This article is about one of the giants in the hedge fund arena. Michael Platt is a stock trader who achieved career clarity at an early age. When he was twelve years old, he already knew that he wanted to become a trader, starting at the age of thirteen. Plath traded successfully during his high school and college days, although he suffered a major drawdown during the 1987 market crash. When he completed his qualification, he joined JP Morgan. During his eight years at JP Morgan, he managed to remain consistently profitable. After a good time at JP Morgan, he left to trade for a firm he co-founded known as Bluecrest. The company was successful and brought in a lot of profit. It uses a discretionary and systematic approach based on the system. Their success is largely due to their exceptional risk management.
Their biggest loss in eleven years was only five percent, and the years were not without a financial crisis. His trading strategy of discretion is very diverse. Diversification was achieved by using different traders with different trading strategies. When Michael was young, he was obsessed with puzzles. He compares the markets to puzzles to be solved, and after the solution, there must be compensation. He believes that markets should logically move up or down, consolidate, look for new fundamentals and trend again, but this is rarely the case. He believes that market pricing is irrational because many decisions are made by traders based on their past experience. It has been experimentally proven that most people can hardly remember their past experiences in detail.
He believes that a systematic strategy based on diversification has become more difficult to generate large profits due to the evolving phenomenon of risk and lack of risk. This means that the markets have become more correlated recently than in the past. This led to an update of his systematic strategy. The system is programmed to exit trades when the market is overvalued. The background is when he closes positions and the market continues to trade in their favor, but this helps in a situation where the market turns aggressively. Another aspect of the program is that it will place small positions when it thinks the trend is weak. The strategy changes from time to time, as the markets are constantly changing, and this requires a lot of research. Michael's grandmother used to trade stocks, she actually introduced fees to stock trading.
The first trade he made was financed by his grandmother as a loan. When he was twelve, he read articles about investing and how to analyze. By the time he was fourteen, he had already amassed a lot of information about finances and had saved up twenty-five thousand pounds by buying and selling shares. Although the crash of 1987 got the best of him when he lost fifty percent of the funds. This happened due to poor risk management. After the crash, he was able to get his money back when the markets recovered. Michael's hedge fund also uses a discretionary strategy when trading emerging markets, loans and fixed income, and he also pays minimal attention to equities. They have a little program where they run the system on individual stocks. The system looks for a discrepancy in the performance of a single stock compared to a basket of stocks.
Basically, he looks for signs that point to the correlation of one stock and uses the difference in prices. Almost every successful hedge fund manager seems to know the story of the financial crisis, and Platt is no exception. Prior to the crisis, Michael had a neutral market strategy and was able to anticipate the coming crisis. In 2007, he saw red flags that caused confusion. Libor rose by ten percent, something he had never seen in his entire trading career. When he realized that there was a possibility of a credit crunch. When he gave talks, he found himself dwelling on the topic of credit risks associated with financial institutions, and people thought he was crazy until the crash happened. The Libor ios spread is an index of overnight lending rates, it reflects how much the lender receives compensation for lending, this is basically a premium for the risk that the lender had when lending funds that have the possibility of not being returned.
When Michael realized that there was more risk in stocks, he adjusted his stock management strategy by $9 billion. Even though it had already lost five percent on this strategy, it was not outrageous compared to the losses other institutions had suffered. Many people were so optimistic that they ignored the signals until it was too late to liquidate open positions in the stock market. Once Platt liquidated all of his positions, he invested nearly all of his funds in fixed income assets such as Treasury bonds. When markets are uncertain or in turmoil, money will flow into safe havens such as US government debt, the dollar, the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen. During the crisis, his hedge fund made big profits. Platt has a high regard for risk management and employs experts from every sector of the business. He constantly monitors the accounts of traders.
He is very realistic in his expectations from his traders. Sometimes a trader may have a losing streak, but this does not mean that he cannot trade. Trading in Michael's hedge fund is like trading in a private firm. It puts limits on trading accounts and if you are making big profits you can move the funds to the next contract which will give you more room for drawdowns. His risk management methods are limited not only to cutting losses, but also to how assets compare. Like many successful traders, Platt does not hesitate to close a losing position and knows how to make his emotions work for him. He does not think he knows everything about trading, and is always ready to adjust his strategies when he sees fit. Some traders are introduced to trading in
unusual ways. For example, Platt was introduced to trading by his grandmother, which is cool.