High Quality Trading Is Episodic, Not Continuous

There’s two types of market returns. Alpha and beta. Beta is what you get for diversifying and passively holding the market. Alpha is the opposite. It requires an edge, of which there are three: informational, analytical, and behavioral.

And as Ray Dalio says, “Alpha is zero sum. In order to earn more than the market return, you have to take money from somebody else.”

Harvesting alpha takes significant work because it involves separating someone else from their capital. And that someone else is trying to do the same to you. Most traders and active investors are in the game to produce alpha.

The competition among alpha players is what creates mostly efficient markets.

Once in awhile, Mr. Market throws a tantrum (or gets too excited) and a mispricing occurs. This opens up an opportunity for alpha players to profit. These opportunities often don’t last long. Other alpha players swarm to take advantage the second they detect blood in the water. Once enough catch on the market returns to an efficient state i.e. random forward returns.

Using this mental model of the game we can deduce that high quality trading is episodic, not continuous.

Trying to capture alpha continuously would be like playing every starting hand in Texas Hold’em. Expert poker players know that it’s virtually impossible to win long-term with the bottom 80% of starting hands no matter how good your post-flop play is.

In trading, it’s impossible to harvest alpha every single day. The market is highly competitive and Mr. Market rarely screws up with such high frequency.

Being a trader, you need to learn to patiently sit through long stretches of getting dealt duds. In poker we call this “sitting in Siberia.” This is when you have to sit and fold for hours and hours waiting for cards that have a positive expectation while the rest of the table has fun pushing chips into the middle. Trying to trade during these “Siberia moments” in markets is a profitless endeavor over the long haul.

Continuous trading creates subpar performance because exposure to inefficient market states get mixed in with exposure to efficient market states.

If you take the right side of the market during an inefficient state you will make money long-term. But when you initiate a trade in an efficient market your expected return is 0. And you still have to suffer through the volatility of each trade. It’s a waste of time, resources, and energy. You have to go through all of the work for no reward.

That’s why it’s important to think of trading episodically and not continuously. You don’t want to mix the good with the bad. Structure your trading similar to how a sniper goes about his business on the battlefield — a series of high impact and deadly episodic strikes.

The corollary to “high quality trading is episodic not continuous” is the rarer the market dislocation the greater the edge.

There’s a few reasons for this.

First off, an event that occurs seldomly is less understood than an event that happens frequently.

Uncertainty and confusion in the market is what creates an edge for the alpha players who are able to make sense of things.

Second, the professional quant community ignores rare events as sources of edge — which creates less competition.

Conventional quant techniques look for statistical significance. That means quants need to see lots of historical occurrence to prove that their trading methodology is legit. If there aren’t enough historical occurrences, they will write off the approach as spurious.

The ‘professional’ quant methodology guarantees that they won’t and can’t act on the highest alpha opportunities in the marketplace, leaving the lion’s share to human traders utilizing intuition and experience. Trader intuition and experience is powerful because it enables traders to identify rare alpha opportunities despite a low number of historical occurrences.

So if you’re an independent trader who

  1. Believes that high alpha trading is episodic not continuous
  2. The rarer the dislocation the more alpha

Here’s what you can do to shift your approach to produce better risk adjusted returns.

Start by weed wacking your trade “setups.”

Take the bottom 50% of your trading opportunities and cut them out. Then take the remaining trade setups and cut them by 50% again. This will align you with the philosophy of rare events (the most optimal setups) and make your trading episodic rather than continuous.

Then consider trades that make logical sense to you but don’t have many historical occurrences.

These trades will always have the fattest edge and the least amount of competition because other traders will pass them up.

Finally, expand your playing field as much as possible.

This is in line with our global macro approach at Macro Ops. Because high alpha opportunities are rare, a particular market will only generate a few quality signals a year. That puts a cap on your earning potential. The only way to make more money is to increase your discovery space. That means getting involved with other markets like currencies, rates, grains, meats, softs, volatility, crypto, energy, micro-caps and metals. Hopefully over the course of the year these markets will generate additional rare alpha opportunities that you can capitalize on.

 

 

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Brandon Beylo

Value Investor

Brandon has been a professional investor focusing on value for over 13 years, spending his time in small to micro-cap companies, spin-offs, SPACs, and deep value liquidation situations. Over time, he’s developed a deeper understanding for what deep-value investing actually means, and refined his philosophy to include any business trading at a wild discount to what he thinks its worth in 3-5 years.

Brandon has a tenacious passion for investing, broad-based learning, and business. He previously worked for several leading investment firms before joining the team at Macro Ops. He lives by the famous Munger mantra of trying to get a little smarter each day.

AK

Investing & Personal Finance

AK is the founder of Macro Ops and the host of Fallible.

He started out in corporate economics for a Fortune 50 company before moving to a long/short equity investment firm.

With Macro Ops focused primarily on institutional clients, AK moved to servicing new investors just starting their journey. He takes the professional research and education produced at Macro Ops and breaks it down for beginners. The goal is to help clients find the best solution for their investing needs through effective education.

Tyler Kling

Volatility & Options Trader

Former trade desk manager at $100+ million family office where he oversaw multiple traders and helped develop cutting edge quantitative strategies in the derivatives market.

He worked as a consultant to the family office’s in-house fund of funds in the areas of portfolio manager evaluation and capital allocation.

Certified in Quantitative Finance from the Fitch Learning Center in London, England where he studied under famous quants such as Paul Wilmott.

Alex Barrow

Macro Trader

Founder and head macro trader at Macro Ops. Alex joined the US Marine Corps on his 18th birthday just one month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He subsequently spent a decade in the military. Serving in various capacities from scout sniper to interrogator and counterintelligence specialist. Following his military service, he worked as a contract intelligence professional for a number of US agencies (from the DIA to FBI) with a focus on counterintelligence and terrorist financing. He also spent time consulting for a tech company that specialized in building analytic software for finance and intelligence analysis.

After leaving the field of intelligence he went to work at a global macro hedge fund. He’s been professionally involved in markets since 2005, has consulted with a number of the leading names in the hedge fund space, and now manages his own family office while running Macro Ops. He’s published over 300 white papers on complex financial and macroeconomic topics, writes regularly about investment/market trends, and frequently speaks at conferences on trading and investing.

Macro Ops is a market research firm geared toward professional and experienced retail traders and investors. Macro Ops’ research has been featured in Forbes, Marketwatch, Business Insider, and Real Vision as well as a number of other leading publications.

You can find out more about Alex on his LinkedIn account here and also find him on Twitter where he frequently shares his market research.