Benjamin Hoff – Commodity Futures Surfaces and the Cash-and-Carry Glue (S7E17)

My guest this episode is Benjamin Hoff, Global Head of Commodity Strategy and Research at Société Générale.Ben started his career in rates before making the jump to commodities, and that lens—shaped by curve arbitrage, convexity, and carry—colors everything he does. In this conversation, we explore how commodities differ fundamentally from other asset classes: the importance of cash-and-carry economics, the sparse information cadence that rewards technical models, and the physical realities that challenge purely quantitative approaches.We also dive into Ben’s more recent work on the geometry of the futures surface, how convexity and skewness may be misunderstood, and why tools like Lévy area might help uncover non-linear structure in the data.Whether you’re deep in the weeds of term structure trading or just curious about how to systematize chaos in barrels and bushels, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

My guests today are Roxton McNeal, Managing Director and Head PM of QIS Investments and Siddharth Sethi, portfolio manager and Head of QIS structuring. Together, they’re spearheading the development of QIS-driven solutions at Simplify.In this conversation, we explore what it takes to build and manage a multi-strategy QIS portfolio—from infrastructure requirements to portfolio construction and risk management. We discuss: • The structural vs. academic premia distinction and why it matters. • How Simplify evaluates and customizes QIS offerings from banks. • The need and challenges of dynamic allocation across dozens of strategies. • How QIS strategies integrate with traditional beta portfolios. • The operational and counterparty considerations of trading these strategies.For those interested in the practical realities of QIS investing, this episode provides a deep dive into both the opportunities and challenges of running a systematic, multi-strategy portfolio.I hope you enjoy my conversation with Roxton McNeal and Siddharth Sethi.

Scott Phillips is just the second independent trader I’ve interviewed for this show.Like many independent traders, Scott found that his constraints – including the size of their capital pool, the ability to execute trades efficiently, and a lack of supporting infrastructure – made trading anything but loose-pants trend following almost impossible in traditional markets. These constraints led Scott to look for easier markets to trade: markets where the edges were so big they could survive inefficient implementations. All of which brought Scott to crypto in the late 2010s.While our conversation is, at a high level, mostly about trend following, we spend a lot of time discussing what makes trading these markets unique. For example, with tens of thousands of spot cryptocurrencies, how do you choose what to trade? How do you choose which venues to trade at when liquidity is so fragmented? How do you deal with the fact that both crime and degenerate gambling are real idiosyncratic factors?More than anything, painted between the lines, Scott provides a master class in thinking about edges.I hope you enjoy my conversation with Scott Phillips.

Today I’m talking to Thao Tran, Co-founding Partner at Vamient Capital.This episode was born from a question I had watching the NFT market place: how do you make markets in illiquid, non-fungible assets? Clearly people were doing it and I wanted to know how it differed from traditional market making.Several people recommended I speak with Thao, and she was kind enough to oblige, despite NFT market making being just a small component of what she does. In this conversation, we walks me through how the NFT market place has evolved, how she thinks about managing inventory risk, key features that impact spreads, and how platform evolutions changed orderbook strategies.In the back half of the conversation, Thao shares her thoughts on the state of crypto markets today, the emerging opportunities in decentralized exchanges, and how the landscape of alpha opportunities has changed over the last two years.I hope you enjoy my conversation with Thao Tran.

My guest today is Victor Haghani, founder of Elm Wealth.Victor is, in many ways, one of the last tactical asset allocators standing after the 2010s. That might be because Victor wouldn’t categorize himself as such. Rather, he sees his dynamic index investing approach not as a tactical alternative to traditional static portfolios, but as the rational approach for anyone starting from first principles. This conversation dances between theory and implementation. Victor is just as comfortable sharing his thoughts on where equity market risk comes from as he is defending payout-adjusted CAPE as a metric for forecasting long-run returns. If you’re passionate about asset allocation, you’ll find lots to think about in this one.Please enjoy my conversation with Victor Haghani.

In this episode of the Get StackedInvestment Podcast, Corey and Rodrigo have an insightful conversation withJonathan Glidden, Chief Investment Officer of the Delta Airlines Pension Plan.Since joining in 2011, Jonathan has been pivotal in elevating Delta’s pensionplan funded status from 38% to over 100%. They delve into Jonathan'sunconventional career journey, his implementation of portable alpha strategies,and share valuable lessons learned from turbulent financial periods such as2008 and 2020. Whether you're a seasoned investor or new to the concept ofportable alpha, this episode provides a masterclass on optimizing pension planmanagement through innovative investment strategies.

In this episode, I speak with Farouk Jivraj, Portfolio Manager and Head of Alternative Risk Premia at Fidelity Investments’ Asset Management Solutions division.After spending nearly a decade on the sell side, Farouk joined Fidelity in 2021 with the goal of building out an alternative risk premium platform, tapping into the best of what both the sell-side QIS desks have to offer and what can be built in-house.We spend the majority of the conversation peeling apart the layers of Farouk’s 5-step process for implementing alternative risk premia strategies. He shares his thoughts on how to classify different premia, why thoughtfully-constructed peer groups are an important evaluation tool, how to go about selecting specific strategies, how to construct portfolios of alternative risk premia, and the actual rubber-meets-road implementation practicalities.Please enjoy my conversation with Farouk Jivraj.

In this episode I chat with Giuseppe Paleologo – or Gappy as he likes to be called. Currently on garden leave, Gappy has previously worked in Risk & Quantitative Analytics at Citadel, as Head of Enterprise Risk at Millennium, and most recently as Head of Risk Management at HRT.We begin the conversation with a discussion as to what a quant researcher actually does at a multi-manager hedge fund. As a semi-support role to the fundamental PMs, Gappy explains how portfolio manager coverage, factor hedging, and internal alpha capture can all work together to help maximize firm P&L.We then discuss the broad field of factor research and portfolio construction, where Gappy shares some of his strongly held views, both on how factors should be constructed as well as how they should be utilized. Topics include returns versus characteristics, mixing versus integrating alpha signals, single- versus multi-period optimization, and linear- versus non-linear models.Please enjoy my conversation with Giuseppe Paleologo.

On this episode, Ben Carlson and Michael Batnick are joined by Corey Hoffstein of Newfound Research to discuss: managed futures, return stacking, using leverage effectively, and much more!

My guest in this episode is Kris Abdelmessih, co-founder of moontower.ai.Kris began his career at SIG, where he worked as a market maker in several different option pits, before moving to Parallax where he ran a relative value commodities volatility book. For the last five years, Kris has been writing on his blog Party at the Moontower, which is one of my favorite reads for all things probability, payoff space, trading, optionality, and seeing the world through a volatility lens.Kris is a passionate educator, so it should come as no surprise that learning is a key thread throughout this entire episode. Kris discusses how learning is accelerated in the pits and how we can think about replicating it in electronic space. Kris discusses what he had to unlearn and relearn in his move from market making to relative value trading. He also shares his thoughts about how firm lineage influences how you learn to trade markets.Finally, we discuss Kris’s newest venture, moontower.ai, which seeks to provide a “volatility lens” to opinionated traders to help them better express their bets in option space.There is a lot of experience to unpack in this one. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kris Abdelmessih.