The Compound and Friends
00:02:08 · Josh Brown, Alex Altmann, Michael Batnick
[00:02:08] S0: Yes. [00:02:09] S1: You know, you you could see... I mean, it's very plausible that we see a recession before the next election, and you might actually get a decent opportunity to scoop some commercial real estate at, like, attractive prices if a bunch of businesses go par. [00:02:22] S0: Oh, the whole city [00:02:22] S2: could burn willing. [00:02:23] S0: Right? Literally literally anything can [00:02:25] S2: anything can happen. Anything for a good deal. Alright. Let's go. [00:02:29] S0: Yeah, boys. How are doing? Ready? All right. It's The Compound and Friends episode two. Curious
00:02:29 · Josh Brown, Michael Batnick
[00:02:29] S0: Yeah, boys. How are doing? Ready? All right. It's The Compound and Friends episode two. Curious [00:02:39] S2: about crypto and not sure where to start? Start with Grayscale. Grayscale is the world's largest crypto focused investment platform and has been in crypto for over a decade. That's a long time when you consider how early we still are in crypto adoption. In markets like these, education matters more than ever. Grayscale provides research, insights, and long term perspective to help investors better understand digital assets and the evolving crypto ecosystem. Whether you're exploring crypto for the first time or looking to deepen your knowledge, let Grayscale be your guide. Today's show is also brought to you by Janus Henderson. At Janus Henderson Investors, we believe working together is the way to work better. By combining your portfolio plans and our in-depth strategy, your valued assets and our valuable insights, your mission and our vision, Always working in perfect harmony to find the right investment opportunities. Janus Henderson Investors, investing in a brighter future together. Visit janicehenderson.com.
00:02:39 · Michael Batnick, Josh Brown, Alex Altmann
[00:02:39] S2: about crypto and not sure where to start? Start with Grayscale. Grayscale is the world's largest crypto focused investment platform and has been in crypto for over a decade. That's a long time when you consider how early we still are in crypto adoption. In markets like these, education matters more than ever. Grayscale provides research, insights, and long term perspective to help investors better understand digital assets and the evolving crypto ecosystem. Whether you're exploring crypto for the first time or looking to deepen your knowledge, let Grayscale be your guide. Today's show is also brought to you by Janus Henderson. At Janus Henderson Investors, we believe working together is the way to work better. By combining your portfolio plans and our in-depth strategy, your valued assets and our valuable insights, your mission and our vision, Always working in perfect harmony to find the right investment opportunities. Janus Henderson Investors, investing in a brighter future together. Visit janicehenderson.com. [00:03:47] S0: Thank you, Thing One. We appreciate it. Miss Nicole in Halloween regalia. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the best investing podcast in the world. Four out of five dentists say The Compound and Friends is where they get all their financial news, and we appreciate that. We have a new guest. I'm so excited. I've been looking forward to this conversation since we booked it. I'm really pumped for this. Our guest today is Alex Altmann. People call you Alti Yeah. I've been told. [00:04:18] S1: Is that [00:04:18] S0: a thing?
00:04:18 · Josh Brown, Alex Altmann
[00:04:18] S0: a thing? [00:04:18] S1: There's a story to that, but, yeah, sure. [00:04:20] S0: Alright. You'll get into that in one second. Alex is managing director and global head of equities tactical strategies at Barclays where he generates thematic ideas and market content for the bank's equities and global markets clients. The Barclays Equitable... Equity Tactical Strategies or bets team generates tactical ideas from the trading desk and turns them into research for clients before Barclays. Alex was a macro portfolio manager at Millennium and spent a decade running equity trading strategy at Citi. So he's seen the markets from both the buy side and the sell side. Alex, thank you for being here. We really appreciate it. [00:05:02] S1: Thank you for having me. Yes. [00:05:03] S0: The crowd is going wild. Can you hear that? It's unbelievable. It's run of exception. For the benefit of the audience, how do you define the term tactical, and what is different about the work you do at Barclays versus other tactical trading desks or research groups that refer to themselves as tactical? Sure. [00:05:22] S1: Okay. Well, again, thanks for having me, guys. I mean, tactical is a really easy answer. It just means it's camouflaged and, you know, has has weapons involved. Right? [00:05:29] S0: Made it a lot of pockets.
00:05:30 · Alex Altmann
[00:05:30] S1: Yeah. Exactly. Just unnecessary pockets. No. I mean, like, tactical in the in the traditional sense of of of Wall Street will mean that rather than thinking about your typical research outfit that we'll look at six, twelve, even longer time horizon, six, twelve months, we'll we'll... We're kinda trafficking in the shorter time horizon more suited, but not exclusively, to the fast money community. So we're thinking one week, two week, four week, maybe, you know, eight weeks ahead, not really much beyond that. We have thematic views. We've... You know, we have views that have sort of been prevailing for for months, if not years in some cases, on some structural opinions. But we're generally trying to think four to eight weeks out and say, alright. How are we gonna make money? And what are what are markets are gonna wanna do? Where's the best asymmetry? And then the other aspect about the tactical consideration is we we traffic a lot in verticals of the market that your traditional research outfits tend to not cover. So we'll think about positioning, derivatives, quant, what a hedge funds are up to, you know, and and these are really important verticals or pillars of the investment process that, quite frankly, all of the buy side are doing, but a lot of the sell side still kind of don't cover from a traditional research perspective. So we try to basically match the desk investment process to what the buy sides or the guys that we typically talk to, what they're doing. And that way, we can have a pretty sort of, like, pari passu head to head conversation.
00:07:01 · Josh Brown, Alex Altmann, Michael Batnick
[00:07:01] S0: Wanna know what other hedge funds are up to. Yeah. Okay. They do. And not purely, like, from a gossipy sense. Like, too. They wanna... Probably, but they wanna know... So positioning has become something really important in the market. Michael and I joke about it. Anytime there's something going on in the market and we can't explain it, we go Positioning. It's positioning. [00:07:22] S1: And it... It is. [00:07:23] S0: But it's... But people wanna know... People that are managing money professionally wanna know what their peers are doing. And they... I think they recognize the limitations of, like, a traditional portfolio manager survey, which sort of just comes out like groupthink. So you... So I guess you guys become a repository for, well, here's what your peers are. Here are the trades that people are putting on and why. That that... That's one aspect of it. [00:07:49] S1: Yeah. And then there's other aspects about positioning. Okay. So positioning can be instructive because, obviously, flow tends to dictate price. Right? And price dictates narrative. So in theory, you can carve up... And quite frankly, I do follow this mantra, which is if you know if there's a positioning asymmetry that has been built in the market, Does it have the propensity to change price in a very asymmetric way? And in doing so, can shift the market's perception of a narrative. [00:08:19] S2: Situational awareness was a perfect example of that. Perfect example of it.