YouSaid · the spoken record

Will England

lines on the record: 86
first: 2023-09-05
most recent: 2023-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Our relationship with some of these individuals, seeing what's possible, that firm has gone on to be extremely, extremely successful. It would not have set me up for the next thing and the next thing. And I think about this notion a lot when we talk about combining excellence in a performance-based culture, but also being supportive and thinking about the human a lot. It's been extremely, extremely helpful to me. So I'm very grateful for that.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never heard of. I didn't know where the fuck Elon was. And then I was crawling on rockets literally had I not had just those literal experiences of being there.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company modeling school, which everyone does an investment bank what I'd never done because I was a math guy, and so we're going to give you the tools to do that. You still got to carry your own backpack. This is a culture of excellence. You need to perform, but we're going to support you and give you the option to put yourself in a position to do that. And at the time, I didn't think, oh, wow, this is really kind. But as I've gone in, particularly now in running a larger firm, I realized how kind that actually was when you have someone that is just not performing, it'd be so much easier to be like, you know what, this is not a fit and to move on. But seeing something in me and the intensity within me and be like, you know what, this is a person where I'm going to actually go not really out on a limb. That would be way too strong, but to be like, I'm going to be supportive here. So I was extremely kind. And that's been kind to me because if I had not had the experiences of being on that firm, which were in hindsight truly crazy about three months after that, they were leading an investment in this rocket company called SpaceX.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just joined this firm with this guy Antonio. He's really great. They're doing really cool things. It's a private equity firm in Chicago. And I was like, that sounds crazy. But you know what? I wanted to come back to the U.S. I'm a very curious person. I met those guys. I love those guys. Okay, great idea. Let's move to Chicago in 2010. And I was terrible, really. I didn't know how to model. I didn't even know what the fucking LLC was the first day. I was a hardcore math guy. And I thought that was the ultimate intellectual achievement. But I just got my ass kicked and it was super helpful in hindsight. But the specific story that I want to tell to answer your question was I remember distinctly this one day. It was about when I was two months in and I was really not doing a good job. I just was not trained properly. I was not mature enough for the role. And I thought I might get fired. I was like, oh my God, it's the first time I've ever failed in anything in my life. And Antonio sat me down and he said, you know what? You're fucking up. Yeah, I know. But we're going to help you. We're going to give you the tools to support you. We're going to send you to.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to tell a story involving one of the previous members of your podcast, which as I've gone on and gotten a little bit older and have a little bit less here, I think about more and more now. So I used to work in a firm called Valor Equity Partners run by Antonio Gracias. And the way I got there, and a few people know this story, after grad school, I was at Oxford doing math, and I was a hardcore math nerd and a big time rower. I thought I was awesome. And then I started working in a quant firm in London. I was doing really well. And back in 2009,”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nature doesn't change. And so what I find myself doing constantly just because I'm so curious is reading books about these people. How did they think when they were my age? What was their life? How old were their kids? What were the problems they were facing? What were the stresses that they're facing? How did they interact with their partners? How did they interact with their employees? Because all that stuff doesn't change at all. And then ultimately not trying to copy anyone, but you take bits and pieces from what other people have done before. And that's true of those really outsider industry as well as even with our own industry. And you ultimately come up with your own mosaic of saying, I'm learning from others because you'd be crazy not to, but blindly copying is also equally crazy. You want to come up with your own recipe. So I'd study, I'd say the personality type as opposed to one individual personality.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less about one individual because I don't think anyone's perfect. I think it's quite dangerous to be like, this is the one person that I think is ideal. If there was one person that I'd be like, you know what? If I could have that guy's life holistically in every element, not just business success, personal success, it probably would be Ed Torp, who's one of the pioneers of quanting, has been successful across many areas. He's like 90 years old, but he looks like he's 60 and has a good family. Okay, that's successful. But it sounds like I studied that guy intensely. What I do find myself studying and it's why I love the founders podcast. It's not just a shapeless plugin. It's really true. Because learning about successful people in the past, whether they be in finance, going back to Robert Baron age, Vanderbilt was a fucking psychopath, but he's still extremely admirable in many ways in certain parts of his life. Same thing with Jay Cole, James J. Hill. You go down the list. You can't be serious without studying Rockefeller. You name it.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, who's going to pass out first and the level of intensity and competition around that behind closed doors? Yeah, people care a lot about that. And if you're going to play in this arena, you have to embrace that and be like, you know what? I want to compete day in, day out because if you're not, you're going to get passed by.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you get that pace right? And I'm sure that startups that are in a bit of a bubble have had similar types of conversations that absolutely happens in our industry. And finding that right balance is really important. So that's certainly something that happens behind the curtain is talked about. I guess the other one that is worth mentioning, and just to come out and say it, because people, we all have good manners in our industry or maybe I don't always all the time, but at least I was brought up to have good manners so I can fake it. But the fact is it's a relative talent game and there's only a small number of firms. It's extremely competitive. And that's not to say that firms hate each other, but absolutely probably a big part of what drove Millennium and Citadel to be so excellent is a huge rivalry there. Then maybe you could send that to other firms as well. And we have our rivalries too. And I grew up in a sport. It's literally, you're either going to sit down and erg or line up.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How big to get and how fast? So, the past couple years, because the returns of platforms have been strong and there's this general intellectual acceptance that there's a better mousetrap. There's been money that's just been thrown at institutions like ours that have a credible shot. The biggest firms have effectively doubled in the past few years to just scale that boggles my mind and many others' minds. There is effectively blank check spac type multi-managers that are being started by very smart people, but very different coming from a massive institution to starting one on yourself. So the space is crowded. There's a lot of money that's come into this space. Investors of all sizes. And we've grown on a percentage basis. We've definitely grown. We've also turned down a lot of capital. But the conversations that we have internally are”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have tons of respect for helping them to articulate and institutionalize elements of their own culture at scale. And then where you work at the next Guinea pig up to do that. As far as what that means, there's artifacts to that, of course. There's words. He's an author, so he's an amazing writer. But it's more, what are the rituals involved? Even things like getting the whole firm together, what is the right communication cadence? And in talking with James about it, these are things that all firms face as they go from. There was this core group of people that was seeing each other every day. and there was a lot of nonverbal communication to once you get above 150 people this magical barrier in human cognition and lose the ability to keep track more 150 faces you have to really focus on institutionalizing that and there are organizations that can do that at scale typically they're outside finance but certainly in the military they're the case the obvious special forces teams some sports teams do this better than others and so we're spending time on that”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Just amazing degree of success. And when he came away from that, in a nutshell, he was saying you have these individuals who are incredibly high performing. But in the book, he has this line of sweep the sheds mantra. And that's a New Zealand terms. It means like, pick up the fucking locker room. Even if you're the god, the rugby god, and you physically look like a gigantic human, do the little things well. And that's not just talking about all blacks. You find that in all areas. I love the line, how you do anything is how you do everything. the notion of humility, the notion of supporting your teammates. Another key takeaway from that book is don't be a dickhead. So similar to what I was mentioning before about not hiring hired mains people. Just some really great values and that you can have this organization that has those pieces where you have this collection, this team strength, a team of support that's also really high performing. And so the reason why we're working with James is that he had worked with a firm where I had spent time years and years ago.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this book, it's called Legacy by another name, James Kerr. James embedded himself within the All Blacks. The New Zealand Roga team, arguably one of the most successful sports franchises”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we do it, it's going to be great and we're going to feel great about it, and then we're going to go on to the next thing and the next thing, next thing.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of embracing that a bit more and be like, you know what? That's okay. And if other people find that inspiring and want to come along with that, that's great. But that is what gives me meaning. It's what gives a lot of the senior folks at our firm meeting. The final piece of that is to be able to demonstrate to people, you know what, you can do that while also being an excellent human, excellent individual in your personal life, how you take care of yourself physically. Definitely that's hugely important to me. And I believe oftentimes people don't stress enough the connection not to get too crunchy about a connection between your mind and body and how you're physically primed to the machine and how this can impact your ability to just have energy to perform all of that really matters. So all those things together personally, I think that's why I've been able to”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you can be successful in that and you really understand okay, inputs and output and rowing is just this amazing sport because you can get pretty darn good on very little talent and just being incredibly pig-headed. So that is definitely to find me. But the things that I've done personally in my life over the years, whether at first that was academically and then athletically and then as I've gone on in my career and I've definitely had my own faults in my personal career, the thing that comes from that is when I'm personally the most happy is when you pursue something that is hard and it's a struggle, but you persevere and you do that. And you're doing that with other people that are in it for the same reasons. And the people that are really attracted to or affirm that I've enjoyed working with, we've got people that, and not to overhype it, but spend time in the SEALs program, people that have played athletics at very high levels. There's this core notion there's certain types of people that are wired in a way of they just want to be great at what they're doing. And over the past couple of years, as I've been in a leadership position,”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the reasons why I love our particular model is that notion of yeah, be excellent is celebrated actually in many parts of life people that want to be excellent are somewhat pushed to the side. And what I mean by that is personally probably still can deadlifts at 100 pounds, but I was an athlete in college and afterwards I was in rowing, which is a totally ridiculous sport because you essentially sit down next to someone else and then say who's going to pass out first.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reputation, you can get a sense of meeting with someone, interviews are easy to fake, but it's a small world where someone's been before usually follows them around. So there's obviously limits to how much you can screen for that. One of the things that I've definitely learned is it's not germane to our particular model is you can get a sense pretty quickly once you're actually working with someone and the romance has gone away of where they really follow that tenants. And so I do think that we put a bit more emphasis on the human side of it and less just trying to hire pure mercenaries and looking people on Amerson screen again, not to say we're perfect. We benefit a lot from those that have gone before us. And your question was about relative talent came. Absolutely, that is true. Our sweet spot is people that are typically in their mid-career where they've spent time at large institutions and for various different reasons they want to pursue a different path from being there. Some of that is structural, some of that can just be environment.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A core tenant of our firm when it was started, my partner said, been in the business since the 1970s amazing career. When he started walleye, one of the things that he said is I don't care how much money someone can make us. We're not going to hire high maintenance people. Believe me, there's a lot of high maintenance people invite us. And sometimes it can be tempting to say, you know what? Let's hire that person, even if they're a pain in the ass and they're going to drive us crazy. They're going to make us so much money that it doesn't matter. Well, you know what? That's never the case. So that's actually really been a core tend to refer. It does come from her, my partner, and we do think about that a lot.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few things, and some of these are going to sound cliche, but they really matter, and you feel them. So intellectual honesty is the biggest one. You meet a lot of people. They need to really understand why they made money in the past, because we're not underwriting the past. We're underwriting the go-forward basis, which is an obvious statement, but very few people really understand that. Did you just make money because of the market call or did you make money because you followed a process which has a probability of repeating itself in the future? Are you doing things in the right way? Are you putting yourself in a position to be successful? And can you evaluate and analyze that? And experience matters, but it would be inaccurate to just say you're just hiring based on experience. If anything passes a certain point, there's a U curve where you have almost two experienced people that were trained in a different world back in the 80s or 90s or even early 2000s picking stocks before reg FD. They're not equipped with a modern tool sometimes to be able to be successful, as I said, kind of interface a little bit more in a gray box style for fundamental stock picking.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's like someone saying you have a bloody nose. Well, let's just cut off your fucking nose. That doesn't make any sense. So there was a skepticism about Lenoxy validated. And underpinning that assumption is that you have extremely smart, sophisticated, competent people that are running those businesses that would make sound decisions.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in that firm in particular, that is a core mandate of basically donating down your exposure. So it'll be a huge departure from effectively a stated operating principles. Also, the potential market impact of that would be enormous. And so almost like, okay.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People on industry definitely have channels of communication. I do not speak to anyone there personally, to be clear. There is an element, and you read about this in entrepreneurs of all types, but there's an element of just being disagreeable and backing your own intellectual intuition. And I remember thinking when I heard that rumor, like, that's just not true. That just wouldn't make any sense to me. So I'm going to ignore jobs that are freaking out and saying of that. There was certainly a piece. Because it just wouldn't make any sense.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, there's no fucking way they're doing that. But nonetheless, those are the rumors that are coming in. And the human piece, and this is really, it's these low frequency moments where you really can distinguish yourself as a firm, is you need to be able to manage that personally. And I can even say managing that personally because I've been through a number of these periods now and I'm not saying I'm perfect by any means, but absolutely was I better prepared in January 21 than in March 2020 having been through March 20. Yes. And so what came out of that is you're watching what's going on. you're thinking about whether you're exposed to these factors that are now obviously coming up as the mean factor, the game saw factor, whatever craziness you want to call it. And if the answer is no and you see that you have some strategy of losing money because very clearly there's people across the street that are freaking out, then the best thing to do is to say we're not in a position where we're impaired. We understand what's going on. You need to have situational intelligence about it. You need to triangulate information. You need to be able to.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was like, wow, you could never short a stack again. So holy shit, we have to take down our entire books. And so what's happening in those periods, again, as mentioned, and I believe that everyone in my seat at the top firms is very much in the weeds. And we can see a lot of what's going on in our portfolios. That's where having the systems in place to be able to watch that in real time. Very helpful. And even in that case, I'd be like, okay, we didn't really think about what the fuck is going on in Reddit could actually impact this world, but we need to pipe that into our system real fast and pouring Twitter's feed into our system, building tools on top of that to identify. It's like, oh, this is next one that's there. Do we have high short interest stocks? Could something become targeted? That's very much a whack-a-mole exercise. So you asked about what is about what's actually going on. Just to give some examples of that, I remember hearing a rumor during that week, Citadels taking down, telling their books to cut in half.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All use the GameStop week of January of 21, maybe as a more isolated example to just our industry. So if you remember then, he's really a four-day period started on a Friday and there were some rumors that Melbourne was really having some trouble with her game style position. And then Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, for a very brief period of time, people are industry just absolutely freaked the fuck out. And there is this idea.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's not to say that there's this eyes closed. We'll be fine no matter what, very much paying attention, but definitely being able to hold your ground when you're going through it is really affordable.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not particularly good. So that's a huge piece of it as well, saying within that distribution of outcomes, what leverage level am I comfortable with? Another thing that is pretty critical, you ask the question of how much does it vary, especially at the larger platforms, being able to, and this is true for us too, being able to say, okay, I'm confident that I actually can have a view on the potential range of outcomes, so I don't need to be like, oh, my risk management strategy is just to take down gross. That's stupid. And there's a lot of investors. and very famous ones that have made a mistake over the years of oh when it gets a little dicey i'm just going to pull back from that you kind of need to prepare for that storm ahead of the fact which is where vector analysis does come into play so it's cliche but you can play position of strength mate when everyone else is a little bit weaker so that's another maybe misunderstood but certainly important point to make is that the risk management policies i think this is a technique thing they're built to withstand crazy things that can happen in markets”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that complicated to say if you go bit by bit and block by block, and that piece is really important. I think it's insane to try to start one of these businesses from scratch. There's a free works that I've tried. The results of that have not been great. But if you're going bit by bit and saying, okay, I'm a $100 million firm and my standard deviation is plus or minus $500,000 a day. So it analyzes a million. Okay, I'm in range there. Then I get a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. And you keep it at that same level. The leverage overall at the firm stays relatively constant for us. It's been 500 to 600% over the years and that's reasonably stable. But no one has specifically saying I need to apply this leverage concept. You're really backing into I need to deliver interesting returns for my investors in order to do that with a variable lag and forecast, which is much more around volatility and also the potential for loss as well because realistically if you're trying to make call low to mid double digit returns a year, having a 10% drawdown, 15% drawdown.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So ultimately, you're targeting a return profile for your investor base. It's much easier to target a volatility profile than return profile. So you're really backing into, okay, if I'm trying to make 15% return to investors and I want to do that very consistently, really, really good net returns would be about a three sharp ratio. So just again, do simple math. The sharp ratio for the best platforms has been at that level the past couple years, but three sharp ratios aren't realistic, but nonetheless. Let's say it's 5% annualized fall at the fund level. So the leverage that you're taking and say, okay, I need to be in this category and returns day to day you can't necessarily measure, but you can get a pretty good sense of your volatility profile just by looking at the distribution of your P&L. And there is an element of we're backing into with the range of possibilities that can happen of, I'm generally speaking, going to be 5% to 7% analyzed vol. And I don't want to trivialize that problem because it is not simple, but it's also.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this gale is dramatic. And that's what I was saying before the model makes a lot of sense. It's very easy to articulate. Oh, you just earned two, three percent on gross market value. I can do that. But no, no, you have to do that at scale, not just from an AUM perspective, from a strategy standpoint perspective. It's very difficult to execute. It's very much an execution challenge.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is about 100, but millennium, so I think about 300. So the scale is large. And that's where it's very complex management exercise.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing as well when you're building a multi manager platform, you think about playing to your strengths. You can't do everything all at once. At scale, if you're a citadel, you've been around for 30 years that you've had time to build these different businesses and build them in high quality fashion. And that's where there can be attention because there's definitely benefits of diversification. But if you're expanding too quickly, then you just lose money in diversified ways.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started as a volatility specialist mostly in single name options. We still are very active training options. It's a different style than what we started with, but still very active there. A lot of single name equities trading, but most of asset class level volatility across our entire business, that number is still at this point 25% or so 25 to 30 percent is related to volatility trading. We do a lot in long short equity. So that would be another 40% or so. And then the balance is split up between capital market strategies and fixed income and macro strategies of various different formats. And I'm not to say that's the ideal fashion. As I said, the history for us, we started as a volatility specialist and we started pushing this other areas. Sorry, I forgot Kwan in that as well. That would be that last bucket. Quant is a decently large part of what we do about 20%. Fixed income macro is a small piece. That was the point I was trying to make. And that's not because we don't believe that there are good things to do in that category. It's just it's not our background. It's not our DNA. And that's.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're fucking smart. You have the same technical abilities are there, and I can say that with personal knowledge. So what differentiates people is how you're putting together everything in the soup as one. That's a bunch of small decisions that are much more akin to artists making painting on a canvas than necessarily following a terministic standpoint. And that can be how you're combining balance sheet data with technical price data, which type of machine learning model you're using. And then that feeding into portfolio construction piece of how much you're trying to optimize for sharp ratio versus how much you're trying to optimize for drawdown and all these different elements, how much of your exposure is going to be in the US, how much it's going to be outside, how are you going to shift that around? There's all these tiny, tiny decisions even in building an equities.arb strategy.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Signals, but at the same time, arc waste our business running at scale for almost eight years. A lot of the data that they're using has been available really since the 70s. You go back, CopyStat's been around for a long time. And when you read about Princeton Newport, what they were doing in the 80s, they're talking about fucking value and momentum. Yeah, that book about it is great, but the core concepts have been there for a while. What does change, it is still very competitive. I'm not trying to say it's not competitive, is that even in quant, there's still artists. And this is what we find in evaluating. There's definitely quantitative artists that are saying, okay, Quant, especially that style of equities at our quant investing, is less about finding the thing that no one else has. And I think that's totally ridiculous to think that you really are going to find something that no one else has found, especially when you realize that at least since 1990, people that go to the elite universities of the world have been pouring into quantitative finance. And everyone's”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A futures markets, and it does even impact equities markets because of the positioning of that industry. Trend followers have been around since the 70s and generated decent uncorrelated returns for quite a while. And last year was one of the best trend follower years in quite some time. Now, the sharp ratio of those strategies is less than one. If you're a good trend follower, you're like a 0.8 chart. And I can say this because I wrote a trend following strategy over a decade ago that still runs. So I actually know everything that's in there and the nuances are different, but it doesn't necessarily mean it goes away. So that's how I think about it a bit more. In Kwantland and multi-managers, most of what Kwan is, is equity stead are. And that's analogous to what I was mentioning before, is that you're long $100, you're short $100, you're looking for idiosyncratic returns. So what people are fighting over now is there's a signal aspect. Is there some new bit of data that could help improve my?”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Related to sharp ratio. You can't just group quant into one bucket. And there are quant strategies that are double digit sharp ratios. And if anything, the half-life of those is a lot shorter. And that's because if you just think about it from an analytical framework, the higher the sharper ratio, the closer it is to a pure arbitrage. And at some point, capital is going to flow in and close that arbitrage. And there are real 10 sharp ratio strategies out there. I've seen them that can run for years. So it's not like anything that the higher the sharp ratio, the faster it dies. But generally speaking, something could be great for six months because of some strange anomaly and then go away. At the other end of the spectrum, you think of something like trend falling strategies. I started my career after grad school. It was at the time the world's largest trend flying manager. And trend followers are very simply, I'm going to look at momentum typically measured by moving average crossover, and that's going to determine how long I am or how short I am. It's still a huge part.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are coming together. Look, this is finance. This is the money making business. We're taking money from rich institutions and we're trying to make it into more money. So as humans, you need to find purpose in doing that. And yes, there's all sorts of stories you can tell about who those institutions actually are and their core purpose, which is true. But for the people that are in there day to day, this notion of how you do anything is how you do everything. And let's be excellent for the sake of being excellent. That doesn't mean that we are excellent in every way, but at least that's the goal. And my role now is leading that across our investment and our non-investment functions. And the non-investment functions are so critically important in our business. That is what I personally enjoy the most.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get bigger, I'm interfacing with people and putting in place people that I really trust that are experts in their domain. My official title as CEO and CIO's Achievement Investment Officer. But the investments that I'm making are investments in strategies. I'm not making a call on individual stocks. I'm not making macro calls. And effectively, the individual strategies are, to use a normal company analogy, they're like individual products. And I'm saying, how much do we want to invest over here in our equity longshore business as a whole? and then maybe in particular areas and how do we get the right coverage across the map do we want to start bulking up our quant business just like again another division of the firm and for me having a quantitative background and the ability to abstractly architect data has been very helpful what i personally really enjoy is because it is such a human business and i really think that is overlooked the multi-strip model this business is risk and people on the people side is so important being given the opportunity to lead groups of people that affect”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me personally Definitely the latter. Definitely ladder. Earlier in my career, I went to grad school for math, started off at a big quan firm in London. I was able to, in a random experience, spend some time in now one of the great growth equity firms in Chicago. So for people that have my seat, if I just have a wider range of experiences, and even when I first came to Wall, I was running my own quant strategies that I wrote personally, I was running code all day, and then it was evolving into hiring teams of people in quant strategies and then more broadly across effectively over time everything that can be done in our world. And in terms of the differences between being a PM, it's essential for someone in my position to have been a PM. That's for the psychology aspect of it. And to be successful in doing that, you need to prove your bona fides and you also need to be able to say, I understand psychologically how hard that could be, no matter who you are. But in terms of where we are now, my role is I'm designing processes. And increasingly, as we...”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going back to reasonable competent people that are doing the obvious things well, yeah, if you're in a tough spot, you want to have a fair conversation about it as opposed to just essentially being fired by some 23-year-old because in a spreadsheet, the cell goes from green to red. That's again what these hike help people want.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drydown, and they get close to the point at which there's this drydown limit, which every firm has, including us. And that's really a way to say from a statistical standpoint, let's automate the offboarding process. Obviously, the hardest piece in risk allocation, whether that's alloc individual positions or allocating individual managers, is one to actually call a quiz because there's this human psychological bias to say, oh, okay, if I fire someone or if I change my idea that I failed in some way. So drawdown limits are very helpful to just automate that and take the human emotion out of it. But the PMs want to feel like, well, shit, there actually could be situations. They're rare, but there are situations where the path matters and that could be not the right decision to do. So what we tell people, look, that is rare. This is definitely not, oh, if you've got a great story, you can just keep going indefinitely. But we're willing to have that conversation that we are investors ourselves and have a lot of experience of what it's like to be in that situation. And that is what PMs really respect. Again,”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes there can be competition for those analysts as well. So PMs will come to me and say, hey, I really like this person. They're in process in a number of places. Can you speak to them? Absolutely. And people feel that in all various different ways, as I mentioned, whether that's getting the weeds in a technical problem, whether that's helping with recruiting. And that doesn't mean one of the things I haven't mentioned, it's not like we're saying we're soft on anything goes and you can lose a ton of money and there's no problem to that. That's not the attitude. I think we're very fair in that respect, which is a third piece is that when you talk about all these risk parameters in the corridors, sometimes from the outside people like, oh, well, this group, they run with such tight limits. And here you basically can't operate. Generally speaking, I don't think that's true. Maybe with the exception of one farm. Overall, the risk corridors are fair, but what PMs want to feel is that it's just that they are actually fair. And if they have a question or they want to actually have a discussion with a reasonable person, let's say someone's going through.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I was doing, and I have the knowledge to be able to do that. Same with the other partners. There's this notion of no one's above that. No one's a figurehead. And that can be really, really in the details at times. That doesn't mean that I'm micromanaging or getting lost in the weeds, but there's definitely a place to be like, yeah, be hands-on, get after it, show people that it's important. And I've had so many new PMs that have come here and be like, I can't believe that you actually took the time to look into that personally. Or when you said that it's going to get taken care of. Just even something as simple. I need some new futures options enabled in the system, can we actually go through and do that? Okay, fine. I'm not saying we're the only firm that operates that way, but definitely from my experience, the best firms, you still have very hands-on senior people that are also, frankly, very confident able to do that. And you're showing PMs really that they're important and they care. It's not just about hiring PMs, but you're really building teams of investors. You have a PM. They could have sub-PMs. They can analyze.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not overly complicated, but doing it the right way, not putting on errors, it would be totally inaccurate to say that it's a family. It's not a family. It's a business. It's a professional sports team. But professional sports teams can still operate with respect or respect for everyone across the organization. So that's one element. The other element, which does, I think, come from our firm a bit more and the particular people that are running the business, myself and my other partners, and very fortunate because we have effectively our chairman who's very successful, who's almost 70. And then there's a group of us young guys that are running the business. And there's a great balance there. The young guys, we're really, really hands-on. And I think that also really resonates with PMs. If we bring someone into our firm and let's say that it's a little bit of a new category for us, we haven't necessarily done this type of strategy before or we're not perfect in some dimension, which can happen. You don't have certain product types enabled or you need a new technology piece. Even at this day, I'll get really involved because years ago, that's...”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Vanis Rizing is not a joke. I literally live in a lake. People ice fish. There are pickup trucks that will drive a mile offshore. That's not exaggerated. Come there in August, but we brought the entire firm out there, had a party on the lake, and I had my office door open the entire time people coming in and asking questions, like, how do you think about this? How do you think about that? What is the firm doing in these dimensions? So there's a notion of accessibility and just, again,”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give an example of that of someone that we just hired who was definitely their profile. And we still try to get the entire firm together. And we're 300 people so we can still do that. But we're all over the world. So that's harder. But we brought the entire firm out to Minnesota in early August. Minnesota's had absolutely amazing place to visit six months a year. The other six months a year absolutely do not go there.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brilliant. It's like if Michael Jordan was still playing basketball. That's the analogy to think of, or is the Elon Musk a money making? Like, really? And that's such a gift to people like me to say, okay, there's someone up there who is still pushing it, who is still going to the limits, who is not satisfied. That is amazing. But I think the one thing where those firms, and partly could just be science, are a little bit vulnerable, is this notion of thinking about the individual PM experience and what are they looking for? What is the attachment that they want to look for? Because they still want to be part of something, I believe, or a certain group of people that want to be part of something. They don't just want to be a mercenary sitting in some random ass office in Dubai or Spain or you name it and you see all these places poking up. They still want to have a connection to the firm. And we can tell a story of our Minnesota roots, of our prop trading roots, of realism and all the partners.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out. So when we recruit, when we talk to PMs, it's not like I go out and say, We're the best in every single dimension. I think we're great in some areas. We're good in other areas, and we still suck in certain areas. And that's fine. We want to accept where we are. And I'll tell people that, but definitely when someone interacts with me, the other members of the senior team, you'll be like, that's an intellectually honest person. That's someone who's not bullshitting me. There's a realism to that. And because there is so much bullshit in finance, if you're really high caliber individual and you're selecting because there is a little bit of supply demand imbalance, you're selecting across a number of firms, they want to work with the intellectually honest person. But they don't want to sacrifice competency. You need to have both. You can't just tell a great story about we're great people. We got this great culture. We treat each other really well. You need to be really fucking good. If you're not, it doesn't work. But if you can do both, that's really powerful. And because the biggest firms in our industry, who are amazing institutions, I have so much respect for all of them, especially Citadel. And I think Ken Griffin is truly.”
2023-09-05 · Invest Like the Best · Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds - [Invest Like the Best, EP.342] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source