QVR Advisors - Media
April 2024 EQDerivatives: San Francisco-based volatility manager QVR Advisors has appointed two staff to the role of co-chief investment officer. Tae Hong, currently deputy CIO, and Steven Richey, portfolio manager for QVR’s convexity alpha series, will take over from Benn Eifert as co-CIOs. Eifert will continue in an oversight role and in driving research forward to support business growth further as managing member and president, according to Scott Maidel, head of hedge funds business at the asset manager.
April 2024 Hedge Fund Alert: Tae Hong and Steve Richey have been named co-chief investment officers of QVR Advisors, a growing quantitative firm that trades options and volatility. Hong, who oversees QVR’s absolutereturn strategies, has been with the San Francisco firm since its inception in 2017, most recently filling the role of deputy CIO. Richey, who heads convexity alpha strategies, joined the operation in January as a portfolio manager. He has long experience as a PM, having once overseen a $3 billion systematic volatility program at First Quadrant. More recently, Richey spent time at Capstone Investment and Parallax Volatility Advisers. QVR manages $726 million, up from $578 million in January.
April 2024 EQDerivatives : Tae Hong, partner and deputy chief investment officer at QVR Advisors, said the congestion of dispersion traders making long bets could drive market flows in one direction. QVR has been managing an uncommon vega-neutral short dispersion position – short single-name stock implied volatility versus long S&P 500 index volatility – as the firm sees the current spread between single-name and index volatility being too high, according to QVR’s fund report for March. The USD726 million hedge fund said this movement shows crowded positioning with most of the dispersion players piling into long dispersion positions.
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.
January 2024: Tae Hong, the newly appointed deputy chief investment officer at QVR Advisors, said despite the S&P 500 near all-time highs, the USD644 million hedge fund continues to see dislocations caused by excessive market flows under the hood. “At QVR, we believe the foundation for a successful program is to have a variety of strategy levers to pull,” Hong said in a statement to EQD. “End users dominate derivatives markets and are the marginal price setters. Therefore, when we think about potential positioning it’s usually around excessive movements in volatility skew, volatility term structure and relative volatility moves in SPX versus VIX, to name a few. Unfortunately, many investors are far too often affected by herd mentality or are far entrenched in existing programs to change course.” QVR recently launched new relative value strategy sleeves in commodity interest rate futures with more expected to come in 2024.
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.
November 2022: by Sofia Horta eCosta and Richard Henderson by November 6, 2022.
November 2022: by Lu Wang, November 3, 2022
October 2022: Hugh Hendry Podcast - Dark, Mysterious & Sexy Volatility
October 2022: Hugh Hendry - Dark, Mysterious & Sexy Volatility - podcast YouTube with Hugh Hendry
August 2022: Benn Eifert talks to RCM Alternatives’ Jeff Malec and fellow guest David Rhoiney on The Derivative.
July 2022: CNBC Interview - Benn Eifert, QVR Advisors managing partner, joins ‘TechCheck’ to discuss how to spot red flags when investing in technology companies, those that will emerge from the cryptocurrency space stronger and more.
June 2022: Benn Eifert of QVR joins Harley and Mike to review the trading strategies that led to his explosive performance in 2020. Institutional grade discussion of variance swaps, volatility strategies and the dynamics of managing a portfolio from a position of strength.
June 2022: Blockworks Macro - Forward Guidance - Trading Volatility in Volatile Markets
June 2022: HFA webinar - Managing Volatility Amid Heightened Inflation
Episode 06 Volatility Series: Finding True Value in the World of Volatility ft. Benn Eifert — January 5th, 2022: Hari Krishnan is joined today by Benn Eifert, to discuss running a volatility fund, the benefits that Benn gets from using Twitter, how to effectively serve clients as a volatility trader, the drawbacks of hedging via ETFs, monitoring market flows, the popularity of short-dated options, implied volatility versus realised volatility, how correlations change over time, balancing family-life with managing a fund, and the new normalisation of working from home.
ReSolve Riffs September 2021 with co-host Corey Hoffstein: Option writing, collars, operational alpha, industry trends and more.
July 2021: The BIP Show podcast.
Bloomberg TV May 2021: Benn Eifert discusses retail options trading. He joins Guy Johnson and Kailey Leinz on "Bloomberg Markets".
RICHES IN THE NICHES Ep. 21: Recurring Thematic Dislocations
Bloomberg May 2021: Benn Eifert speaks to Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway .
April 2021: Macro Hive Conversations Episode 47
Bloomberg TV March 2021: Benn Eifert, founder and chief investment officer at QVR Advisors, discusses retail options trading, volatility, ETFs, and the VIX. He speaks on “Bloomberg Markets”.
Bloomberg Odd Lots February 2021: Odd Lots podcast discussing stock market gamma squeezes, how retail trading is affecting markets and what the ripple effects of this will be.
The Alpha Exchange January 2021: QVR Advisors CIO Benn Eifert joins Dean Curnutt on the Alpha Exchange podcast. Discussion topics include crowd sourced convexity, a persistently high VIX, supply vs. demand for optionality and some potential misconceptions around the retail option trading community amongst other topics.
Bloomberg January 2021: QVR mentioned in Bloomberg news. Clip discusses small lot trader volume increase year over year and impact by hedging of that activity spurring further upside gains.
Bloomberg January 2021: “Over 18 million calls in sizes of 10 contracts or less were purchased in the first week of December, the highest ever, according to the Options Clearing Corp. data compiled by QVR Advisors Chief Investment Officer Benn Eifert. Just over 16 million calls were purchased in the first week of January.”
EQDerivatives November 2020: The QVR Absolute Return Fund is a capacity-constrained alpha strategy that seeks to provide a diversifying return stream with low correlation to traditional assets. The sub-strategies are constructed to be market neutral on a stand-alone basis and all weather, Scott Maidel, QVR’s head of business development wrote.
Global EQD 2020: The first day of Global EQD 2020 was held on Monday, Oct. 26, as an exclusive investor forum sponsored by QVR Advisors. A panel of investors discussed their approaches to volatility investing, how they are thinking about using vol to supplement or replace fixed income in their portfolio and the various benefits of tail-risk hedging.
Global EQD 2020: Benn Eifert, chief investment officer at QVR Advisors, Cem Karsan, senior managing partner at Aegea Capital Management and Roxton McNeal, head of multi-asset investment strategy and allocation at UPS Investment Trust, discussed portfolio design and tail risk management as well as lessons learned from March 2020, on day two at the sixth annual Global EQD. The panel was moderated by Elinor Comlay, global managing editor at EQDerivatives.
Global Capital September 2020: Covid Raises Hedging Questions as Markets Plot A Path Forward.
Bloomberg September 2020: Odd Lots Podcast discussing how Robinhooders fueled the stock market rally.
Bloomberg September 2020: Evidence suggests the kind of strategies pursued by institutions like SoftBank have a minimal effect on stock-market volatility, according to Benn Eifert, chief investment officer of hedge fund QVR Advisors. Citing commentary from derivatives trading desks, he said the real power is being wielded by day traders buying enormous amounts of call options on tech stocks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-07/nasdaq-whale-theory-for-tech-stock-surge-is-stirring-doubts
EQDerivatives Virtual Forum July 2020: See here for video (subscribers only) https://eqderivatives.com/commentary/virtual-forum-notes-looking-beyond-spx-dislocations-issuance-and-tactical-opportunities-in-partnership-with-cboe
Newfound Research Flirting with Models podcast July 2020: https://blog.thinknewfound.com/podcast/s3e3-benn-eifert/
Institutional Investor June 2020: QVR’s flagship vol products (called “absolute return”) gained 59 percent as Malachite and others imploded during the first three months of 2020. Was it edifying? “Yeah. Very much so,” Eifert says. He’s among this crisis’s Big Short-type investors — those who both called a collapse and turned it into a windfall. But even hedge-fund managers admit little pleasure whispering “I told you so” as the economy disintegrates and livelihoods vanish. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1m6kkzscgqrl0/How-to-Lose-a-Billion-Dollars-Without-Really-Trying
Bloomberg June 2020: Click here for video: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-06-12/qvr-cio-eifert-says-market-selloff-didn-t-feel-panicky-video
June 2020: San Francisco-based QVR Advisors plans to launch a commingled fund in the fourth quarter, broadening investor access to its absolute-return strategy. Launching the strategy as a commingled fund will allow QVR to offer it to a wide range of investors, from pensions to endowments, foundations and other institutional investors, as well as family offices, Maidel said.
May 2020: San Francisco-based QVR Advisors has hired Scott Maidel in a new role as head of business development. Chief Investment Officer Benn Eifert said the firm, formed almost three years ago, made the addition as it is starting to see much broader interest in its absolute return and institutional solutions business. “We manage capacity-constrained absolute-return strategies that are best communicated by someone with a background in derivatives portfolio management.
EQDerivatives Magazine, 2020, Vol. VI, Issue 2 https://eqderivatives.com/magazines
EQDerivatives Magazine 2020, VOL. VI, ISSUE 1 https://eqderivatives.com/magazines
Alpha Exchange 2020 - Welcome to the first in a special series of the Alpha Exchange in which the 2020 economic and financial crisis is the specific focus. Amidst this protracted ...
Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast April 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-04-09/what-s-happening-with-those-korean-structured-notes-podcast
Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast Jan 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-01-17/how-to-create-havoc-in-the-u-s-options-market-podcast