SI368: Valuation Has Left the Room ft. Cem Karsan & Alan Dunne
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 712 Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cem Karsan joins Alan Dunne to chart a market running on more than just momentum. Beneath the surface: a structural liquidity engine, political incentives aligned with asset reflation, and a surge in non-correlated flows reshaping risk itself. As institutions scramble to catch up and volatility begins to rise with price, Cem draws on lessons from the late 90s to explain why the real story is not about valuation - but positioning. From AI’s misunderstood impact to the growing role of options, gold, and crypto, this is a portrait of a regime defined not by fundamentals, but by reflex and constraint.
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Episode TimeStamps:
00:23 - What has been on our radar recently?
02:00 - Industry performance update
03:07 - Are current valuations a sign of a bubble?
12:13 - The importance of reflexivity
18:59 - The move towards non correlation is upon us
22:55 - What is driving up asset prices?
26:34 - When will the supply/demand imbalance normalize?
31:56 - Reaching an uncontrollable situation
35:47 - What are markets showing us about options?
39:38 - Precious metals is the place to be
42:26 - Is AI actually the game changer that we all expect it to be?
52:07 - Will better technology = better performance?
56:03 - A timeline for possible risk dates
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 |
| 0:06.2 | systematic investing and learn about the most dependable and consistent yet often overlooked investment |
| 0:11.9 | strategy. Welcome to the Systematic Investor Series. Welcome back to the latest edition of Top Traders Unplugged, where each week we take the |
| 0:27.5 | post of the markets from the perspective of a rules-based investor. It's Alan Dunn here, sitting in |
| 0:32.5 | from for Neals this week, who's away, delighted to be joined by Gem. Gem, how are you? How's hold |
| 0:37.2 | in Chicago? Doing great uh fall in |
| 0:39.9 | chicago is always beautiful so it leaves are changing colors and the kids are back to school so yeah |
| 0:44.6 | things are good good stuff noticing any impact from the shuttown or not yet uh not really not really |
| 0:53.5 | i mean uh i uh more more like here in Chicago, the, uh, ice agents and, uh, you know, those, those things don't seem to have shut down at all. Uh, okay. I went to Wrigley Field yesterday and there were helicopters circling from, uh, it's really kind of a bizarre situation. |
| 1:12.4 | Okay, wow, interesting. |
| 1:18.4 | We like to kick off with asking what's on your radar since you've been last been on. |
| 1:19.9 | I mean, plenty going on. |
| 1:21.4 | There's no shortage of things to talk about. |
| 1:22.4 | Anything standing out? |
| 1:32.0 | Oh, I mean, obviously you can't really ignore kind of some of this, the political. |
| 1:36.9 | I hate the word political because it's not really political, but the governmental changes that we're seeing. |
| 1:42.5 | So I think that's starting to, you know, markets don't care about that until they kind of do. |
| 1:44.9 | And I think those are starting to have structural effects. |
| 1:48.4 | And I think that's all going to really accelerate here into the midterms next year. |
| 1:54.6 | And I think markets will increasingly probably focus on what's going on there. |
| 1:55.6 | Okay. |
| 1:59.6 | But I think that's definitely part of what we will get to as we go through the conversation. |
... |
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