QVR Advisors - Media
For Media inquiries please contact:
Scott Maidel, Head of Hedge Funds Business at Scott.Maidel@qvradvisors.com
Please meet with us in San Francisco, California, Las Vegas, Nevada and West Palm Beach, Florida.
February 2025 Forward Guidance with Felix Jauvin
February 2025 Bloomberg Odd Lots (Bloomberg link): For a long time, the world of derivatives trading was a niche thing, largely occupied by professional investors who used them for hedging purposes. During the pandemic and the Robinhood boom, the retail masses started discovering them, and activity exploded. Since then, the use of options, swaps and other levered positions has grown among both individual traders and the big professionals on Wall Street. There are countless influencers on social media promising "guaranteed" returns from various options selling strategies. New ETFs have been launched that embed derivatives inside them. And institutions, which might historically have employed simple, sleepy investments, are now making them part of their core mix. So how did this happen, and what effect is it having on the market? On this episode, we speak with Benn Eifert, partner at QVR Advisors, about the evolution of this world, why you should not get your trading advice from Instagram, and how this trend has reshaped the entire market.
February 2025 Bloomberg Odd Lots (spotify link): For a long time, the world of derivatives trading was a niche thing, largely occupied by professional investors who used them for hedging purposes. During the pandemic and the Robinhood boom, the retail masses started discovering them, and activity exploded. Since then, the use of options, swaps and other levered positions has grown among both individual traders and the big professionals on Wall Street. There are countless influencers on social media promising "guaranteed" returns from various options selling strategies. New ETFs have been launched that embed derivatives inside them. And institutions, which might historically have employed simple, sleepy investments, are now making them part of their core mix. So how did this happen, and what effect is it having on the market? On this episode, we speak with Benn Eifert, partner at QVR Advisors, about the evolution of this world, why you should not get your trading advice from Instagram, and how this trend has reshaped the entire market.
January 2025 EQDerivatives: Scott Maidel, partner, portfolio manager and head of hedge funds business at QVR Advisors in San Francisco, said the equity and option markets’ reaction to DeepSeek represents another example of market euphoria unwinding. “Excessive risk taking unwinding with big tech names, particularly chips and artificial intelligence, may be a small crisis for now, or could lead to a more major crisis, unwinding crowded positioning in over-leveraged key areas,” he said. QVR has been leveraging its convexity alpha strategy to capitalize on structural dislocations in risk pricing by identifying and owning undervalued gamma opportunities, stemming from the proliferation of derivative income strategies tied to the S&P 500. Maidel said, “We continue to see dislocations before and during these types of periodic violent unwinds. Volatility events used to last months, then weeks, now it is days or even hours.”
January 2025 Other Peoples Money with Max Wiethe - APPLE podcast link
January 2025 Other Peoples Money with Max Wiethe - YouTube with VIDEO
January 2025 Other Peoples Money with Max Wiethe - SPOTIFY podcast link
January 2025 EQDerivatives: Scott Maidel, partner, portfolio manager and head of hedge funds business at QVR Advisors, said the firm is capitalizing on exponential growth in systematic hedging and derivative income strategies tied to the S&P 500. This trend, coupled with the proliferation of financial products, has created unique opportunities for the firm’s approach. “We follow up-down capture closely. This spread is indicative of manager skill and future returns,” Maidel said. “The convexity alpha program has historically, and is currently, tracking around the 40% range. The vast majority of managers are upside down on up-down capture. When this occurs, hedge funds and other various strategies who are upside down with a negative up-down capture spread, rely on persistent positive equity upside for returns.”
DECEMBER 2024: “We believe this team buildout at QVR continues to bring an experienced lens and advanced techniques staying steps ahead of others,” Maidel said, referring to Miller’s arrival as well as that of Richey, who joined in January. “The team has a real-world successful track record reaching back to the early 1990s,” which Maidel called “very rare in this business.”
DECEMBER 2024: Scott Maidel, head of hedge fund business at QVR, said Miller was hired to help the firm prepare new mandates, including tail hedging, hedged equity and pure volatility alpha. This comes as the team is starting to see some volatility dynamics coming back that haven’t been since the global financial crisis, Maidel said.
OCTOBER 2024 HEDGEWEEK: Volatility hedge fund QVR Advisors, led by 20-year options veteran Scott Maidel, is taking aim at Wall Street’s booming options-selling strategies, which have grown so popular that they may now be undermining their own profitability, according to a report by Bloomberg.
OCTOBER 2024 BLOOMBERG: In the telling of Scott Maidel, a 20-year volatility pro, it’s official: the options-selling boom across Wall Street has now become too popular for its own good.
AUGUST 2024 BLOOMBERG: To Scott Maidel, head of hedge fund business at the $2 billion volatility shop QVR Advisors, the turmoil shook out some leveraged weak hands. Yet he warns investors buying into the trade now face trouble. QVR bet against the strategy during the first quarter, but the wager didn’t pan out as dispersion between stock and index volatility kept widening, so the firm exited its position. “In the event of a market distress, you stand to lose much more on the short index” side of the trade, he said. “We remain cautious.”
JULY 2024 EQDerivatives.com: USD2.1 billion San Francisco-based manager QVR Advisors said hedged equity investors are facing structural pressures in the options market. Scott Maidel, head of hedge fund business at QVR, said that the massive trade flow in hedged equity strategies, supported by hundreds of billions in assets under management growth, is contributing to a large and still growing structural dislocation in options markets. This is opening opportunities for market participants to add alpha by providing liquidity to price insensitive end users of options who trade a specific systematic strategy, regardless of the price, Maidel said.
JULY 2024 RISK.NET “There’s a very large increase in assets under management in retail and of course, it’s also going on privately, probably at a much greater scale,” says Steve Richey, co-chief investment officer at QVR. In a recent paper, the hedge fund describes the funds as “a new wave of option selling and hedging strategies” previously known as defensive equity, now with a new-fangled marketing spin. “The products are being sold as insurance on equity market declines in exchange for a portion of upside gains and large groups of investors are now viewing it as an “evergreen” asset class for income generation,” QVR stated. “There’s a lot of these funds out there, almost too many to keep up with,” Richey adds. “But effectively, they’re all selling volatility. There has been massive growth of products such as JEPI since the global financial crisis.”
JULY 2024 Risk.net
JUNE 2024 Hedge Fund Alert: The San Francisco firm in February launched its second strategy, Convexity Alpha, via separate accounts with the arrival that month of Steve Richey, who previously led First Quadrant’s global options program. Maidel, an alumnus of Russell Investments, previously worked under Richey at First Quadrant, where Maidel was associate director for global trading and trade research. Convexity Alpha represents an evolved version of a strategy Richey led at First Quadrant. Richey worked there from 1997 to 2009, where he oversaw the firm’s $3 billion systematic volatility program.
March 2024 Bloomberg The Big Take: “Yet QVR Advisors also sees the footprints of the boom in vol-selling. The degree of swings priced into S&P 500 options — so-called implied volatility — has drifted lower over the years versus how much the index actually moves around, its data show. The theory is that money managers flooding the market with contracts to generate income are putting a lid on implied volatility — which after all is effectively a gauge of the cost of options. The hedge fund has recently launched a strategy seeking to take advantage of cheap derivatives that benefit from large swings in the S&P 500, whether up or down.”
February 2024 HFA The Grapevine: A veteran portfolio manager who once ran a $3 billion systematic volatility program at First Quadrant has joined QVR Advisors. Steve Richey started in January at the San Francisco firm, where he oversees market-neutral equity, hedged equity and volatility convexity strategies. Richey counts Capstone Investment and Parallax Volatility Advisers among recent employers, though he’s perhaps better known for his 12-plus years at First Quadrant, where he was a partner who managed a short-volatility arbitrage book and headed global options strategies.
January 2024: QVR Hires Portfolio Manager. Steve Richey has joined San Francisco hedge fund QVR Advisors as the manager for its new market neutral equity strategy sleeve. Richey most recently worked as a portfolio manager for Capstone Investment Advisors and Parallax Volatility Advisers. He also Partner and director of trading and global options strategies at First Quadrant where he managed a long-short volatility arbitrage book and oversaw a USD3 billion systematic volatility program at its peak. QVR announced the move this month in its last quarterly letter for 2023.
October 2023: San Francisco-based hedge fund QVR sees no need to use over-the-counter derivatives to expand into new strategies. The fund is expanding strategies and adding assets under management, but Scott Maidel, head of business development, said QVR is sticking to listed instruments. Liquidity and volumes for listed products have ballooned, allowing QVR to add strategy sleeves without turning to OTC markets.
February 2023: Inclusion in the Top 25 Leaders In Systematic And Volatility Investing is based on feedback and data collected from allocators across the globe over the last 12 months.