In Return Stacking and Telescopes, astronomy gave us the hopeful version of low signal-to-noise: stack enough weak observations and hidden structure can become visible. Part B is the warning label. When evidence is faint, humans and models can also invent structure where none exists. Along the way, we’ll peer at Martian civilizations through Victorian telescopes, count how many canals a computer can find in pure noise, see what AI does to that count, and ask who is most likely to build them.

Understanding the interplay between supply & demand, physical & financial players, inventories & storage capacity, helps us understand the price dynamics of calendar spreads better.

Take a magical trip into the Universe, both financial and cosmological, as we explore how stacking can reveal real but faint signals that no single observation can see. Along the way, we’ll pass distant galaxies, bridge astronomical magnitudes to Sharpe ratios, and find out why the real magic in trend following is not prediction, but the disciplined accumulation of weak evidence.

Equity trend can be broken down into index trend, industry trends, factors trends and thematic trends. Even then, most of the risk remain idiosyncratic and there is more of it than ever before... 

Market selection is the bedrock of any investment process - yet it’s often treated as a one‑off design decision rather than an evolving discipline constrained by capacity, quality, and diversification reality. I learned an early, low‑cost version of this lesson at a horse race, aged thirteen, with a fifty‑pence bet on a horse called Microlite…

High and rising Inflation is bad for your portfolio. Especially to your bonds. If you are worried about inflation and want a better defensive allocation, returning CPI+4% in all inflation regimes, an equal mix of bonds and commodity trend may be what you are looking for.

Fear and greed drive markets. For equities this is the classic risk-off, risk-on dynamic. For commodities it can play a little differently, indeed both fear and greed can lead to commodity price rises.

Let’s talk about “bananas”. And for once this isn’t a metaphor for market madness.

Understanding the supply & demands dynamics of a market is important for trend followers, so here is a surprising result showing how inelastic demand is in the US equity market...

We examine both through the lens of which markets are ‘best’ for trend and demonstrate that it is possible to reconcile these two opponents and persuade them both to work together.

The mathematical distillation of trend into its critical components.

Oftentimes we think of CTAs as “uncorrelated”. But if you are an allocator and want to ensure your portfolio is more robust to your capital market assumptions, you should consider CTAs as a tool, right at the core, of your allocation process.