QVR Advisors - Media
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Scott Maidel, Head of Hedge Funds Business at Scott.Maidel@qvradvisors.com
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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
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.