TTU31: Why Investors Should Not be Worried ft. Marc Malek of Conquest Capital Group – 1of2
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 670 Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2014
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This guest had a different path that eventually led to owning a hedgefund in New York. Marc Malek got a grant from NASA to study how different armored tank positions would lead to winning results on the battlefield. Traveling to Wisconsin to begin his research, his advisor steered him to do a similar project on stocks, bonds, and equities instead. He went on to work for UBS and finally founded his own firm, Conquest Capital Group. His story will fascinate and inspire you.
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50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- The story of how Marc became interested in the financial markets after a university project, a bit unexpectedly.
- About Marc’s upbringing in Beirut, Lebanon.
- How his studies at Caltech in neural networks and decision support systems eventually led him to the stock market.
- About his grant from NASA to research the position of tanks.
- His job offer from Oracle that he turned down.
- About his first job out of university at Salomon Brothers and why he left after one year.
- How Marc got hired at UBS and moved to Europe and then Asia during his time with the company.
- Marc’s departure from UBS and how he started Conquest Capital Group.
- How trader’s thought processes are turned into trading models.
- Why models are not black boxes and why investors should not be worried.
- The history of trend following and the old systematic approach.
- How markets move for alpha and beta reasons.
- About “turtle strategies” vs “trend following 2.0”.
- How Marc’s strategies and models have evolved over time.
- About his product Conquest Macro and the two mandates that the product has.
- How his product makes the bulk of its return during periods of risk aversion and high volatility.
- How his firm developed a risk index in a time before anyone was doing them.
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Resources & Links Mentioned in this Episode:
- See Episodes 13 and 14 for more discussion on “Turtle Strategies”.
Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.
IT’s TRUE ? – most CIO’s read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.
And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.
Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Top Traders on Plot, episode number 031, with Mark Malick, the founder of Conquest Capital Group. |
| 0:09.7 | This episode is sponsored by Swiss Financial Services. |
| 0:14.0 | Imagine spending an hour with the world's greatest traders. |
| 0:17.8 | Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes, and their failures. Imagine no more. |
| 0:24.1 | Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers |
| 0:29.0 | in the world so you can take your manager due diligence or investment career to the next level. |
| 0:34.8 | Here's your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kastrop Larson. |
| 0:46.6 | Welcome to another episode of Top Traders Unplocked. |
| 0:50.3 | Thanks so much for tuning in today. |
| 0:52.9 | I know how valuable your time is, |
| 0:54.6 | so I appreciate you spending some of it here with me today. |
| 0:58.7 | I also just want to thank those of you who have left an honest rating and review in iTunes. |
| 1:05.3 | Not only are they really helpful for me and the show, |
| 1:08.9 | but many of them are also quite funny. |
| 1:11.8 | So I decided to put an automatic stream of the last five headlines that I get in these |
| 1:17.7 | reviews on my website, so go check them out. |
| 1:20.7 | I'm sure you'll find that they will put a smile on your face too. |
| 1:25.0 | On today's show, I'm talking to Mark Malik, founder of Conquest Capital Group. |
| 1:31.9 | Mark was originally given a grant by NASA to study how to optimize the position of tanks in a |
| 1:40.0 | battlefield to increase the chances of winning the battle. But as his background had taken him |
| 1:46.9 | away from a real war zone in Lebanon, he was at the last minute encouraged to spend his time |
| 1:53.9 | looking at stocks, bonds and currencies instead. This lucky break became the beginning of a long career in the financial world, |
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