SI366: The Strategy Didn’t Fail. The Investors Did. ft. Rob Carver
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 712 Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2025
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rob Carver is back from summer break for a conversation that moves between past and present through the lens of lived experience. Starting with the anniversary of Lehman’s collapse, Rob and Niels unpack why strong performance often coexists with poor investor outcomes - and how timing, not strategy, remains the silent killer. They question the recent push into trend by asset management giants, weigh whether CTA underperformance marks a structural shift or a familiar cycle, and examine what the data can and can’t tell us when conviction fades. If there’s a theme this week, it’s simple: knowing what works is not the same as using it well.
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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:
01:14 - What has been on our radar recently?
12:09 - Industry performance update
19:23 - Q1, John: What are your recommendations for adapting a continuous forecast-based position sizing for a cash-only portfolio?
23:15 - Q2, Absolute: Is short/long symmetry optimal for a strategy in which the price of the traded instruments is measured in units (fiat currencies) that are inflated (devalued)?
30:19 - Q3, Lin: Got any ideas for trading a crypto portfolio?
32:04 - Why investors are losing money on 42% gain ETFs
39:50 - The difference between percentage return and cash return
43:24 - Debunking the persistent score card
46:19 - How the world has changed for CTAs
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're about to join Neil's Kostrup Larson on a raw and honest journey into the world of systematic investing |
| 0:07.2 | and learn about the most dependable and consistent yet often overlooked investment strategy. |
| 0:13.2 | Welcome to the Systematic Investor Series. |
| 0:28.5 | Welcome and welcome back to this week's edition of the Systematic Investor series with Rob Carver and I, Neil's Castle Blaston, |
| 0:32.6 | where each week we take the pulse of the global market through the lens of a rules-based investor. |
| 0:36.5 | Rob, it is wonderful to be back with you this week. |
| 0:39.5 | I don't think we've spoken since before the summer, actually. |
| 0:41.1 | So how are you? |
| 0:42.4 | How are things in the UK? |
| 0:48.4 | Yeah, I've been on a very long summer break as I'm very lucky to be in position to do so and enjoying what was a very nice sunny summer in Britain and also a bit of Europe that I visited. |
| 0:56.0 | And it's nice and sunny today, which is good as we're obviously welcoming |
| 1:00.0 | VIP visitors to the UK at the moment, but I won't mention their name of these people, |
| 1:06.0 | but we like to be good hosts, so it's nice that they've got good weather. |
| 1:13.2 | Yeah, no, that is absolutely true. |
| 1:18.1 | We've got a good lineup of topics as we always do, of course. |
| 1:21.7 | We've got three questions coming in, or that came in, I should say. |
| 1:29.8 | And before we get into all of that, I was going to ask you I normally do, um, sort of what's been on your radar. |
| 1:30.7 | And I, I imagine the last couple of weeks, not the whole summer holiday, uh, recap, but. |
| 1:37.9 | Yeah, I won't, I won't do the, the, when I was a child at school, the first thing you |
| 1:42.5 | always have to do when you came back in September was write an essay entitled |
| 1:46.0 | what I did in my summer holidays. And because I've got quite vivid imagination, I always felt the ability to like to make stuff up, which I hope amused my teachers immensely rather than just reading about, you know, the normal standard stuff. |
| 2:07.0 | Yeah, no, I'm, so it's actually an anniversary of an important event recently. |
... |
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