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.

Thanks for listening and please welcome our next guest, Marc Malek.

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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.
  

  “If you look at any successful discretionary trader, they don’t sort of wake up and randomly decide one day to put on a position because they had a dream.” – Marc Malek (Tweet)

• How Marc got hired at UBS and moved to Europe and then Asia during his time with the company.
  

  “In setting up the Global Exotic Derivatives Group, I initially set it up in New York, then moved to London and set it up there, then moved to Tokyo and set it up there.” – Marc Malek (Tweet)

• Marc’s departure from UBS and how he started Conquest Capital Group.
• How trader’s thought processes are turned into trading models.
  

  “Liquidity is the oxygen of these strategies, and one of the first casualties from the rise of risk aversion is liquidity.” – Marc Malek (Tweet)

• Why models are not black boxes and why investors should not be worried.
• The history of trend following and the old systematic approach.
  

  “There is a big misconception out there that investors believe that long term trend following is a long volatility strategy; it’s not.” – Marc Malek (Tweet)

• 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.
  

  “I don’t understand how anyone can promise a certain return profile because really returns are a function of what the markets give you, and no one really knows ahead of time what the market will give you.” – Marc Malek (Tweet)

• 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.

Resources & Links Mentioned in this Episode:

• Learn about Marc’s previous employers/institutions:
  • Salomon Brothers
  • Caltech
  • UBS
• See Episodes 13 and 14 for more discussion on “Turtle Strategies”.

*This was originally published in Top Traders Unplugged.