Posts by Jakub Rehor - Portfolio Manager

After a heady nine months in the commodities space, investors are starting to ask whether the boom is over. Have we missed it? Is there still time to jump on the bandwagon? Fear not, we haven’t even started yet. A quick look at the chart of the Bloomberg Commodity Index puts the recent past into Read More

People who want to become quant investors or traders often ask for advice on how to start. I began my learning journey ten years ago and now I have some opinions on the matter. It is easy to put together a monster list of dozens of books but that kind of advice is counterproductive, more Read More

Lumber prices have soared in the last 12 months to levels never seen before. Lumber traded between $200 and $400 for 25 years, from 1990 to 2015. There was a brief spike to $600 in 2018, but the price quickly returned to $400. The last 18 months have been wild. As the pandemic kept people Read More

Not all futures contracts succeed in gaining trader adoption. Exchanges try to list many contracts. They then quietly delist those that languish in obscurity. Successful launches are rare. The creation of whole new categories of contracts is even rarer and happens about once per decade. The 1970s saw adoption of currency and interest rate futures Read More

The futures industry historically served large users: big farmers, grain traders, food processing companies, energy companies, etc. They were mostly commodity producers or buyers hedging their exposure; investors and speculators played a small role in the market. That started changing in the early 1970s with the launch of the International Monetary Market, a subsidiary of Read More