SI304: Taking the Trend Following Temperature with Man AHL ft. Graham Robertson
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 715 Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2024
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, we are joined by our special guest, Graham Robertson who is Partner and Head of Client Portfolio Management at Man AHL, for a wide-ranging conversation about trend following. We discuss how trend following has stood out in recent years and why April 2024 was especially noteworthy, and how Graham views the current interest from investors around the world. We also address to what extent trend following should play a role in your portfolio and what type of environment tends to influence overall performance for the industry based on Principal Component Analysis. Lastly, we discuss how AI might impact the trend following industry, and whether Trend Followers have started saying goodbye to the short fixed income traded, that lasted for more than 2 years.
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50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE
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Episode TimeStamps:
00:56 - Introduction to Graham Robertson
03:40 - How Graham came across trend following
04:56 - Graham's observations in 2024 so far
08:03 - Is China becoming an easier market to trade?
09:01 - How to deal with uncomfortable markets
11:17 - Why April was an interesting month for trend followers
14:54 - A discussion on trend following performance
20:45 - Industry performance update
22:03 - How Man AHL assess the interest in trend following and CTA strategies
26:37 - Rating the climate for interest in trend following
31:46 - Which regions or countries are most interested in trend following?
34:16 - Why ESG means different things to different strategies
38:05 - How much should investors allocate to trend following?
41:05 - How to change people's minds about trend following
43:59 - Changing the narrative in the trend following industry
47:28 - Man AHL's general approach to research
55:15 - Graham's perspective on AI in the trend following industry
01:00:20 - A new approach to 60/40
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
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PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:
1. eBooks that cover key topics that you need to know about
In my eBooks, I put together some key discoveries and things I have learnt during the more than 3 decades I have worked in the Trend Following industry, which I hope you will find useful. Click Here
2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score
One of the things I’m really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here
3. Other Resources that can help you
And if you are hungry for more useful resources from the trend following world...check out some precious resources that I have found over the years to be really valuable. Click Here
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to join Neil's Kostrup Larson on a raw and honest journey into the world of systematic investing and learn about the most dependable and consistent yet often overlooked investment strategy. |
| 0:13.2 | Welcome to the Systematic Investor Series. |
| 0:33.5 | Welcome and welcome back to this week's edition of the Systematic Investor series with Graham Robertson and I, Neil's Castel Blaston, where each week we take the pulse of the global market through the lens of a rules-based investor. |
| 0:38.3 | Graham, great to be with you this week. How are you doing? How is London doing? Niels, yeah, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. London is good today, |
| 0:44.3 | particularly after that result last night. I'm sure you're aware of it. England keeping us |
| 0:49.3 | on tender hooks to the 90th minute once more, but yeah, progressing through to the final, |
| 0:53.3 | we're all excited mood is |
| 0:54.4 | positive it is very exciting absolutely now we've got a very solid lineup thanks to a lot of topics |
| 1:01.3 | that you brought along but before we do that i wanted to since it's your first time on the on the |
| 1:08.6 | show i wanted to kind of introduce you a little bit |
| 1:12.3 | more to our audience learn a little bit more about uh your background and also how you ended up as |
| 1:19.4 | a partner and head of client portfolio management at man hl so why don't we start with that sure yeah happy to |
| 1:26.7 | um i guess my background is actually quite similar to a lot of Why don't we start with that? Sure, yeah, happy to. |
| 1:33.8 | I guess my background is actually quite similar to a lot of people we have here at HL. |
| 1:35.2 | I'm very much academic. |
| 1:38.6 | I studied physics and then geophysics as an undergraduate. |
| 1:41.5 | Seismology then as a postgraduate. |
| 1:46.0 | I can remember sitting in my office as a seismologist. I absolutely loved it. |
| 1:48.0 | I was working when I could and playing squash and cricket and you name it when I could. |
| 1:54.0 | I was aware at that point on the radio, somebody said the average worker in ASDA, |
| 1:58.0 | I guess Walmart and Walmart in the US was getting paid more than I was and I kind of raised a little bit of an alarm bell with me. So I thought, right, I had to do something a little bit different. A few colleagues had gone off into finance. It sounded fascinating, sounded like a very interesting industry. So I headed off and joined Credit Suisse, which at the time |
| 2:18.8 | was being run by Alan Howard and Chris Rockos, fascinating time developing fixed income analytics, |
... |
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