JASON BUCK: I'm Jason Buck and this is Real Visionaries. On this theme, I had the idea of a general vol theme. Everybody knows I come from the vol space, but trying to think a vol in maybe a broader sense. And that's what thematically has a through line with all the guests in this part of the series. If we think about Alex Lennard from Ruffer. Ruffer is known as 50 cent in our world. They were buying these out of the money call options on VIX for 50 cents.

Everybody knew it as 50 cents, but it finally came to light in 2020, that was actually Ruffer. This is obviously a very direct volatility play. But it's really interesting to think about how Ruffer running over $30 billion in all-weather strategies. How they use volatility to hedge other parts of their book, or how they systematically think about how the global landscape prevails and how they hedge out those different parts of their book.

ALEX LENNARD: One of the ways that we think about getting protection into our portfolios is asking ourselves, where is the mania in financial markets. Once you identify that mania there, there are two things you can do. First, and probably the most importantly is avoid it. Owning no dotcom stocks prior to the TMT Blob. Owning no leverage financials prior to the GFC, but then also trying to get the other side of it. If the mania breaks, where is capital potentially going to rush to?

JASON BUCK: One of the other guests we had, my buddy, Cem Karsan from Kai Volatility. Obviously, another volatility trader. But Cem has a really interesting perspective because he comes from a market maker and volatility. He knows how to assess where dealer flows are coming from. So, that's his specialty. And his secret sauce is figuring out how the different players in the market, how the dealers have to hedge their book, and how that affects volatility. But he would argue that volatility is the tail that wags the dog. So, everybody may think, oh, I don't care about volatility, I'm trading the equity markets. Well, volatility is actually moving the equity markets, whether they realize it or not.

CEM KARSAN: Deal flow is predictive. This is much more traditional asset management in the sense that we now take the shackles of arbitrage off of the strategy. We allow it to be a too long 1x the underlying market, up to short 1x the underlying market, up to 1.5x notionally long vol, up to short 1.5x notionally short vol. And so, this now bigger sandbox allows for us to be much more dynamic in our positioning.

JASON BUCK: We also Noel Smith from Convex AM. Noel is another volatility trader, so to speak, but he has a very unique perspective as well. He used to run a prop shop. What's interesting in prop shops is you get to see dozens of strategies over time. How those individual strategies work and what doesn't work, given different market cycles and regime shifts. A strategy might work for five years, then might go out of favor for five years and come back the next five years, and how can you tell if they work or not?

It's interesting to talk to Knoll about, I had seen dozens of strategies, how does he pick a handful of strategies that he will think works? Then how does he think about the importing or overlaying volatility within that? Is this a long vol strategies or a short ball strategy? How do we harness volatility in general?

NOEL SMITH: We have four strategies that we employ. There are balances around the other. There's actually a little bit more about, we'll just talk about the main four. First one is version trade. Our second one is a VIX Vol trade, which is really Vol ARB in the VIX complex. Our third trade is Vol ARB. And our fourth trade is a bond term structure trade. Each one of these trades have been introduced to me over the years through other guys that have come to work for me, or we've massaged over time. What we've tried to do is just optimize them and make the cost for them as low as possible, while make the benefit for them as high as possible.

JASON BUCK: We also interviewed Scott Army. Scott Army comes to us from Galaxy Vision Hill. It's a really interesting perspective Scott has because they are the primary tracker of hedge funds within the crypto space. And so, they look at a multistrategy perspective on how crypto is operating. Obviously, if we're talking crypto, we're talking Vol. It's one of the highest Vol assets that we all can play with. And everybody loves volatility because with volatility is how we make money. We talked to Scott about the different aspects of how you should trade the crypto markets or how one could trade the crypto markets, or how to look at allocating to the crypto markets.

SCOTT ARMY: Purpose built in digital assets, nothing like that existed. We took all of our data and we put it in a database. And we said let's open source this to the extent we can to the community, because it's going to help allocators get comfortable, with better information, our tagline, better information leads to smarter investment decisions.

JASON BUCK: Also, I was able to interview Anthony Scaramucci. It's very interesting. How would you say Anthony Scaramucci is involved in volatility? I would almost say, for lack of a better term, a very volatile character. But part of it is he's been able to harness that volatility, not only survive, but thrive off of it. That he can truncate his left tail volatility. He can rise like a phoenix from the ashes. And so, it's always great talking to him because he's one of the great raccoon tours in our space.

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: United States is now borrowing 53 cents of every dollar that it's spending, should that be the way it goes? Is that how we ought to do things? No, but that's how we're doing things. Now I have to prepare my clients and prepare my portfolio to embrace the reality of that world. And so, this is a way more growth oriented product. This is like a tiger global for the masses. It has some high gross low net strategies in there like 0.72 and guys like Dan Loeb, but I've also got Web 3.0 stuff going on inside that portfolio.

And I've got some privates in there, where we own pieces of different companies like FTX, and Chime and Klarna, because I know that those companies are going to take us into the future. And that's where the economic rent is going to be, and I want my clients to do well.

JASON BUCK: In general, people talk about volatility, right? Is volatility the new asset class, or is volatility the only asset class? That's for other people to argue. I just think is the volatility is an overlay for how we think about the world. Everything we do is going to be there, implicitly short volatility and persistently long volatility.

So, it's very easy for me to look at the world through a lens of volatility. But maybe that's not the only thing in life, but it's a good metaphor for maybe how we should think about our interactions with people. They're generally long volatility, their call options. It's very exciting to hang out with new and interesting people. And I like to bring these people on camera for this Real Visionary series, because it's very interesting to talk to people from different walks of life and how they think about portfolio construction and how they harness volatility to make sure we save and invest and grow our wealth over time.