Alpha Exchange

With early exposure to Paul Tudor Jones and then stints on the sell-side in credit research, Michael Contopoulos is now Deputy CIO of Richard Bernstein Advisors, a macro-oriented asset manager overseeing roughly $20 billion across long-only portfolios. Our discussion centers on portfolio construction in an era of extreme equity concentration and shifting global leadership.On the equity side, the firm is under-weight the most concentrated segments of U.S. equities and overweight international markets, citing valuation gaps, earnings acceleration abroad, and under-ownership by investors.Using his background in quantitative credit strategy and a Merton framework for modeling  spread risk, Michael brings a structural lens to today’s corporate debt markets. Our conversation focuses on the surge in long-dated issuance tied to AI infrastructure build-outs. He argues that history rarely rewards lenders who finance capital-intensive growth booms at their peak.Drawing parallels to late-1990s telecom boom, Michael quest

It was a pleasure to welcome Louis Gave, the Founding Partner and CEO of Gavekal, back to the Alpha Exchange. Our discussion centers on what he describes as one of the most consequential and underappreciated macro developments today: the mispricing—and now the policy shift—of the Chinese renminbi. Louis is quite bullish on China.Louis argues that for much of the past decade, China has acted as a powerful deflationary force on the global economy. In response to US trade restrictions, Chinese policymakers redirected domestic savings away from real estate and toward industrial capacity. This dual dynamic—collapsing real-estate activity alongside surging industrial investment—produced a deflationary impulse that many underestimated.A central feature of this adjustment was a deliberately undervalued currency. Despite large trade surpluses, the renminbi remained weak even as inflation diverged sharply between China and the United States. Louise describes this as one of the clearest examples of a “wrong price” in gl

It is busy time, to say the least, for Libby Cantrill, Head of Public Policy at PIMCO. Today’s markets are grappling with vast uncertainties…in US fiscal policy, in Fed independence and leadership, in geopolitics, and in global trade. Libby is charged with helping both the clients and risk-takers of PIMCO better understand the implications of policy that is changing rapidly.Through her conversations with institutional, retail, and international clients, she outlines how uncertainty around US policy has become a central driver of investor concern early in 2026. Our discussion highlights how recent geopolitical developments — including tensions with Europe, rhetoric around Greenland, and renewed trade disputes — have amplified questions around US credibility and global leadership.Throughout the conversation, Libby frames the current environment as one in which policy volatility, rather than policy outcomes alone, is shaping investor behavior. Tariffs, fiscal deficits, and election-driven incentives have created

Five years ago, on January 27th, 2021, the frenzied buying and speculation in Gamestop hit its apex. In this short podcast, I look back on one of the more fascinating, and dare I say, dangerous, risk events in modern day markets. The stock was subject to an outright speculative attack. But not the kind most CEOs complain about. This was not Soros taking down the British pound in 1992. This was a retail army of Reddit bandits whose buying power was nothing individually, but everything collectively. This was an attack not by a short seller, but against one. We learn a great deal about markets by studying periods when things run amuck. GME event is one of them, the most intense “stock up, vol up” episode in memory.

It was a pleasure to welcome Alex Urdea, Founder and CIO of Deep Ocean Partners to the Alpha Exchange. Alex traces his career from credit derivatives trading at a large bank to a risk management function at a hedge fund focused on distressed investing to ultimately building an asset-backed private credit platform focused on smaller, less trafficked segments of the lending universe. The conversation centers on how regulatory changes following the Global Financial Crisis, prolonged periods of low interest rates, and shifting investor preferences have reshaped where and how credit risk is priced. Alex describes how traditional public credit markets, including leveraged loans and high yield, have increasingly compressed spreads while loosening covenants, reducing compensation for bearing risk. In contrast, private credit has emerged as an alternative channel for borrowers unable to access bank balance sheets, particularly fast-growing businesses that are asset-rich but cash-flow constrained. He emphasizes that cr

Today’s market landscape is defined by extremes that challenge conventional portfolio construction. A small group of mega-cap stocks now represents an unprecedented share of index weight, profit generation, and capital spending, raising important questions about valuation, diversification, and risk concentration. With this in mind, it was great to have Andrew Lapthorne, Global Head of Quantitative Research at Société Générale, back on the Alpha Exchange. Drawing on long-run valuation distributions and profitability data, Andrew examines whether today’s market qualifies as a valuation bubble, not through narratives, but through measurable historical comparisons. His analysis highlights that while headline index multiples appear defensible due to strong profits among a narrow group of companies, the average stock is more expensive than during prior bubble periods, including the late-1990s technology cycle. Our discussion also examines how passive investing and benchmark constraints have altered market behavior.

As I share my closing thoughts on 2025, I want to look back with an eye towards pointing out this year’s unique characteristics from a market risk perspective. I start this exercise by highlighting what I consider to be 2025’s three most interesting days from a vol and risk perspective: 1) the April 7th roller-coaster in the VIX  2) the September 10th surge in ORCL and  3) the October 21st melt-down in the GLD. Each of these helps us better understand some of the forces at work in today’s market. Next, I explore two important themes and their implications. First, the “stock up, vol up” dynamic that is increasingly common among stocks, even mega-caps. Here, the market assigns a higher implied volatility when pricing options on stocks that have often surged in value. It speaks to FOMO and a winner-take-all notion in which stocks are often treated as options. Second, I discuss the incredibly low level of both realized and implied correlation among stocks in the SPX. I consider this a risk hiding in plain sight a

It was a pleasure to welcome Ian Harnett, co-founder and Chief Investment Strategist at Absolute Strategy Research, to the Alpha Exchange. Our discussion explores how long periods of low volatility and abundant liquidity can quietly allow systemic risks to accumulate outside the traditional banking system. Drawing on lessons from the Global Financial Crisis, Ian explains why today’s financial system—now dominated by non-banks rather than banks—requires a different risk framework.  While post-GFC regulation focused on large banks and insurers, much of the system’s leverage and liquidity transformation has migrated toward pension funds, private equity, insurance companies, and private credit vehicles. In the U.S. alone, roughly three-quarters of private-sector financial assets are now controlled by non-banks, reshaping how shocks can propagate through markets. A key theme of the discussion is that systemic risk is multiplicative rather than additive. Ian argues that past crises were often triggered not by the l

Kumaran Vijayakumar has spent his career in the equity derivatives market, first as an exotics trader and later in running large risk-taking desks in listed and OTC options. Now, the CEO of DataDock Solutions, a firm he Co-Founded in 2018, Kumaran and his team are developing analytical tools that allow sell-side flow desks to better understand the risks they take and clients they take it for. Our discussion explores the challenges inherent in evaluating client flow, and how data-centric infrastructure has changed the way risk is assessed. With the premise that “what you can measure you can manage and improve”, we discuss DataDock’s efforts to build tools capable of ingesting large-scale trade history and simulating outcomes at the most granular level. In equity derivatives, where trades move quickly and visibility is often instantaneous, desks have historically made decisions based on memory and anecdotal assessments of “good” versus “bad” flow. Kumaran describes this as a space where information is abundant,

Risk generally falls into 4 categories, monetary (Central Banks), economic (growth and profits), financial (leverage, carry and correlation) and finally, geopolitical. This last category is non-market, market risk.  And in this context, it was a pleasure to welcome Mark Rosenberg, Founder of GeoQuant and adjunct professor at UC Berkeley to the Alpha Exchange for a discussion centered on political risk as a measurable market variable.Mark’s work evaluates how governance, social instability, institutional stress, and security dynamics influence asset pricing. Tracing his path from academia to his time at Eurasia Group, he describes the gap that existed in country-risk assessment—macroeconomic indicators were abundant, yet political inputs remained qualitative, backward-looking, and infrequent. His motivation for launching GeoQuant followed the belief that political dynamics could be structured into model-based, data-driven signals rather than anecdotes, expert impressions, or slow annual indicators.GeoQuant sep

Todd Rapp got his career started in equity options at Goldman Sachs in the late 1990’s, a wild time in which a bubble inflated and burst and provided critical lessons in both gamma and vega risk in the process. Now the CEO of the Fortress Multi-Manager Group, Todd leans heavily on his derivatives DNA in the areas of sourcing uncorrelated return streams, portfolio construction and both measuring and managing risk. Early training has shaped his long-term view that markets express probability through delta, option curvature, and distribution structure rather than through static price movements.Our conversation connects early risk management lessons to today’s landscape, where market concentration echoes 1999, yet correlation conditions differ meaningfully. Todd notes that unlike the prior cycle, today’s equity index shows low intra-index correlation, making dispersion, risk sizing, and factor neutrality more fundamental for return generation.We also explore how the multi-manager architecture seeks to harness unc

It was a pleasure to welcome Jessica Stauth, CIO for Systematic Equities at Fidelity Investments, to the Alpha Exchange. Our discussion explores how quant investing has evolved through cycles of market stress, technological change, and today’s extraordinary concentration in the equity landscape. Reflecting on her start in markets in the aftermath of the 2007 Quant Quake and the onset of the global financial crisis, Jessica highlights the foundational lesson that markets contain far more uncertainty than models can fully capture — a theme as relevant today as investors confront narrow leadership and elevated fragility. She explains how early dislocations demonstrated the limits of traditional risk models and the dangers of crowding, especially when many quantitative strategies rely on similar signals or hedging techniques. Turning to the present, Jessica describes how her team builds equity strategies designed to function across regimes, emphasizing the need for diversified risk models, guardrails that prevent

They say there’s always a bull market somewhere and a chart on doom commentary has surely been up and to the right. Perhaps it’s been the joint decline in the equity and crypto markets. NVDA is down 10% in November and Bitcoin is down almost twice that. Perhaps it’s been that there wasn’t a hard and fast enough of a catalyst to point to…no trade war, Powell presser, CPI surprise or earnings shortfall. These would have at least left us with plausible drivers, satisfying our need for markets to make sense. But when price operates as the only fundamental, sell-offs in asset prices take on much greater meaning.If there’s one idea that best captures my own curiosity about markets it lies in studying our presence in them. And here’s where the Soros theory of reflexivity is so relevant, especially to modern day risk-taking. Reflexivity is a brilliant concept and price is central to it. Price is surely an outcome that results from changes in economic data, corporate profits and adjustments in the stance of monetary p

Welcome back to the Alpha Exchange. In today’s episode, I am joined by Megan Miller, Senior Portfolio Manager and Head of the Options Solutions team at Allspring Global Investments. Her career spans the extremes of market volatility—from learning options trading during the GFC to now overseeing option-based strategies across a $600 billion platform. The conversation centers on how her team uses a GARCH-like modeling framework as part of a systematic approach to forecast future realized volatility. From this, signals emerge as to which options are over or underpriced.Megan explains how the democratization of options has reshaped implementation. While call overwriting may appear simple, doing it efficiently at scale requires advanced technology, rule-based construction, and close attention to liquidity across both U.S. and global underlyings. She outlines how index-option overlays can deliver income, preserve stock-specific alpha from the underlying equities, and manage beta more deliberately—an especially rele

On this episode of the Alpha Exchange, I’m pleased to welcome back Jordi Visser, CEO of Visser Labs and Head of AI Macro Research at 22V. Our conversation centers on one of the most consequential themes in markets today: the intersection of artificial intelligence, exponential innovation, and market structure. With Nvidia’s historic rise as a backdrop and AI’s increasing integration into every sector, Jordi pushes back on the tendency to label this cycle a “bubble,” arguing that AI is more akin to electricity — an enabling technology whose applications will permeate everyday life. Demand for compute remains effectively infinite, he notes, and the supply shortfalls in GPUs, data centers, and power capacity shape how investors should think about the buildout phase.Jordi also lays out a framework for navigating volatility in sectors tied to AI buildout — including how to handle 20–30% drawdowns — and why estimate revisions matter more than multiple expansion from here. Beyond markets, we explore the labor dynami

The global economic and geopolitical order has long been balanced by the United States. Today, however, that traditional stabilizing role is in flux. The drivers of market uncertainty, typically resulting from changes in monetary policy and the economy, are increasingly linked to US politics. Fiscal strain, tariffs, and hyper-partisanship are sources of unpredictability reverberating across markets worldwide. In this context, it was a pleasure to welcome Alex Kazan, Partner and Co-head of the Geopolitical Practice at the Brunswick Group, back to the Alpha Exchange.Our conversation explores just how we got to a point where the US is exporting risk to the rest of the world. Alex argues that this is not solely about Donald Trump but more the result of structural forces that have been building over time. The advent of social media and the technology that maximizes attention by algorithmically parsing individuals into one camp or the other and the twin shocks of the GFC and Pandemic have deepened partisanship and

Loyal listeners, I hope your recent days have gone well, even if they are becoming shorter. On my mind – and where I hope to engage your interest for 20 odd minutes – is the topic of risk and uncertainty.The SPX is at an all time high and it is also highly concentrated with volatile and richly valued but uncorrelated tech behemoths. That’s very unique. Whether you are an AI bull or bear, one thing we must acknowledge is the unique degree of index concentration and the risks that accompany it.The exposure of both US households and foreign investors to the SPX is at an all-time high. There’s a reflexive element here. The massive increase in market cap for corporates is the currency that funds the epic capex. For consumers, facing a tepid labor market and ongoing cost of living challenges, stock market wealth matters a great deal.I also discuss the surge in volatility in gold and the advent of prediction markets. I hope you enjoy the discussion. Be well.

The distribution of asset price returns is a subject of much study in the literature of empirical finance. We know, of course, that equity returns are left-tailed, subject to the occasional violent plunge. But other asset classes are different, and in this context it was a pleasure to welcome Ben Hoff, Global Head of Commodity Strategy at Société Générale, to the Alpha Exchange. Ben describes commodities as a dual system — one that exists both physically and financially. This duality means real-world frictions such as storage, transport, and substitution shape risk and return in ways financial models often miss. Unlike equities, where the volatility risk premium (VRP) is structural and macro-driven — investors chronically overpay for protection against crashes — the commodity VRP is episodic and micro-driven, emerging only when the physical system’s natural buffers are overwhelmed. Ben likens the commodity ecosystem to a CDO structure of risk absorption. The first-loss tranche is “optionality in time,” where

They say that diversification is the only “free lunch” in markets. Scatter your bets around and you’ll realize a reduction in volatility that helps you manage risk. That’s been happening at an epic scale in US equity markets: the 1m correlation among stocks in the S&P 500 is (to quote Dean Wormer from Animal House) zero point zero. But I’d argue that today’s index and the trillions of dollars that track it are enjoying a run of low correlation among stocks that is unsustainable. It’s not if, but when the next correlated risk-off episode materializes.Effective risk management requires a healthy imagination and a willingness to carefully evaluate blind spots. In the aftermath of largescale drawdowns and spikes in measures like the VIX, a consistent realization by investors is that the degree of “sameness” in assets was underestimated. It took us until 2008 to recognize that the substantial run up in housing prices was linked to a common underlying driver: the vast supply of mortgage credit. There was a huge

It was a pleasure to welcome David Puritz back to the Alpha Exchange. A colleague of mine from 25 years ago and now the CIO of Shaolin Capital Management, Dave has some excellent insights to share on uncorrelated investing broadly and on the current state of convertible bond trading, risk, and liquidity, specifically. When he last joined the podcast in 2021, the Fed was still at zero, five-year yields were 75bps and Dave warned investors to avoid long-duration, low-coupon converts. The epic drawdown in bonds in 2022 made that call quite prescient.We talk about some of the pricing dynamics within converts, where Dave sees the risk of being wrong as especially high. Here, he points to the pricing of high implied vol underlyings that can suffer from vol compression that is not offset by a tightening of credit spreads. Overall, he sees many areas of the converts market with little margin for error. On the risk management front, Dave states that in order to get a position to a fully desired sizing, the first purch