TTU22: The Most Important Question Investors Should be Asking ft. Nigol Koulajian of Quest Partners – 2of2

Top Traders Unplugged

Niels Kaastrup-Larsen

Business, Business News, Investing, News

4.8 • 670 Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2014

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Did you know that a meditation practice can help you be a better investor?

In this episode we discuss our common lessons that we ask all Top Traders, but we dive deep into why Nigol thinks differently about CTA issues. Growing up in war-torn Lebanon shifts the filters he uses to see the markets. We all have filters but in this episode you will learn what perspective he takes on the markets that may, or may not, support his market philosophy.

Welcome back to the second half of our interview with Nigol Koulajian.

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In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

How growing up in war torn Lebanon influences the way Nigol filters market decisions
The challenging nature of a market injected with federal liquidity
Nigol’s strategies for selecting position sizing
Drawdown expectations of Quest Partners
How Quest works to maintain a balance in the working environment and how busy the team stays
How Nigol manages emotional turmoil of drawdowns and how he projects this calmness upon his investors
The few things that Nigol predicts would shake their strategy
How to listen to clients and use their advice in a way that serves them, even if you don’t implement exactly what they’re saying
Why mathematician optimization can adversely effect the strength of your CTA strategy
How Nigol expects to know if a model is working or not
The importance of using math as little as possible despite the systematic approach to trading
A fascinating perspective on why the CTA industry AUM has shifted to Europe
The most important question investors should be asking: “How to price tail risk.”
What it takes to build a firm and become the next Quest
Learn all about Nigol’s daily meditation practice which he credits as his top personal attribute to becoming a great trader
The most challenging thing about being a CTA for Nigol (A: Fishing in a very small pond)
Nigol’s biggest failure which occurred in 2009

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Top Traders Unplugged, episode number 022, where I continue my conversation with
0:07.4	Nicole Collagen, founder and CIO, of Quest Partners. This episode is sponsored by Saxo Bank and Swiss
0:15.1	Financial Services. Welcome back to Top Traders Unplugged, where the best traders in the world come to share their experiences, their successes, and their failures.
0:24.5	Let's rejoin the conversation with your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kastro Flandlarsen. This is complex stuff.
0:40.3	For you to explain this, this is not, you know, a lot of people will have difficulties
0:48.3	in sort of getting their head around these types of concepts because it's a little bit more than
0:55.3	traditional trend following you buy when the price move up and you sell when the price
0:59.8	move down and so on and so forth but what I wanted to ask you because you mentioned in
1:04.8	the beginning of our conversation that your upbringing in Lebanon actually
1:10.3	influenced the way you design your systems.
1:13.6	So now I want to try and bridge that gap between these very complex models that you just described
1:19.6	and your upbringing in an inherently unstable environment.
1:24.6	How does that work?
1:31.3	Thanks for the interesting question. Well, you see, we see the world based on our memory of what it's supposed to be like.
1:40.3	It means most people see the world based on their own filters of reality, not based on how it is.
1:46.5	Right.
1:47.3	Okay.
1:48.2	So I have filters.
1:49.9	People who grew up in New York and have never seen a war have a different type of filters.
1:55.7	Sure.
1:59.1	My filters, when I started out as a kid, my grandfather who basically lived in the Ottoman Empire, always warned me that, you know, always questioned the system.
2:09.6	Don't believe that a system which looks strong means that it's stable, that things can reverse at any point in time.
	...

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