. We started having a daily risk meeting at 9:30 every morning to look at every trader’s positions, liquidity and counterparty risks and stress tests and we’ve continued that discipline now for 13, 14 years where at 9:30 every day, including today, I was on our risk meeting looking at P and L from yesterday, every trader’s position, is anyone having difficulty?
Is there anything that we need to be concerned about? And so on and so forth. And I think the consistency of having that very hands-on risk management approach is a real, adds great value over the long haul. It’s not in any given moment. It’s that over time you’re hopefully going to manage risk more successfully because you’re just more attentive to it. I think one of the other things that’s been really important to me as I manage Graham is the diversification of the sources of alpha internally at Graham. I don’t want to be a one trick pony. I don’t want to only make money when it’s good for momentum and quantitative trading. I want to be able to make a return when maybe value is a more attractive factor than momentum.
That’s why we built our discretionary trading business 24 years ago and more recently we got involved in long-term quantitative equities trading and we are always on the hunt for sources of alpha that aren’t correlated to what we’re already doing and where we feel that we have an edge and it’s synergistic without poor business. I think finally I would say to run a firm successfully over three decades or what have you you want more or less to be strategically innovative and creative because there’s no way you can do what worked 10 years ago and expect it to always work in the future. You’ve always got to be looking for more innovative, more creative ways, more inventive opportunities to find new sources of alpha.
Thoughts on Platform/Pod Funds
Bilal Hafeez (22:11):
Yeah, absolutely. And on diversification within the firm, one set up of hedge funds is the pod shop approach, the platform approach. Many, many big names, funds have that structure. What’s your thoughts about that type of structure and have you thought about setting up restructuring Graham in a pod shop style?
Ken Tropin (22:33):
We’ve thought about it. First of all, we give great credit and respect to the most successful of those firms and we’re very respectful of just how institutional they are and the consistency of their performance. I think our clients, some of them are uncomfortable with a pass-through fee structure because the costs end up getting pretty high and I think some of the most successful funds are now asking clients to lock up for five years and so on and so forth. So that’s also unappealing to some investors, but I think you have to respect the net return that the best of those firms have accomplished. We have started our own version of a macro focused multi-strat fund and we’re finding that clients are interested in it, they’re watching it, some are investing and I think over time it will be an important part of our business and at the end of the day we want to compete for the top talent and in order to do that, having a fund with the same economics as some of our most successful competitors is something that is essential to compete for the top people.
Impact of AI
Bilal Hafeez (23:38):
And you talked about innovation earlier as well, and obviously we’re hearing a lot about AI at the moment in all sorts of different ways, ChatGPT and so on and of course Graham has a whole history of quantitative approaches. Could you imagine AI replacing humans at some point in the investment process or is there something still humans have that AI can’t deliver on?
Ken Tropin (24:01):
Well, I think it’s hard to know. It’s hard to believe just how impressive some of this artificial intelligence really is. I was astonished when we asked that software chat to write a song about trend following, and it wrote a magnificent set of verses about trend following, capturing the essence of how trend following works and when it works and how it works. I was blown away. So I don’t want to predict that it’s going to replace humans in terms of strategic judgement and I think there’s an edge that humans have that is hard to replicate. But I also don’t want to underestimate artificial intelligence. It’s pretty powerful.
Market Views
Bilal Hafeez (24:47):
Yeah, and we did touch on market views earlier, but what are your current market thoughts? On equities you thought equities are expensive, for example, let’s start with equities and then go through the different markets.
Ken Tropin (24:59):
Sure, so equities to me seem expensive. If you think that we’re likely to head into a recession, which I think is the base case view of most economists over the next nine months or so, so maybe the Fed engineer a soft landing, but the more probable case is that what we see happening in technology layoffs and all these firms shrinking is going to ultimately lead to a contraction in earnings. And so with forward PEs one year PE now just under 19, that seems high to me. Should we normalise at 16 or 17? I would think so. So it remains to be seen what the economy does, but I would lean towards being short equities. I also think that if you think about what drove equities higher, it really is the TINA phenomenon. There is no alternative and now there is an alternative. Now you can make four or 5% of risk-free rates.
You couldn’t do that for the previous decade. So I think a combination of contraction in earnings, contraction in the economy, and there is a very appealing alternative of a four or 5% risk-free rate that makes me want to be a little negative equities. It’s not lost on me however that the psychology of the investor is so powerful and the psychology of the investor for the last 15 years is buy every dip and you were rewarded for doing so, and if you didn’t do that you were punished. And that psychology probably hasn’t changed yet. And that’s why I think the stocks are performing well right now is that the psychology of the investors still is inclined to think, let me think of a reason to buy equities. And the current reason is the Fed’s pretty close to done, so that should be good for stocks.
But I think if in fact the economy contracts the way most economists believe it will, that’s not so good for stocks. So I on balance think that equities probably decline from current levels. Dollar, I think the dollar looks a little weak to me. The euros trying to break out above 110. I think the perception in the marketplace, this is not a strong trend, it’s one that looks to maybe be developing because we had a strong dollar for the last 15 months or whatever. But I think the perception is the ECB is now more hawkish than the Fed. So the dollar looks slightly weak as we sit here today. If you look at the yield curve, first broadly about fixed income, I think rates are priced about right. Having said that, I think the yield curve should steepen more. It’s already steepened some. It was as inverted as much as two tens were a hundred basis points, inverted now it’s about 60.
I would look for that to steepen as the economy indeed goes into a recession. And I also think if you look at what happened with Silicon Valley Bank, people totally forgot about something called duration risk and that you should get paid more for, you should have term premium for taking duration risks and there is no premium right now, obviously for duration risks. So in fixed income that’s the more interesting play to me is do we begin to see some continued steeping of the yield curve. Finally, I would say I think the market’s slightly optimistic on cuts, particularly in the US happening in this third and fourth quarter. I’m not convinced that Fed’s going to be able to do that. Maybe, but I think that the market’s a little bit optimistic there. It’s not a big mispricing, but I’m not convinced we’ll be cutting this year and there’s about 30 or 40 basis points of cuts priced in the last quarter of the year.
Bilal Hafeez (28:36):
Do you think we’ll get some kind of crisis? We had the mini SVB regional bank crisis, we had the LDI issue in the UK last year, we’ve had crypto blow up, so we’ve had these blowups, like mini blowups. Do you think we’ll see a big blow up like ’08 in some way or is this just a different environment that we’re in?
Ken Tropin (28:54):
Yeah, I don’t think we’ll see an ’08 style crisis, all of it. We came pretty close two weeks ago with the run on banks and if the Fed hadn’t, I think the Fed response was pretty good. So I give credit to them for really managing that pretty effectively. But I don’t know, we got the debt ceiling negotiation that it’s always ugly until it isn’t. So we’ll have to keep an eye on that. I think the political situation is interesting. I think the Ukrainian thing is nowhere near a resolution. So I think there are a lot of risk factors out there, but I don’t see a crisis tomorrow, but you have to be vigilant.
Bilal Hafeez (29:34):
Yeah. Yeah. And more generally in terms of the longer term growth potential of the US, just like five, 10 year view, do you think that the US still is the dominant economic power or do you think… There’s a lot of talk about all the political gridlock in the US and a lot of negativity around that, but in terms of the economic potential, do you think the US still will be kind of the dominant economic power?
Ken Tropin (29:58):
Well, I think we’re going to be up there for all of our challenges, particularly in politics. It’s hard to find somebody in the middle who’s in power. It’s either the far left or the far right. But I think Europe also has issues and Asia has issues. So I think US stays very competitive.
Advice to Young Macro Traders
Bilal Hafeez (30:18):
Yeah. And earlier we touched on the talent. What advice would you give to budding macro traders or macro portfolio managers?
Ken Tropin (30:30):
Yeah, there’s plenty I could offer them. I think one of the things that troubles me is that young people don’t have access to mentors the way I did throughout my career. My career is 45 years and over that period of time I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some really inspirational people. So I think that if I were to give advice to a 25-year old who’s getting out of university or business school, I would be try and work closely with somebody who really inspires you with their intellect and their talent. I think that is such a valuable thing to one’s career development. I had mentors. Paul Jones was an enormous inspiration to me, but there were others earlier in my career, Dean Witter and so on.
And I had the privilege of working with and getting to know really talented people who became macro manager superstars. And I think there is an intangible value that I would really suggest to people. Not easy to do, but it’s not impossible to work in an organisation where you’re surrounded by talented people. I think I’ve always given the advice to people who’ve worked for me over the last four decades, attitude’s important, show up first, leave last, never be on the computer screwing around and have a smile on your face and a positive frame of mind and you’re going to get noticed. And if you do the opposite, that’s not all that helpful to your career.
Bilal Hafeez (32:07):
Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s great advice. I would also, on the mentor side, I also find that mentors are happy to be approached, to be mentors as well. So young people I think shouldn’t feel like they’re imposing. The worst case is they say no. But often I think mentors feel quite honoured to be a mentor.
Ken Tropin (32:24):
Yeah, I think it is situational, the right time and place. I think if one searches out inspiration, you can find it. You just have to look for it. Sometimes I feel that, you asked me a question about how about attracting talent. Sometimes you find talent where other people aren’t looking. If you fish in the same pond as everybody else, obviously it’s going to be thinner for opportunities than if you’re creative and you’re innovative about how you find people. And so I think that’s part of the solution as well is that you’ve got to be open-minded about where you’re going to find the next generation of successful people to work in your firm.
Bilal Hafeez (33:08):
And on that topic, obviously over COVID we had all the work from home dynamics and some of that remains with us. Have you changed your view on different work practices since we’ve had the experiment of COVID?
Ken Tropin (33:22):
Yeah, we have a hybrid approach at Graham of three and two. I’m grudgingly accepting of it. I prefer, I think we’re stronger when we’re all together, but I also recognise that some people have long commutes. They feel they’re much more productive when they can work from home and don’t have to spend time commuting, which is inefficient and so on and so forth. We are going to more or less do what most other successful hedge funds do, which is have some sort of hybrid approach where people can collaborate in person, which I feel is a more effective way to collaborate and we’ll continue to do Zoom and the other things we do to work remotely and manage through it all.
Books
Bilal Hafeez (34:01):
No, that’s great. And then last question I wanted to ask you was on books. I love reading books. What are books that really influenced you over your career or-
Ken Tropin (34:09):
Two come right to mind that I think anybody who wants to become a portfolio manager trader, you got to read Reminiscence of a Stock Operator, Lefevre, and you’ve got to read Jack Swagger’s Market Wizards and the interviews with all the top traders. I think he had two or three editions of that book with different traders over the years. That’s a very good starting place.
Bilal Hafeez (34:31):
Yeah, no, that’s great. What’s the best way for people to learn a bit more about Graham or yourself?
Ken Tropin (34:37):
Well, I think visit our office in Connecticut is a very good place to learn about us. Obviously our website is pretty accessible to people, LinkedIn and so on, and contact our investor relations people and they’ll organise a meeting with whether it be our risk manager or CEO or our CIO and get to know us. It’s pretty straightforward. We pride ourselves on being easy to work with for clients and being really transparent and open because that’s how I want to be treated if I’m a client.
Bilal Hafeez (35:09):
Yeah, that’s great. Yes, with that thanks a lot, Ken. That was a really enlightening conversation and it’s great to speak to someone as legendary as you are in the macro world.
Ken Tropin (35:20):
Wow. Your too kind. It’s totally my pleasure, Bilal, and thank you for your interest and I leave you with this thought. I think, I don’t know that the markets are going to be as amazingly good for macro as they were in ’22 in the next two, three years, but I think they’re going to be a lot more interesting than they were in the previous decade and that ought to be good enough, particularly if we continue to be non-correlated to everything else people invest in. And we’re also generating returns that are pretty attractive and dissimilar in terms of how they happen. So I’m really optimistic about the market opportunity set and excited to do what we do.
Bilal Hafeez (35:58):
No, that’s great. I agree as well. Yeah, well, thanks a lot and good luck for the rest of this year and the next few years.
Ken Tropin (36:03):
Thank you very much, Bilal.
Bilal Hafeez (36:05):
Great.
Ken Tropin (36:05):
You’re very welcome. Have a good day.
Bilal Hafeez (36:06):
Thanks. Thanks for listening to the episode. Once again I’d like to thank the sponsors of this podcast episode, the Amber Group. They’re a global leader in digital assets, products, and infrastructure. To date, the company has served over 1000 institutional investors providing services ranging from electronic and OTC market making, trading execution services, and much more. Over the past five years they have together with their clients experienced multiple market cycles while the focus of the Amber Group has remained the same, delivering an industry leading service for trading, hedging, and managing digital assets with a key focus on security, compliance and risk management, with a strong capital base, industry leading investment backing and deep liquidity. Amber Group looks forward to continuing to service clients whilst holding themselves to the highest standards. And once again, remember to subscribe to this podcast show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcast. Leave a five-star rating, a nice comment, and let other people know about the show. We’ll be very, very grateful. Finally, sign up for our free weekly newsletter at macrohive.com/free. We’ll be back soon so tune in then.