Hello, and welcome to What Goes Up, a weekly markets podcast. My name is Mike Reagan. I'm a senior editor at Bloomberg and I'm Aldana Higherk across Acid reporter with Bloomberg. And this week on the show, Well, this year's bear market in stocks has drawn a lot of attention to hedge funds, many of whom have been doing a lot better than the market as a whole. But what if I could tell you you could package some popular hedge funds strategies into et f s that charge a fraction of the management fees and don't come with all the strings attached about who can invest in them and when they can cash out. Well, our guest this week has been working on exactly that, and quite successfully. But first, Folbanna, I've got to warn you, Mike, I've got a good crazy thing this week. I know you're a big link LinkedIn users, that right, Yeah, except to add you as I would not know since you refused to allow me to join your professional network on LinkedIn. Yeah? Is this your favorite social media app? I hate all the social media I do too, but I use LinkedIn like so much to add all these new connections. And I know you're adding on left and right all the that's just NonStop. Well, my crazy thing is going to make you think twice about doing that. I would really, but you know I wouldn't know because I'm not a member of your professional Maybe and it will say this way, maybe we can use that as a new gimmick. If we get a certain number of ratings on Apple podcast, Donna has to add me. What's the number for ratings to add me on LinkedIn? Throw something big out three one. I was going to say a thousand, but okay, hundred one. Remember once we had three hundred, we're revealing the Donna's high school nickname. Which would you rather first the nickname or me add you on LinkedIn? Well, of the we're at two, I think, so three is the uh gets the nickname? Three of one? You have to add me on and so we'll see, we'll see, we'll see. Maybe no one wants to take it to three one. They don't do not want me. But but you know what I usually say, guess who is in my LinkedIn network? Probably this week's guest, this week's guest. Yeah, that's right, Well I'll add him right after the show. Actually, I want to spite me. By the way, don't get flattered. I want to introduce Andrew Beer. He is managing member at Dynamic Beta. Welcome to the show, Andrew, and to my LinkedIn network. Oh thank you so much for having me. I wanted to ask you to maybe just start out telling us a little bit about yourself and about your background. And by background, I mean professional background, but if you're up for it, you can also sort of paint the picture for our listeners of what your actual background is like, since we're doing a zoom call with you and we can see it and it's it's fantastic. Well, I'm sitting comfortably up in the outeron ducks right now, trying to divide my time between endless zoom calls and actually going out inside and seeing nature. Um. But my my background has been in the hedge fund industry for almost thirty years. I was I was very fortunate to join the industry in the early days and but you know, my my singular obsession over the past fifteen years has been some of the points that that you're alluding to, which is that done right, hedge funds can have great benefits and they can benefit more than just that big pension plan down the street. But you know, there's actually been the success rated products that have been then launched for a broader audience has actually been very, very poor. And so what we in our business have really focused on for more than a decade at this point is is really how do you get those diversification benefits but you know, and shocking to people in the hedge fund industry, but actually in a client friendly package. You know. That's that's it's it's just been our singular focus. It's what we do, and unfortunately we're seeing some success in it today. Yeah, I'll say with the one et f's UH to share or something like that dB m F, the h I M dB I Managed Futures et F. I wanted to and ask you about sort of the history of trying to replicate hedge fund strategies in ets because I get the impression it's not you know, hey, some traders quit a hedge fund and are trying to you know, put that strategy directly into an et F. There. It seems like there's more of an academic background, you know, the Andrew Lows of of m I T and and that sort of thing. Is it talk to us about sort of how this all came to be. Uh, the notion of replicating hedge fund strategies in et s, I came at it from completely the opposite direction, which was that, you know what what hedge fund replication is all about is basically the in hedge funds, it's always the big trades to make a difference. You know, when when Stan druck and Miller calls inflation, he doesn't talk about trying to arbitrage between the twenty nine year treasury at thirty year treasuries, like I'm betting rates are going up in commodities are going up. Uh. You know when people talk about John Paulson and subprime, they don't say, oh, but his very very best trade was to buy a few million dollars of this tronch and and and profit from it. Right. So it's it's it's pretty obvious to anyone who's been in the hedge fund industry that if you can figure out the big trades of hedge funds, that you're gonna be able to explain most of what they do. And and what Andrew Low from M I T and a bunch of other academics basically pointed out was, you know, again in seventy page papers with a lot of statistics. Is what was pretty obvious to people in the industry all along. What hedge fund replication is as a strategy is just trying to find the best way to identify what those big trades are and then copy them cheaply and efficiently today. And if you can do that, then you can do it in an e t F, you can do it in a mutual fund, you can do it any use it's fund. And so look, I've looked at I've looked at this question for fifteen years, and there's only one thing we found. We found something better, we would do it. This is the only thing that we have found that works reliably well. So can you talk more about your e t F? And Mike mentioned it's up some twenty this year and we've had such a brutal year so that our performance really stands out, But what is it about the e t F that's helped to get to that point? So so we in that e t F we basically copy the big positions of twenty large hedge funds that pursue a strategy called managed futures MANATUTRES is one of those irritatingly vague and complicated terms that people use and then really understand what it means. But basically, what these hedge funds do is they have quant based strategies that are playing off the fact that the rest of us human investors are kind of emotional. You know, we don't change our minds easily. Sometimes we pile into things too late, et cetera. And so what that does is it creates trends in the market. An asset that that you know, starts rolling down a hill kind of keeps rolling and sometimes it accelerates, and they don't get it right all the time, but sometimes they get it really right, and this year they've gotten it really right. Um. And so what we do is we basically look at these twenty large hedge funds and say, all right, if they're buying crude oil, then we simply go out and buy a futures contract on crude oil. If they're shorting treasuries betting that rates are going to go up, we'll go out in short treasuries. If they're betting that the dollar is going to be strong against the end, we'll we'll do the same trade. And so, you know, so the whole idea of it is is that you've got really smart guys who do this every day with tons and tons of resources. We're just I mean, we're almost like Ikea or something, you know, we're we're just we're trying to copy what they do, but do it cheaply and efficiently. And what specifically was it doing this year? Was it short treasuries or what was the strategy? So I mean so much to everyone's surprised. The biggest gainer this year has actually been shorting the yen against the dollar. And again for you know, when you talk about the craziest things in the market, I think if you'd ask FX strategists earlier this year, you know what, where the end is at a hundred and fifteen, where could it possibly go? You know, the guy who said a hundred and twenty five would have been laughed out of the room. And then low and behold, it almost hit a hundred and forty. So the you know, the funds got that position early and and wrote it. But they also they were right and long in crude oil at the right time. They were short treasuries when rad started to go up. So it's really been it's been three big principal trades that have delivered most of that performance. That's fascinating. I was gonna ask you if trend following is too simple, simplistic of a of an explanation for it, but it sounds it sounds like not. But I'm I'm curious, is it, you know, is it something that can be systematic and sort of rules based or is there a lot of uh, you know, just watching the tape and and making sort of discretionary decisions about about what the trends look like. So so I I irritate a lot of people in the managerer space by basically saying, I don't think it's that complicated, right to me, it's the modern day version of that guy with that we all know, with the candle chart who's telling you that something has just broken through its moving average and it's gonna go keep, you know, keep going up the you know what was that guy saying? He was saying that that. You know, people fall in love with stocks and they drive them higher, They bail out of things, and you know, sort of dump things at the same time. Sometimes the world changes and they're very very slow to respond. What Manaiteucher's fund does it's got a lot of human beings sitting around with a lot of computers, and so it's not as though somebody has created some computer and then you know, like Tesla autopilot kind of set it to work. Rather, it's guys trying to figure out and constantly tweaking and changing the models and trying to figure out the right parameters over time. So it's it's a systematic strategy in that these guys are what they buy and sell every day is riven by computers. But there's a very human side of how people end up building the models, what they like and what they don't like. And so I think there's often this misunderstanding when people say it's quant based. They think it's it's it's hell in in two thousand and one with its own identity. It's not. They're just expressions of human beings who happened to be quantity of nature. Yeah, and is that true you think of the entire stay ct A and Managed Futures universe, because I do. I do think of it as more almost autopilot in a lot of ways, But that's mistaken impression. It's it's autopilot on a day to day basis. Right, So it's not it's no one's looking at footnotes, no one's making big macro calls that they think, you know, there's no macro strategists involved. And really what they're doing is they're saying, Okay, the you know, crude oil gold has been going down, do we think it's going to keep going down? And and every model will look at that question in a slightly different way. And you know, I think I think what people when when people use terms like trend following, the problem is that that it almost sounds as simple as equities, like if if we if we say, you know, did equities do well tomorrow? No one in the corner says, well, you know the type of I mean, you know, the tie equity market went up, therefore equities went up. Well, right, that's one small market out of many. Um. But in in you know, in the trend following world, because the models are so different, my model may be very different than yours, and so we may end up with very very different results. So it kind of it kind of fools people into thinking that everybody does things the same way, and they really don't. I was hoping you could also talk about what trends you guys are looking at right now, like what is the market showing your where potentially is do you envision the e t F heading for the remainder of the year. I mean, so I have no idea where it's going to head for the remainder of the year, right, because that's that's basically we'll see those these hedge funds will change their positioning and then we will follow along with what they're doing. Um. I think you know the big change if you'd ask me at the end of June and said if you could describe the portfolio and one word, I would have said inflation. You know it was it was a bet on rates going up, for their equities going down, commodities going up, and the dollar being strong versus other parts of the world. Um. And and you know, underlying that was basically the view that Powell and the Fed we're going to keep raising raids aggressively and that was going to play out through lots of different markets. If you if I had to put a word on it today, I'd say recession. You know, we've we've largely gotten out of those short treasury you know, interest rates are going up forever bets we continue to be short equities. We continue to believe the dollar is going to be better because I think the view is that if it gets bad in the US, my god, how bad is it going to be in Europe or Japan? And so you know that's we've we've seen a big reduction in our exposure or long exposure to crude oil for instance. Um So, so really what the models are doing is almost interpreting what they're seeing in these private price foods, and it gives us an interesting vantage point. But I wouldn't say that it's predictive because we could have a very different positioning and in three months, and that's going to depend upon how people in the markets change their views somethings. And if curious, what sort of all the strategies are that can or or can't be replicated in an ETF, especially because I'm fascinated with your background. I know you worked at bow Past with Seth Klarman, who's you know, traditionally considered one of, you know, sort of the best bottoms up stock pickers, which to me seems like it would be a very difficult thing, at least at this point to replicate in an e t F. And don't even get started on horse race picks because he's killing it with those two with his thoroughbreds, won the congratulationship. It's a lifelong dream. It's incredible for it. So he picks stocks and he picks horse as well. I I it's hard to replicate either, I think in a in a in an ETF strategy. Yeah, so so you're you're correct. Most things cannot be a lot of things cannot be replicated. Um, the two strategies that are easiest to replicate our managed futures and equity long short And you know, in in homage to Seth, I think one of the things that he drilled into me someone years ago was, you know, don't do things just to do things, And and the whole asset management business is this manic just do stuff, you know, launch new products, launch change what we're doing, etcetera, etcetera. And and you know, we've only launched three strategies, three replication based strategies in fifteen years because most don't work. And and and we we won't launch them if they don't work, if we don't think they're gonna work. So the you know, we would never try to replicate bow Posts. We don't try to replicate millennium. We don't try to replicate you know, small pools of funds. But but you know, but what what replication does? I think better than anybody else, and better than anything else is the this category of hedge funds is up five over the next three years, and we're up seven, it's up nine, we're up eleven, it's up three, we're up five. And it does it consistently. And and that index plus ethos of it comes from replicating lots of funds. So you get diversification, just like the SMP five is more diversified than any of the stocks in it. But then you outperform in the old fashioned way, which is by by by charging less, by cutting out fees and charging less. And and that is a unique solution for the wealth management and are a world, because they build model portfolios and when they decide that they want to invest in managed futures, their measure of success is I made an allocation in five years the space up let's say eight percent a year, and mike pick is up ten and it never materially underperformed. There are no other products in the liquid alts world that do that well. And so that's why we did it in the t F because we're trying to change the the how a large part of the E t F world looks at these kinds of strategies. Well, how do you want people to be looking at the strategies, Because that's a really interesting point about just having three e t F because I think you recently said you wanted to be the vanguard of of hedge funds. So maybe you can talk a little bit more about that and what you mean by that. So, so we want people to look at our strategies and say, I can make this an allocation as part of as part of my model portfolio. Right, so I can I can get exposure to manage futures with a single et F. I can get exposure to equity longshore with a single et F. And then there's no noise over the next five years because because what happens in the liquid all the worlds as they say, Um, I just found some great guy. He just had his killer year last year, and and you know we want to be invested in Mannag Tuchers. We're going to give it to him. And then the next year, the guy's underperformed everybody else by fifteen and so if you're an advisor or you're building a model portfolio, that's a nightmare for you. You've got this five percent allocation and you're sitting across from your clients and saying, I thought, you guys told me this guy who was the best guy in the space, and now he's the worst guy in the space, and that that hamster wheel of picking a fund and then replacing it, picking a new fund and replacing it has been incredibly costly. So in the morning started a great study that chasing hot dots in this space cost allocators more than of the dollars they would have made bye bye by doing nothing. And so what we want is people to use our products as the sleep at night solution. We we we make it as a strategic allocation, and then it just does its job with no fanfare, and five years later we're happy. It's funny, Andrew, you were choking before we started taping that you've been known and dropped some grenades. Some quote grenades. I think it was your your comment, uh and from your notes here, this one's kind of a quot grenade. I gotta say the liquid alts world is an embarrassment. Is that? Is that what you mean basically what you just explained by that pull pulling yet another pin on yet another quote. Quind, Yeah, look, I mean the liquid alts world. I mean it. To me, it harkens to Einstein's alleged definition of insanity, which people keep doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. This is a space that, give or take, let's say it's had four billion dollars in it for the past decade, it's made one point six percent per annum. Okay, the fees on it are more than that, right, So so just just think about this, right, You've got You've got tons and tons and tons of really smart people who launched tons and tons of products that we're supposed to do six seven eight percent per annum, and and and and and weather the storm. I my guess is that there's been seventy billion dollars of fees that's been paid paid to people over the past decade to generate that one point six percent perantum, and yet people keep doing roughly the same thing set at the time. So you know, when I first as a hedge fund guy, when I first looked at the space about ten years ago, I thought it was insane, and I really I thought it was like the products have have no demonstrable diversification value. But I've have developed a more nuanced view over time. There are reasons people do it. There are all sorts of structural issues in the industry. But but look, what we're trying to do is is really talk to people who are making the allocation decisions from from their perspective. You know what, what do we think of their real issues? What are they trying to solve, and how do we help them to solve them? Because that's how we built all of our products. Yeah, I imagine when it's a lowly paid pension fund manager you're hit with, Well, the manager of such and such a hedge fund took me on his private jet to the to the Super Bowl last year. Well, then that guy is probably in jail today if you did that. Yeah. I mean it's it's so our products really don't have not so far had a great appeal in the institutional space because because there there's always a I there. You know, there's somebody whose job it is to pick hetch funds. And you know, I thought this product fifteen years ago would be a great answer for those pension plants, right, they want low fees, they want liquidity. The problem is they have a consultant who standing there, who buy and large Their job is to pick hetge funds. And what they want to be able to say is when when a client says, why am I paying three or four hundred basis points a year for something that's making less than that? And they want to be able to say, well, if we if there was a cheaper option, you know, a more liquid option, you know, we would bring it to you. There just isn't and and so so you take DPMF Right, it does. In the first three years, it did five basis points better than these twenty flagship edge funds with probably a quarter of the fetes. Why would every pension plan fiduciary not put that at the top of their list? And I hope they do, But I've been I faced these these biting headwinds for years from people where it's might be great for their clients but not great for their jobs and their careers. Well, and I imagine the answer, you know, why am I paying this fee for this performance? Is something about while you're like this, when you have a bear market in equities, hedge funds are actually doing a lot better than that. Your et F is doing a lot better than that. And that's sort of you know, the way I think of hedge funds is that they're sort of almost like your insurance policy in a in a big broad portfolio like that, when you know when you're regular equity and even bond portfolios in the crapper this year, while a good hedge fund will at least get you know, break even and with any luck, performed better, is there is that Is that the best you can ask for with something like this? Or is there the potential in your mind that even if you know smps up next year, this thing could be up more. No, everything, every problem we have is meant to be a diversifier to sixty forty portfolios, um and and during the two thousand tents that was kind of allowsy position to be in because sixty portfolios, I mean, everybody who procrastinated about diversification in sixty forty portfolios in the two thousand tens and one, and then the next year they won again. Year after that they won again. I mean it was the SMP was up from the from the lows. In two thousand nine, the SMP was up sixtent a year until even until the past month or so. I mean, who in the world would have said the equity risk premium would be fift basis points over twelve years UM. So it's always they're always viewed in the context that managed futures is. And I talk a lot about this. Managed teachers as a strategy has more diversification bang for the buck than any other hedge fund strategy. It's it marches to the beat of its own drum. During normal times, it might make mid single digit returns, nothing spectacular, But then you get a year like this when it's up, whateverything's down. Same thing happened in two thousand eight, same happened during the dot com crisis. So you have this very very unusual strategy where it's almost like an insurance policy that pays you while you're waiting. The problem is that that there are these two big land mines in this space. One land mine is there is no way to get exposure to the space. Instead, you have to pick this guy or that guy or that guy. And that's like saying I want to exposure to emerging market stocks and then picking one stock. Right, it's going to be a problem for you in the next few years. And the other thing is that fees and expenses. So you know, first we got into the space in two thousand fifteen. Over the first four or five years, clients made zero. And people would say it was a terrible period of time for for the space, and I said, actually no, everyone else was fine. But you like, I mean, there are plenty of trading. Mean, the guys who were counter party has made a lot of money, the hedge ones made a lot of money. Everybody made money, but a hundred percent of it went to everybody else. You took all the risk and got none of the rewards. And so you know, back to the point about about I mean the philosophical similarities with van Guard and what they tried to do was basically saying, look, there's this there's this crazy industry structure problem, and and how do we solve it in the most simple and straightforward an elegant way. And that that that produced the index business, and it took and it faced decades of resistance, and and you know, when I've had people say, don't worry, you know, your third decade doing this will be great, I'm like, that's not really comforting we can we have a few more wins in decade number two. Bocal is a little younger when he started Van Guard. I guess catch, I'm catching up backround. But Andrew, you were just talking about how institutions haven't really warmed to your products yet. So I'm just wondering who who your target audience is and who actually has been buying the E T F s where, whether it's the retail crowd or who has been Yeah, so so our our audience so far has been our right and so and I have it has been a great um pleasure and opportunity to get to know these guys well over the past several years. Um. You know, there's this you talk to an institutional consulting pernment, they feel like what they do is somehow superior and more sophisticated than what you know, an r A A who's managing four million dollars is doing. I look at it completely the opposite way. The guy who's running the r A he's got a business to run. He's an entrepreneur. He is dealing with all of the I've been an entrepreneur for closer twenty five years, and you're dealing with all these different things every day, and and and you have to make calls and and if you make the wrong call, you you you end up with with all sorts of of of issues and problems in your business that you then have to deal with a lot of you know, the consulting and other businesses tend to be they're kind of insulated from from the ramifications of of their decision making. So the people who bought it have really said have really it's been conversations about about how this solves problems for them. You know, they want to diversify, they want to be able to to to have things outside of sixty forty portfolios. But but it's it's working with them to articulate what it is they're looking for. And when you get through it all, what everybody's trying to do is with an asset class bucket, it's index plus, it's it's it's do as well as the category, do a little bit better than the category over time, and do it consistently. It's not as exciting as picking the guy who just had a banner year, but you don't get the hangover when the guy crashes. And and that then means that as entrepreneurs as businessmen, they can spend more time talking to their clients, they can get they can bring in new clients, they can think more strategically about their businesses. So it's been it's been very symbiotic for us, and I think where it goes from here as we continue to make a lot of traction of that market. There are thousands and thousers of guys who do this, you know, And I spent a lot of time talking about this point and what about the typical retail investor in the retail Investor cohort, because I know we have this very vague category within the e t F space called complex ETFs where we don't really know how to define a define it. But but possibly your e t F would fall under that category. And I know regulators have been a bit outspoken in recent months about you know, maybe retail investors having to be cautious investing in their money in some of these products. So how are you thinking about that? So I think so I feel like our audience and really the only people that I talked to professional investors who have may have thousands of of retail clients. But but I'm dealing with with with pros. So in terms of the like. I hope, I hope the regulators get it right in terms of the complex ets, because we trade futureist contracts, but we're not you know, a three x leveraged fund that that that that can blow overnight. Um, it's designed. These are designed to be you know, stable, predictable, long term allocations, you know. I think I think the architecture of the e t F world is interesting in that most of the capital in the e t F world is model portfolios, anything from the blindingly simple sixty forty portfolio you can get from for free from Vanguard to much more complicated things. And then there is also another part of the industry that I would call the gun slingers. You know, these are the people who are who talked about social media in the beginning, you know, who are emphatic and loud about arc in the same way that they're emphatic and loud about crypto, and they're and they're going to buy this trend and do that. I call them the gun slingers. And I don't we don't have anything to do with them, right if if you're look, I don't know whether our fund is going to do well in the next month. Or not right. Nobody knows that. I think we will do well over the next five years or ten years, and so I need people who think with that time horizon and a gun slinger who's thinking about how do I day trade this E t F or short arc here to that that's let's let's those are like those are like the you know, they're they're just not relevant to us. We're we're talking about I mean, man, this is my cisistic I just throughout the other day. Is that managed futures et F s right, so many tuchers is one of the most valuable hedgehune strategies for diversification purposes out of the overall et F world. It's between point oh one and point oh two of assets and and and But a lot of that comes back down to an education issue. Guys who build these kinds of products, they talk in their own language. I've been in this business for a long time. I'm not a quant by background. I don't understand what they're talking about, right, And so, so what we've got to do as a business, if we're going to bring more people into the tent and get that to one to two percent, we've got to change the language and how we talk about it, and and I am trying to you know, when I'm not tossing quote grenades, I am trying to come up with a language to talk about this that resonates and and a lot of it is is feeding off my conversations with guys who do buy into it and what we're doing. But we've got to get a lot better at at articulating the benefits and how and what people can't expect and how they can then turn communicated to their clients. And hopefully we'll have this conversation in two years and we can talk about progress on that left. You know, the universe of futures products is so large, right, you know, I'm wondering if there's any uh that you just would steer completely away from, you know, bitcoin futures or lean hog futures, you know, is are you pretty much open to anything? So it's it's it's a really interesting question. So we actually only trade about ten core futures contracts and so so we have a three word motto that relates source strategies, which is simple as better Right, it's it's and that is something that makes people in who market hedge funds their heads explode, right because they they their whole thing is this is incredibly complicated, You'll never understand it. But therefore you should pay us at everybody else lot of money to give you access to this magical, wonderful, you know, opportunity. I think people who've been inside the industry just don't find it all that mysterious and magical. I look there there, and there are plenty of people who do things in this industry that I think are are magical. Like what what Ken Griffin has been able to do? What is the anglinger has been able to do? Um? You know, Stan Druck and Miller. I think anytime that guy says anything, just never take the other side because it's investment suicide. Right. The guys just unbelievably good. But but but by and large, um, the the so those tenders, So I'm guessing those ten or the major equity. I mean, we we care if coude oil goes up and down, not whether pork bellies goes up or down. You know, is gold going up or down? Is is is the tenure treasury going up or down? And and and the reason is it's these are the deepest and most liquid and efficient markets, and I promise you there will never be a year in the next five years where somebody at the Financial Times or Wall Street General says, uh, you know, these twenty largest managed tutors hedge funds made killing in pork bellies last year, and we're up twenty percent. There's not tens of billions of dollars to be made in the in those areas. And you alluded to this already, But I'm wondering how difficult it has been to market your products, because you know, we were just talking about how difficult it is to describe some of these concepts managed futures and liquid alts. So how difficult is it to actually talk to people and have them sort of get up, buy in, or even understand what the what the e t f s are. Well, it's you know, there's there's huge heterogeneity among the investor base. I would say most of the conversations that we've had so far have been from people who bought into the concept of managed futures, you know, two, three, seven years ago. I mean, there's there's a kind of a funny expression among guys who allocate to managed futures that it's it's it's a space that's sold destroying because the moment you fall in love with the manager, he somehow craps out and you have no idea why, and you can't explain it to your investing committee or your clients. Um So I would say most of the conversations have been relief. Like I wish I'd known about this five years ago. This is exactly what I wanted, but I couldn't quite articulate what what it was that was wrong and what we were doing. And um now my job is to go to the people, as you say, who who who are not experienced with the space, and and put it in very human terms, like you know, the whole thesis of mannered treatures and why someone's got to articulate why this space should make money over time, right, why these guys with these computers running in the background, why it would be valuable and there has to be something tangible And so I've said anyway, I started to write about that, but it's but but that's what I've got to talk to the other I've got to I've gotta, I've gotta. I've got to make it clear to them how I, as somebody who's not a quant I fell in love with the space and and try to solve some of these issues for people. Well, just quickly entered before we get to our craziest things. Um. You know, it feels like the last couple of months we've really had some major reversals of earlier trends from there. You know, equities are now smps up, I don't know, eighteen percent off the low. Uh oil is way off the highs um. You know, yields are kind of still anybody's guests. But what's how are you thinking about the current state of the market, um, as you know from the lens of a trend following expert, you know, are these real reversals and trends yet or too soon as to say, you know, what's what's kind of the whole opportunity set look like to you right now? I think it's incredibly confusing right now. I mean it's it's I mean, if you told so. One thing I've written about is the big problem with macro calls in the past two years or so has been even if you nailed the call, sometimes the markets do completely weird unexpected things. Right, So, if you if you had nailed the inflation call last year and said, you know, what's where the first place you put money? Most people said gold, and then gold does nothing like inflation goes to eight percent or whatever it is in gold and gold doesn't move. Um. You know, if you said, um, you know where where can your treasury is going to be? You know, I mean, you wouldn't expected them to struggle to break through two percent with eight percent inflation. So I think I think when you look at what's happened in July, I think if you went to a lot of macro guys and said, hey, by the way, the world's gonna get really worried about a hard procession in three so the big rate hikes are off, you wouldn't have had a lot of macro guys said, god, let's go buy profitless tech companies. I think it feels like we're in a bit of a transition period. I think that I think that, you know, the hard part right now is that every month consensus changes and people are just unbelievably confident that they're right this time. And and it's a little bit like watching you know, a guy who's kind of whipped on the past four pitches, and it's like, oh, but I'm gonna nail. You know, I can't wait. I can't wait for the next pitch. I'm definitely gonna hit hit a home run. And so so it just it feels like we're in the midst of this regime ship where things everything is changing overnight and changing fast and and you know, I think that's gonna great a lot of opportunities, but also weird months like the best you know, five or six weeks. Yeah, it's just such unprecedented circumstances. It seems like there's no playbook to to kind of fall back on. Uh, but Andrew, great stuff. Really appreciate your times. We're not gonna let you go without a crazy thing though. You come on the show, you gotta you gotta have a crazy thing to share. Uh, Bildna, You're my favorite crazy thing. By the way, I'm just saying, if you're paying attention, so I definitely was you want me to go first, you go first? Okay, mine is pretty good. There's a woman in Nevada who accidentally purchased an entire town basically when she was that I know me too, It's happened to me so many times. But she was signing to buy her new home. She's living near Reno, hoping to live near Reno. Her house was worth or she was buying it FO dollars, and some clause got accidentally copy pasted into her contract, and she ended up with eighty four lots and two common spaces in this town, all thanks to this copy paste. For that's right, what that sounds like she got the better end of the deal. I think it was a legal description from another sale contract was accidentally copy pasted into hers, and she got an entire town. And it sounds like a win for her, unless I are there, like nuclear waste buried under No, it's houses. Okay, So the eighty four lots this is from a UM, a business inside of story UM but I never heard of them my first time getting on that website. But the eighty four lots, they included homes that had already been built and sold, and then at least sixty four of them were put under her name a couple of days ago when this happened. Well, so I think good, right, Yeah, I think she wins. I don't know who's the loser on that trade, but someone's someone's getting fired. I mean, she wins or I win the competition. I gotta see what Andrew has. How about you, Andrew, you say anything crazy this week? Well, I think the craziest thing is just where the dollar is. Yeah, I mean I know, this is this is this is not nearly as as exciting as what you just said to me. The strength of the dollar is just like when you see an explosion the distance and you're waiting for the shock wave to hit and and it's just it's the world is not really well equipped to deal with it. I mean, it's this is going to have implications to emerging markets in other areas. And I think, what's to me the crazy thing? And again, it's not as uh as exciting. It's just it's just you know, we we've we have such narrow attention spans, so we're all focusing on whether text docs have bounced up today or yesterday. Meanwhile, you've got this potential fire burning in the background. Um so um. That's something that I kind of just staring at a disbelief honestly, mainly because who would have thought we'd have a strong dollar with nine percent inflation? Well, I mean, the the it hasn't really big inflations for emerging markets, right, so so every emergencing market. Most emerging markets have some dollar denominated debt that just got fifteen or twenty or thirty percent more expensive this year. The end is you know, has gone down fifteen percent this year. I mean those are those are moves like you know, tech stocks going down and it's happened in six months, and so these things tend to have ripple effects through the markets. And I think that in a sense, the craziest thing is that we haven't had another end run, you know, we haven't had a a major collapse that has had ripple effects through the markets. And maybe the answer is that we've somehow figured out how to contain those in advance, or risk management has gotten better. But but it just it feels like something. It feels like there's something that go. The other answer is wait for it, you know, Yeah, it's coming a lot of times Everyone's phone, so they'll be cursing Andrew's name for JINX. Yeah that I agree though, um uh for sure. All right, two good crazy things I'll give you mine. You guys are probably familiar with the big crypto exchange finance uh And this is the story courtesy of the Indian Express. Apparently, the CEO of Finance has an issue with LinkedIn. Veldonna Um, that's why that's true. Now you're my You're my only issue on LinkedIn. Otherwise I got no problem. That's you I have the issue with. He says, there's way too many fake linked In profiles on there. There are seven thousand people on LinkedIn who claim to work for Binance, and this is a big issue because if you're a fake Binance employee and you're on there saying those coins going to the moon, or you know, we're gonna list such and such a coin, just obvious pump and dump scams. Um. So he's demanding LinkedIn sort of verify people on the site who claimed to work for a company, which I think, Uh, it's probably something they're gonna have to sounds very familiar the Holy elon musk Twitter. That's right, that's right. But here's where we get to our game show. The price is precise, The prices PERI. I we got to inform you, Andrew, you're now contestant on a game show called the Price. Not the prices, right, the prices precise, not exactly a price, but a number. So this guy says, there's seven thousand people on LinkedIn claiming to work for Binance. The number, he says, is a different number who actually worked there, who were on LinkedIn? What do you think that number is? Am I going first? You go first. Finance is a big company, it's the biggest crypto exchange. So I'm going to go with a thousand, thousand andrew, What do you think according to the ceo? Mind you, the correct number of Finance employees on LinkedIn is that's pretty good? He says only fifty. He says only fifty of them are legit and the other six thousand, nine d and fifty are focus. I don't I think these crypto exchanges are pretty lean. I don't. I don't you know. I don't know if there'd be a thousand. Maybe maybe coin based would have a thousand, I don't know, but uh not. Note everyone has a LinkedIn profile whatever. Yeah and yeah, I mean if you have yeah, so and even fewer subset is allowed into Vildonna's professional network. No, almost everybody has a lot of except for you. Yeah. Never gets old, never gets old. I'm waiting, by the way, I'm waiting for the bots to come out and and and accidentally promote all of our products. Oh, yeah, it would. It would be a social good. You need to get them on Reddit somehow. The first meme TF Have there been any meme? T? Yeah, of course there. Like I don't know you'll be able to talking about about, you know, bots, like soliciting them with all sorts of things. I feel like I'm just not cool enough that or high profile enough that, you know, like I'm sort of jealous. I don't get any body attention. Maybe just not correct enough to hire a Botto army. All of my LinkedIn connections are real people? Are you sure about that? Yeah? Are you sure? Check? How many are finance employees? If if of your connections are Binance employees that, I'm gonna yeah, we'll see. I still won't add you. What about a bot Reagan? If there's a bot like Reagan there, maybe I'm on there as a fake Binance employee. You don't even know what you added. I think that's enough conspiracy theories for the week. Andrew Bear, great pleasure to catch up with you. I hope we can have you back in the future and talk about how things are going with your firm. Thank you so much, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for coming on What Goes Up. We'll be back next week and so then you can find us on the Bloomberg Terminal website and app, or wherever you get your pot casts. We love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, so more listeners can find us. And you can find us on Twitter, follow me at reag Anonymous, Bill Donna hierarch Is at Bildonna Hirach. You can also follow Bloomberg Podcasts at Podcasts. What Goes Up is produced by Stacy Wong. Thanks for listening, See you next time.