Andreas Clenow: Simplicity, Momentum, and Systematic Trading | In The Money by Zerodha Podcast 06

Everybody thinks they're a genius in the bull market. I thought I was clever back then. Of course, I wasn't. I was a lucky kid. Right time, right place. And I was reading pretty much every trading book I could get hold of. It took me also many years to realize that very few of the books were actually useful in any way. My personal opinion has been for the last five, six years that this bull market has lasted way too long. It's going to crash any moment. I don't trade on my views. I trade on my math. Opinions are not always good. It's never a matter of the best possible rules, the best possible system, the most profit. That's not how you build a professional trading strategy. First, you need to figure out what are you looking for to make money is not an answer. People are saying strategies only work because everybody follows it or they say because nobody knows about it. And both can't be true. I used to build very complicated things like 20 years ago. The older I get, the more I realize that simplicity gets the job done. Andreas Clenau is a Zurich based fund manager, quantitative trader, entrepreneur, and best-selling author known for translating systematic strategies into practical frameworks. He currently serves as CIO of a family office, overseeing multiple investment programs and managing a 9-figure asset base. Before stepping into the family office role, he built a career that spans both technology and finance. He started programming at a young age, studied finance at Goththingberg School of Economics and founded an IT company in 1990s before moving into the financial sector. He later joined Reuters, led a Nordic consulting division working with banks and asset managers and eventually left the corporate life to launch and run his own hedge fund business. Outside of portfolio management, he has continued to build products and research platforms for systematic investors, including Clenau Research and now the Hush app. Beyond that, Andreas is popular among traders and investors for his books, Following the Trend, Stocks on the Move, and Trading World. He's also written a fictional novel titled A Most Private Bank. Thank you, Andreas, for taking the time to talk to us as a systematic trader myself. Your books have had an immense impact on how I design trading and investing strategies today. Thank you again. And with that, let's get started. >> Thank you for having me. Great to be here. >> I was reading about you and listening to some of your podcast to get a better understanding and I um you know, one of the things which I figured out was you started with computer science at a very young age. What got you to computers? What got you interested in computers at a young age? And what were you coding at that point of time? Yeah, dangerous question. I guess the uh the answer that is beyond the uh statuto limitation at this point. So I could uh elaborate on that. Uh I think I started using computers when I was about eight or nine years old. Obviously the big thing back then was uh how do you get hold of more games? Uh which involved obviously well cracking games and figuring out how to get more games without um breaking or breaking your your budget as a you know as an 8-year-old. So I guess that's how I first got into computers. Back then for those of you old enough to remember even to start a game back then required a little bit of of of knowledge about computers. It was natural thing. You had to figure out about computers. Nowadays of course you you press a button and the game starts. That was not the way things worked back then. Uh so yeah I I was part of the the uh the young underground computer world back then. um figuring out how to bypass copy protection on games, how to play games, how to get them started and you know you you learn a lot from these things. This was oh let me see this is uh yeah sometime in the 80s I I suppose I started with these things >> floppy disc and and CDROM days. >> Uh it was way before CDROMs. Uh I was I mean originally it was u it was cassettes. So you had a actual cassettes. I guess I'm guessing a large part of this audience have no idea what I'm talking about. After that, you advance to the uh the big leagues, the 525 in floppy discs, you know, the the the big soft bendable discs. Uh the ones where you can actually take a pair of scissors and cut a little um cut a little square in in one side of it and suddenly you have double capacity because you took a pair of scissors to a disc. Hard to explain those days to people these days. >> Good one. Good one. How did markets happen after that? markets. I guess I got interested in in finance during university or probably quite early, even quite a little bit earlier than that. Uh, as so many people my age, I would blame the movie Wall Street, 1986, not the other ones with similar names coming later. Uh, the movie that Oliver Stone made to discourage people from finance and explain how evil finance is. And it got a whole generation of people like me to join finance instead because we all misunderstood the movie and we saw go and gecko as a big hero. So I I guess I I started getting interested in finance around there like movie came out ' 86 I guess I probably saw it 80 88 89 something like that and decided to go that path. Combination of the two things of course was quite natural once I had some yeah some some education in in finance and I had my already some some skills on the on the IT side. It was quite natural thing to combine the two and figure out a way to to to have benefit of knowing both sides. >> Got it. But what were your sense of markets? What were you reading at that time and what was your understanding of how markets work at that point of time? >> Well, back then I would say I was extremely good at the markets back then. I was essentially just uh buying uh tech stocks before the uh before the reports and making money. Uh clearly like everybody else back then, I thought I was clever until I realized that uh it took me some years to realize that my brilliant strategy of beating the market was based on buy stocks in the bull market and hope for the best. Everybody was making money back then, you know, it was sure sheer dumb luck. I I started I started investing in a massive a massive bull market in in the dotcom boom. Uh, so of course it's fun when when you start in that kind of environment and it looks so easy then it's fun and like everybody else you know everybody thinks they're a genius in the bull market and I I thought I was I thought I was clever back then of course I wasn't I I was a lucky kid um right time right place but I was I was reading uh back then I was reading pretty much every trading book I could get a hold of I was reading a lot of of books back then it took me also many years to realize that very few of the books were actually useful in any way, but I read all the all the usual names, whatever books you're thinking of, I I probably read them back then. >> Anything in particular that stood out and that kind of helped you in in retrospect, if you think who made sense? >> Let me see. I always enjoyed I I like the Market Wizards book, of course. Uh there was a few of them in the end. Did I find any use for it? Not really. It's more inspirational stories. Uh Jack is a great great author, of course. U I read everything that Jack wrote. Uh, in the end I probably had much more help of reading more technical books, things that help me figure things out on on how to actually do stuff. Too many many trading books, many trading books are more inspirational stories. It's it's great for like a feel-good story, but they don't really help you with anything really practical. No, I I I read a lot of the things. I would say some books that taught me a lot about finance, uh, obviously Liars Poker was was a brilliant book back then. There a few books like that. It's not going to tell you anything directly about trading. It tells you about the finance industry. Uh so that that that's a brilliant book. It doesn't it doesn't pretend to teach you anything about how the markets work. It teach you how teaches you how the finance industry works. At that point of time I understand you were discretionary as an investor or trader and you know how did this whole transition from being discretionary to systematic happen? >> I think even back then I was doing a lot of attempt to systematic trading. I remember I had a bunch of models which looked great at the time. Obviously like like everybody else at the time I I did the stupid math on uh uh you know if you have a say you have a great month and uh you take crazy risk you don't even realize how much crazy risk you take and suddenly you have like a you know 50% plus month which of course is uns unsustainable but like everybody else I I did the funny math of what happens if I compounded that for the next uh you know 10 years and you know you start calculating on when you buy your own island and all this nonsense. Everybody does this when when you're young young and naive. You you start compounding the last month or so. No, I was doing some things back then. I was even um I remember back in the 90s I even once built a a real time point and figure plotter in Excel VBA which was I would say for early '9s it was probably quite advanced. It didn't make me any money in the end but it was a fun little project. >> Got it. But how did this transition happen? At what point you know you you were a discretionary investor or trader and then thought okay it makes more sense to kind of code something or back test a logic. How did that that transition happen? I >> I think I started becoming uh more skeptic about things. I saw a lot of stuff that I doubted especially things I read about and books or online. I saw a lot of things that didn't make sense to me. I tried to quantify it and I realized many of the I would say the more outlandish and ridiculous things >> like >> they're well uh say if somebody tells you that the universe is based on predictable waves where it's like five waves up and three waves down and you divide >> Elliot to wave or something like that. Yeah, >> exactly. And you you divide certain numbers by each other and you get these funny ratios based on a you know rabbit counting mathematician in in uh in Venice uh was it Florence a few hundred years ago. It's ridiculous. It's it's some sort of pseudo religious nonsense. If you believe in these things then you know go join a cult or something. It's not it's not finance. I I started trying to quantify all these kind of things. I started looking for ways of uh can we quantify can we quantify anything about waves or Fibonacci numbers and by the way my my my view on those things are clear that nobody in the in the actual finance industry takes those kind of things seriously that these are like fair fairy tales for hobby investors and you very quickly realize that none of these things are are even quantifiable if you try to define them as math you you can't which is why people can always claim that they work because they can always say your wave count was wrong now then I started um trying to figure out what does work and I realized that as a general principle the the simpler things tend to be more stable. Uh so I started building fairly simple things look at the the um my original background in the hedge fun industry about the uh managed future space. It's not very complex math. The math the math behind it is not very complex. You just need to build your models and test your models and build confidence in them and this can be done by most people. >> So which was largely trend following. Is that how you got started? >> Yes, exactly. That's uh that was my my first type of uh the investment strategy on the professional side. Once I I left my uh my my corporate gig back in in Geneva back in the days um I was uh I had a funny title. What was I called? I was uh global head of commortis and equities analytics something like that. >> Oh, that's a great title to have. >> Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. Corporations are great at giving you good titles. That's that's a that's a good way of avoiding giving you more money. Give you a better title instead. That's that's how large companies often work. Anyway, there was uh no that was fun for a while but I felt I had to get out of there. So I um I launched my first fund back in 2005 2006 around there somewhere uh in the trend following future space. Uh that's when I started considering writing a book mostly because the first thing I did when I started the fund was I I started buying every book I could find on the topic of managed futures and I quickly realized that it's very clear if you come from the industry that almost none of them have any background in the industry. what they're talking about doesn't make any sense and they're missing all kinds of details that are very obvious to people who actually have been there and done that. So my impression was most books about that topic were written by people who don't know more than their readers. So I figured I'll try to read I'll try to write a very simple to the point book explaining how the industry works and that's the one that turned out to be let me see over there somewhere >> behind I can see that I can see that though both the titles look very similar image but then yeah I can see that that's also one of the books I read and which informed me about trend following in a serious way. So thank you for writing the book 2005 which means you within a few years of you starting your fund you experienced the great you know financial uh you know crash of u so how was that how was that experience >> oh that was interesting it's one of those years if you look at a if you look at a track record or even a back test for the managed future space forget about the other parts of the industry but just for the managed future space it's going to look like this was the greatest year ever. Yeah, we had great results that year. I mean the >> because of crisis alpha sort of a thing. >> Exactly. Exactly. Everybody else was suffering. Stock market lost half uh value and so on. Many future space did extremely well but still anybody who was on that side on the on the sharp end of that business that year will have PTSD feelings just hearing the word 2008. Yes, we we had the greatest year ever. We had the most profitable year in the history of the industry, but it was not a fun year. This was a year where the stress level was extreme. Anybody who has any sort of say responsible anybody who who understands financial uh responsibility would have overridden their systems to decrease risk that year because you had massive swings. Once you start seeing 15 20% on the entire fund swings per day, you decrease risk fast. Yeah, you would have made more money if you didn't decrease, but that's insane. You don't take the kind of risk. Most models were not designed for the kind of volatility we saw there. And of course, the bigger problem was in the managed future space. You have you always have a large amount of cash on hand. Now you have the cash management is large part of the field. Uh because you only use uh usually 10 15% maybe 20 if you're aggressive in terms of margin. Now you need to do something with the rest which usually means um you need to safeguard it somewhere. Obviously you don't you know you don't keep hundreds of millions in in cash in a bank account that can blow up in a day. But where do you keep it? And if you need it pretty soon, you need short uh short durations. This became a ridiculous game of say in the afternoon every day you have to analyze which of the major investment banks in the world are least likely to blow up in the next 24 hours. So imagine you're spending a couple of hours every afternoon trying to figure out is Deutsche Bank or or uh or is it going to be Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan who who is most likely or who's least likely to go bankrupt in 24 hours? And now you do overnight depos with those banks. I mean that's today that sounds absurd but that's what you had to do for a couple of months or for months and a half or something like that. So that was that was pretty extreme. >> But did you also have to adjust your positions based on volatility? >> Yeah, of course. I mean my models like many others were not at all designed for this level of of of activity in the markets. So you you have to override it. I I mean this whole you know there's a lot of mantras and a lot of um say platitudes in the business about always do this never do this you can't you can't act like that uh sometimes the markets will remind you that they will surprise you and do something that you did not prepare for your model your mass is not prepared for in that case you need you need to take action especially if you have responsibility for large amount of money for other people you need to act responsibly uh my models were originally not adapted to this extreme level of volatility. We we've never seen anything like that in history before. So, you need to take action. You need to you need to adapt. Uh but even then obviously I I decreased risk a lot from from default as did almost everybody out there. But yeah, it's uh it was a tough year. It was a tough year. After that uh me and I guess everybody else started designing models for extreme scenarios that we couldn't imagine. What if something extreme happens? But it was it's interesting here that's for sure. So one of the things which I've observed Andreas is you know as investors the experiences which we have in the initial periods of our careers kind of informs how we look at the markets. Do you think 2008 was one such event for you where you know which continues to uh inform your way of looking at the market? >> I think it's even earlier to be honest. I think uh 2001 to 2003 has very much formed my my view of the world. Uh that's something interesting I see see nowadays that many people who have not been in the market very long they believe that stocks will always go up markets will always go up and a dip should be bought >> in India there a lot of investors came postco so people who've been like me the older people who've been there earlier we kind of look at them and you know we tell them you've not seen what a market is like because they never seen a recession or a downturn they've only seen markets going up so I think you're talking about uh you know people who recently come into the markets Yeah, I mean recently we we now have the the longest running longest running uh bull market in well two generations. I mean there there is a reason that I trade systematically and not on my opinions because I have been my personal opinion has been for the last five six years that this bull market has lasted way too long. It's going to crash any moment. But don't take my word for it because if I was good at predicting this I would do that for a living. So yeah, I believe the market's going to crash soon, but I've been saying that for so many years. I've been wrong so far. I don't trade on my views. I trade on my math and my math has been long and my math has been loading up risk. So yeah. >> Yeah. Got it. >> Opinions are not always good. >> Yes. Yes. And do you think it's fundamentally quantitative easing changed the way markets work? Do you think that has had an effect? >> Yeah, obviously they had a effect of some years, but do these things have an impact over over decades? Probably not. I mean we we've seen various patterns of of financial policy, fiscal monetary policy from from uh from both Europe and the US uh in the last few decades. Yeah, it changes some some some structural things are happening most most of it on um you know where the interest rates are and which direction they're moving. Uh I mean take an extreme example. the uh one reason why the the managed futures game was so fun for so many years was that we had a very unique situation where interests we're talking American interest because that's primarily what the game is or at least was the interests were very very high and slowly moving down and in that environment with no particular shock this was like 80s and 90s well first you made a lot of money from uh interest moving down so you have a you made a lot of money from the bonds going up in price inverse relationship people those who don't didn't study finance. The other thing is of course you have like 80% or so in in cash but you put that in in government papers and you had a great interest on that which of course you got management fee you got performance fee on that as well. Now in these levels that's all gone of course it's going to be gone for decades. US interests are at least a little bit I mean we're uh much closer to zero over here and in my part of the world. Yeah I mean that's one thing the easing is one thing. The other thing that we hate on the systematic side is surprise government interventions of any kind. Predictable interventions are just fine. But I see more of the problem where we end up in a binary risk situation where we're all looking at this one event. It happens from time to time. Everything is depending on one event whether it's some some budget decision, some debt ceiling or whatever it is. And when the decision comes out, it's a binary a lot up a lot down just waiting for single events. That's something we we we generally hate in the industry. It was worse a few years ago, but yeah, long answer to a short question. Sorry. >> I'll take the conversation more specific to uh trend following now because you started uh with managed futures and that's when you wrote the book. So what at a at a barebone level, what exactly was the strategy? What kind of assets were you trading under it? And uh if you could give me a sense of that. >> Sure. Uh so trend following is a very old type of strategy. What most people not most people that that's a that's a wrong term say what many people who are not in the industry who are outside or students or hobby traders what they do that that's a big mistake is they do trend following on like one instrument what's the best we have trend following the NASDAQ for instance yeah that's not a great strategy what we do in the in the industry is we trade uh a lot of things usually 50 to 100 different futures contracts covering stocks bonds currencies uh commodities pretty much anything you can trade with with with with futures and we don't care what it is. It's just math to us. The thing is you want to have things that are uh not highly correlated even negatively correlated and you we run fairly simple math on when to go in when to go out. Everybody knows the basics of this. I mean the the proverbial devil is in the details but everybody knows the the over the the the gist of the math. It's not that complicated. >> But when you started was it was it moving averages or breakouts or what exactly? >> Yeah, it's it's combinations of of those kind of things. I mean you you can make it a little bit more complicated but in the end that's not going to make the biggest difference. In the end the the big difference is how you build a portfolio. I mean measuring trends you can measure trends many different ways. Is it better to use a breakout or moving average or this or that is an irrelevant conversation that's not you can tweak a little bit on those kind of things in the industry. Most of the time we don't use classical technical analysis indicators mostly because the you have some mathematical properties on other things that make them more convenient. Uh the technical indicators are good enough for many things but keep in mind that many of the the famous technical indicators they were built by smart people but back in the day when they didn't have computer resources many of them are built in a simplified way to make it easier to calculate them with pen and paper and there's no reason to you know follow this because famous person X did this in the 70s yeah you know if he had proper computer systems he would have done it differently so why are we copying the stuff he did with pen and paper back then you really is not the trading rules per se. They're important, but the bigger thing is uh portfolio composition. You know, the the what are you including in your in your trading universe? Uh how are you constructing the portfolio? How do the different markets um interact with each other? Um how much risk do you put in each? These are much more important. >> Talking about managed futures, what part of your portfolio today is trend following? As a regulated uh regulated asset manager, I can't give you a number of course, but these days I don't trade managed futures myself. I allocate to manage futures funds uh for those mandates. Uh I trade more on the equity side at the moment for um especially for my my American company. But the thing is, and then that's I'm guessing your followup question as a usual one that why don't I trade managed futures anymore? Well, the industry is not fun anymore. You see, when I started trading this, it was easy. And I'm not talking about easy from a trading perspective. That's also missing the point by a lot of people who never been in the industry. They they look only as easy is trading or not. That's not the point. The the thing is it was easier running and managing a business in that area because I mean say back in 2006 7 even 8 n you can go out and talk to institutions about this this trend following thing. You explain the ideas of trend following and you know their eyes light up and think it's a really cool thing. you explain all the details and great let's allocate to this you know nowadays it's um it's become commoditized uh pun intended all the money uh the money started flowing into the larger players everybody knows what it is it's no longer a novelty thing and nowadays it's much more about brand management the fees have gone uh gone down pressure on the fees uh the costs of especially compliance have gone up so it's much more brand management much more than trading if you want to start a managed futures fund it's like I mean, I'm repeating something. I'm sure some some of viewers have heard me say before. It's it's a little bit like say you you let's say you invented a slightly better toothpaste. Now, what are you going to compete with Colgate? Which which supermarkets are you going to go talk to? Are you how are you going to get to the buyers of the supermarket? How are you going to get shelf space? How how many ads do you want on the Super Bowl? It's become brand management. Nobody cares if your toothpaste is 5% better than Colgate. Who cares how many tens how many hundreds of millions how many hundreds of millions are you going to spend on marketing brand management and that makes it less interesting. So either you become a large player or join a large player or you find a different niche. >> I know I'm I'm going off track a bit here. >> Sure. >> Those who became big what was in it because of which they they became big? >> Yeah. You go ask go ask uh David Harding those guys. So was it luck or was it you know? >> No, no, no, no, no. I mean I would say in in any type of success there's always a luck factor. It doesn't mean that luck is the determining thing. You know it's like I don't know. So you want to be a you want to be a rockstar singer. May maybe maybe 500 people were good enough and two people became superstars. So you know first you need to be good enough to to be in the game but then probably a little bit of luck to take advantage of it. But it doesn't mean that somebody somebody who's not not competent will not be in the game to begin with. No, it it's um is asset racing and uh I mean what Winton has I I haven't kept track for a while but David Harding with Winton probably has what uh 40 billion 50 billion I it's been a while since I I checked aum but it's a whole different company and then then you run a proper corporation with hundreds of people and it's a whole different industry. Not everybody has the interest of doing that as well. It's different type of business. >> Got it. Got it. And that's that's what is happening is what you're saying that you know smaller players are finding it hard to compete with larger players and uh the cost of compliance is going up and adding up. >> I mean you know when I started uh it's funny the difference how much this has changed. Back in the day like 2005 kind of thing there was not much compliance as long as you paid your tax. You had you set up a say fund company in the BVI, you set up a management company in the Caymans and have a local advisory company where you you know you get your revenue in the end and you pay your tax and you only deal with high net worth individuals u qualified investors and so on and there was very little stuff going on then nowadays quite a different compliance and uh company structure that is required before you even start these days. So back to trend following I mean I understand that you don't do it yourself but you allocate it to funds but then going back to more you know basic questions about it other than diversification and managing sizing is there anything more to it in terms of making a robust trend following system or that's pretty much it you know these are the kind of levers that you play with >> yeah that's pretty much it I mean the key is really in the portfolio interaction anytime you enter a trade it doesn't matter if that trade is profitable or not that's also something that people don't realize until they spend some time in in in the business that it's not about the individual trade. It's like you know the stupid metaphor about trees in the forest. Uh if you focus too much on the trees, you're missing the forest. All that matters is what the portfolio does as an aggregate. And sometimes you might even include things that probably doesn't make much money in the end because it improves like the skew as in I shouldn't bore people too much with the math. But essentially you you can you can um improve the return profile of the of the portfolio by having markets included which are not really making money. Basically it's a matter of when do they gain when do they lose and you can achieve a better riskadjusted performance sometimes by having a loss making instrument included in your portfolio. Talking about trend following, do you or you know this is there are two parts to this question. One is your view on this asset class which is cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and the the funds that you where you allocate especially trend following. Do they have any exposure to crypto and >> no not really I mean uh okay um opening a cat on worms here. I have a I have a price target on on Bitcoin. I had the same price target for the past uh I guess 13 14 years or something since I've been following this thing. Uh my price target is what you call in the industry a donut. That's pretty much what it's worth. Uh no, I mean clearly there is not a single real use case for either Bitcoin or uh blockchain or board monkey pictures or whatever the latest uh meta is. And I don't know, we we invent new words every every few weeks to >> LFT is what you're referring to. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know every now and then they invent new words to pretend that there's some innovation in the end it turns out to be variant of the same scam. All of these years we still have no actual real world use case. There is no there's a speculation of you know maybe one day all the governments in the world just give up and say yes you people were right. We need we we need this moneyaundering tool as our currency and we should give up our monetary policy and uh nah come on this is nothing. Uh it's all based on the whole idea that somebody out there made a lot of money and I I would be angry if I don't make any too. So I better go in a little bit. There's nothing to it. Um yeah. So I mean apart from um you know moneyaundering and these kind of things there I don't see a use for it. Uh and that extends to blockchain. I mean, every time I hear somebody saying that blockchain is going to what save democracy by I don't know this every time I speak speak to somebody into this they come up with a new creative way of claiming they can do something and in the end you say well what's wrong with existing tools nobody in the world ever started by saying we have a problem what kind of solutions do we have and say oh blockchain fix it's the other way around you start with we have a blockchain we desperately need a use case >> so yeah so we we have a tool and we're trying to look for a In the end you realize that if we are happy with having a slower more expensive tool then fine maybe we can retrofit blockchain but no that's um okay that's one part of my view the other is this that see I've had this conversation with a lot of people many times over the past over a decade and one view I do accept is that as somebody once put to me and somebody I respect in the industry who's got a proper trading background once told me that as a professional trader you want to trade stupid money you don't want to trade the best you want to trade the stupid people and Where else in the world? Where else anywhere can you find as much stupid money as in Bitcoin? So, as long as you don't actually believe the whole nonsense spiel about, you know, changing the world and currency this or commodities is or whatever is called these days, whatever the use case of the day is that changes with every month, right? If you don't believe any of this uh the the the religious nonsense around what around blockchain and crypto and all this and you just want to trade stupid money. Yeah. I mean sure don't don't hold it for too long. If you see it as a trade as a something you can trade something that's probably driven by uh herd mentality more than because we have no fundamentals right there's no fundamentals involved. It's just psychology. I mean fundamental is value zero. So it's all a matter of psychology. So therefore you have trends. Is that what you do? Fine. Trade it. Just don't fall for the story. There's there's still money in it. You can still make money from it if if you want to make money from it. Just don't don't believe, you know, the propaganda. >> That that's how I look at it. I mean, so long as it is a time series and if it's you can kind of work with that time series and make some money out of it, why not? Without really getting too much into it. >> Yep. That from that point of view, yes, that point of view, I I can understand it. >> Makes sense. Cool. So my next question to you is how did this transition because as far as I know you wrote the book on trend following first and then came the book uh stocks on the move. So tell me the story how did that happen? >> Right. Uh that's actually quite a funny one. After I wrote the first book obviously anybody writing their first book unless you're you're crazy you don't think it's going to be notice going to be anything big. I mean I I didn't expect this book to be well known. I was as surprised as anybody that the book really took off, got translated all over the world and sold quite well. So, you know, suddenly you get a bunch of attention you hadn't expected. Now, as it turned out in one of these kind of interviews, a podcast or something, I can't even remember where it was, but apparently I was asked about if trend following works on stocks. And I'm not sure if I explained myself well, but apparently I said that no, it does not. And a few weeks later or a few months or sometime later, I hear that somebody's talking about this guy in Switzerland doesn't understand stocks and trend following. And uh they completely misunderstood what what I tried to say anyway. And they they were, you know, laughing at my lack of understanding of that. So I figured, you know what, I'm I don't go on debate with people like this, but let's write a book and explain myself. So because I I've been doing a lot of stocks as well. Now, what I try to do with that book is explain the difference between trend following and momentum. They're quite related. >> Yeah. But they're not the same. >> They're not the same. Not in my view. Okay. I'm splitting hairs here. I mean I mean I'm I'm really I am pushing this divide because I'm trying to make people understand the difference. If you want to call momentum trend following, fine. But you know I I keep it apart because I'm trying to teach people here. Now the reason that trend following as in what we do on futures do not work on stocks is two things. Uh one is you have extreme correlation. Uh everything is beta. You know you have you're trading beta basically. you you're long beta, you're not long beta. That's the stocks for you, right? They all correlate. Some stocks go up more than others in a normal market, but once things go bad, they all >> go down together. >> Yeah. So, you have an extremely different risk profile. You don't have the the cover of of diversification that you have in futures. The other thing is that in futures, everything is depending on the fact that we have extreme leverage or possibility of extreme leverage. I mean, people will have be shocked how how leveraged we are on that side, but that's normal. as long as you handle your risk as normal. In stocks, leverage is extremely expensive and extremely dangerous. You cannot play the same game. But there is something very related called momentum. So I wanted to write a book about momentum and how that works. As long as you understand the difference, both are fine, but they're not the same. >> Was there, you know, this idea of momentum? Did you read up about it or what influenced you to kind of spend more time on it? >> I had been working with it for quite some time. When I wrote that, I was uh I was running a hedge fund based on on single stock momentum. Funny enough, that was I'm getting old 12 13 years ago. And uh I'm still running a variation of the strategy. It's actually been doing uh extremely well for compliance reasons. I have to be careful with uh saying too much on numbers and things. But uh we just seen the best performance I think in my career the last uh like four months on on equity momentum. It's been absolutely insane lately the the kind of returns we've been seeing on that side. So I mean this is something I've been working on for some time and I already had my own way of of measuring momentum. So I figured I'd write a book and and publish that. >> Okay. I'm kind of going to get into details here. So when you started writing about momentum, did you back test any existing ideas which were done in the US and you figured out you could do it better the way uh for example there were these initial academics Jagdesh and Titman who wrote about it. So compared to their ideas did you see you could do better or what what exactly was your thinking at that point of time? >> I mean I was already doing it my way. I've read all of these things as well, but often I mean these are clever guys, but usually these kind of um white papers are a bit too academic for my own taste. I look for pragmatic solutions that are often quite different from uh more academic side. Uh I mean it is always appreciated when when these papers are published. There's always interesting insights from them. I I read a lot of these things. I read most of these kind of papers on the on the subject. But I had I had my own different way of measuring it and a way I thought thought would make sense. So first I've been doing it for a while. I had my own back testing tools. There's an advantage of um having some IT background. I think uh there's a there's a large number of very bad tools for back testing uh especially those available to the general retail and particularly to those who are not technically inclined. Most of them I would never recommend anybody to touch. But yeah, you you got to build yourself and figure out yourself. Which leads to my my my general advice to anybody in the industry. Uh learn programming. Of course, programming is changing a little bit recently with uh the um yes uh nowadays everything is uh cloud code CLI or Gemini CLI and you work in plain text. As we've seen a lot uh on the internet, I guess everybody has seen it. You still need to understand programming. You still need to know programming to use these tools otherwise garbage in garbage out. But still you you do need to understand programming in this business or you're going to be very helpless. >> Got it. So going back to uh momentum and stocks. So if you were to write stocks on the move again today, what would what would be different? >> Uh well, I mean given that that model has done extremely well for the past uh well over a decade since the book has been published, I I think it's quite well. I mean, keep in mind that when I write my books, I never try to explain a an actual production system like this is what I'm doing. This is exactly how you should trade. That's not the purpose of my books. The purpose of my books is always to design a a somewhat simplified model, not to hide something. It's it's not a matter of secrets. I I want to teach a concept. So, I design trading rules that isolate a a phenomenon and I try to use it as a teaching tool to get you to understand how this works. This is a way of learning from the books. And also another reason I do that is that um I find it annoying when trading books make claims that they don't back up. I mean if they have the short graph this would have made uh I don't know 50% a year. Yeah. How do I know that you didn't even publish your rules? So therefore I make a point in my books to put all the rules in there. Again it's not supposed to be production models. But it it's proper realistic testing, proper methodology, proper rules, all the math in there. You don't believe what I write? Well, the data isn't there. The rules aren't there. Go do your homework. Go replicate it. Um, which is always quite fun. After I write a book, I I usually get a bunch of emails from people who say that um, uh, you said that this would compound at uh, 15.7%, I only get 15.5%. Well, cool. You're close. I mean, you know, that's a rounding error. So, it's always cool to see that people actually do the math and figure out how to how to build it, how to test it. That's how you learn. >> I understand that's the whole intention of writing the book. But then just to double click on this idea from your book to an implemented system. What are the things which would be different in a real system or what are those things which a trader or an investor who is consuming that book or reading that book should pay attention to when they are converting it into a real system. >> First is how how you think about the real real system or real model here. Uh now this is a part that's sometimes very difficult to explain to it would have been difficult to explain to myself as well when I was you know 25 years ago I would have struggled with this concept as well but it's never a matter of the best possible rules the best possible system the most profit that's not how you build the professional trading strategy in the end we build products and we build products for a reason we build products for an audience it's not a matter of the best of the highest and fastest I mean the the against a stupid metaphor here is uh imagine Your biggest interest is cars and you're building you want to build a car. You want to have you want to construct a new car, right? Since you love cars, you're thinking, I want to have the fastest car in the world. So now you spend all your your research on making the fastest possible car in the world. Then you end up with uh I guess the car from my uh my original country, the the Kerning Egg, the uh I believe they're still the the fastest Porsche car in the world or the most most horsepower something. It's a crazy car. That might not be the best business strategy. I mean, who's your customer here? Couple of Saudis. Uh, I mean, who's going to buy that car? There's not many people in the world. You might be better off trying to design a Toyota or a Kia. That's where the money is. We're building products. And the whole idea of let's maximize for the highest possible return per year. Yeah. You know where you get the highest return per year? Las Vegas. You also get the highest risk in the world, but go there, put everything on on 17 and spin the roulette wheel and see what happens. That's not how we do things. So having giving you the long answer, what will you do to make it your own system? I first you need to figure out what are you looking for and to make money is not an answer. I mean then you you got more research to do with as your answer. You need to figure out where you fit in the ecosystem. What exactly want do you want to do? What's what kind of structure do you have? What kind of setup do you have? How how often do you want to trade? Who's your competitor? How are you going to raise money for it? I'm assuming you're raising money. As I said many times, trading uh trading your own money for a living is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons. So, you need to figure out it's a personal thing. So, even if I would publish the exact rules and frankly often the difference between the production model that deployed and the books, it's not the kind of thing you you think. It's not like, oh, I use a 5day uh setting instead of a 7-day setting and I trick them. That's not how it works. It's more the details. You need so much redundancy, so much fail safes and details on this side, it would be incredibly boring to write a book about and to read it. >> How how does crowding as an idea fit in with momentum investing? So with more people following momentum, do you think um the edge kind of fades away? What is your thought on that? >> Not really. uh my in instinct would say is it's the other way around but I mean everybody's always been saying for so many years that people people are saying either strategies only work because everybody follows it or they say it only works because nobody knows about it and both can't be true so I mean I don't think so first of all trend following and and momentum are both very much human nature that's not really going to change we as a species we don't change that much and the fact that everybody follows it I mean that's what creates it. I mean, arguably the S&P 500 is a momentum index. Why are those stocks in the index? Because the because the price went up and once they were included in the index, the price went up further because they were in the index. The biggest stocks in in the index are those that have biggest weights and they got there by increasing their price because their market cap weighted. Yeah. And right now we have had incredible trends on the the broader AI theme, storage and uh computation, these kind of things. It's an ongoing theme. It's been going on like this for for as long as I've been around anyway. Probably a lot lot further. I don't see reason for that to stop. Keep in mind, of course, momentum doesn't work all the time. Like right right now, we had an incredible run. Maybe continues a while longer and then we probably have a period where it either underperforms or it keeps up with the markets and gets boring and then sooner or later it's going to spike up again. So um so we were talking about momentum especially in 2025 and the situation right now where because of be it Trump tantrums or whatever you want to call it there was so much of volatility how did your momentum model handle it and u are there you know situations like these where momentum doesn't work even though your larger system may be on because it's way above let's say the moving average or your regime is still uh risk is on but because of volatility the system doesn't work. So have you experienced something like that? >> Oh yes of course. I mean last year was a very very good year despite all of this. Now again this is a matter of of preference rather than right or wrong but uh my preference is not to respond to short-term volatility not for equity momentum models. Uh it's too high risk going back and forth. Um so I don't want to respond to very sharp drop. For instance, like like we saw last year, there was a the initial uh tariff shock when the tariffs were announced and there was uh let me see Q1 last year or early Q2. We we had a a larger sharp drop that was very quickly recovered just an initial shock. Those things in my personal preference is to leave it because more more often than not we get a bounce back up. What you should keep in mind of course is that equity momentum does not work well in a prolonged bare market and that's the problem of most momentum products. They don't know how to do any sort of downside protection. In all fairness for large institution it's a difficult sell internally and to users or to customers that that you shift uh allocation. Uh it's not a common thing to do to shift the the um the exposure during those times. Uh I do that uh I build that in. Uh so I I use for the money we're managing, especially now for our uh our new um high net worth product for the for my American company, the the Hush Club um high net worth um offering uh that we we launched quite recently. We uh did extremely well on that one so far. And that one we have a built-in uh downside protection. We start scaling out of the markets when um when we see a pattern that the markets start getting shaky when we don't think it's good for momentum. As I said, momentum works great in normal markets, but once there's fear out there, everything falls. Everything falls. The momentum stocks tend to fall more than the rest. >> So, this downside protection, one of the ways in which you describe it in your book is by having, you know, a moving average kind of a filter on the benchmark indexes something like S&P 500. Are there other such regime filters which you have explored which work? >> Oh, yeah. Of course, of course. As I said, I I always simplify this in the books using something like the S&P 5, sorry, the the the simple moving average of of the S&P 500, something like this. It's actually not it's not bad. I mean, it's simplistic. Uh that's usually not the detailed rule that we implement in the business in the end, but it's kind of good enough that actually works. I mean, you can do multiple ways. You can look at volatility, for instance. That's a more common way. Look at market volatility. You can look at dispersion. You can look at the momentum patterns of the uh the stocks constituent in the um in the index. There there are multiple ways of of doing the same thing. The most critical thing is you just need a way to identify when the markets are starting to look unhealthy. And I'm personally not a fan of a binary on and off switch as in sell everything and reby everything. That's a big risk in there. I'd rather build something that slowly scales down. You might also Yeah, exactly. slow scales up. Uh, one thing I worked with in the past as well is to to measure the extreme. You scale out, scale out, scale out. But in the end, where things start looking really horrible, that's when you want to start buying a little bit. Maybe not full on, but you start scaling in when everything looks um look extremely bad. >> Got it. any other indicators like market breadth or anything else that has you know you explored and either have found it useful or you have rejected them because they don't make sense. >> I probably explored almost everything over the years. I mean some sometimes out of curiosity and sometimes because I'm you know some some things I spend a lot of time researching because I was doing some speech at a conference or something and needed a fun research project. I used to build very complicated things like 20 years ago. The older I get, the more I realize that simplicity gets the job done and is usually more stable. But yeah, sure. Sometimes I I do something for for fun. Like uh couple of years ago, I was doing a a speech at a big conference for the CMT organization, the um technical analysis organization in the US. So I figured I need to do something fun for them. So I did a deep dive into point and figure uh tried to analyze what's wrong with point and figure the reasons why traditional point and figure makes no sense to me and then I built I changed point and figure in a way that it does make sense. I say it is mathematical non mathematically nonsensical and its original form but I did some research on how you could first fix it. is primarily to do with the box sizing that does not make mathematical sense if you dig into it but there there are ways of fixing it and then I built my own point and figure back test engine just for fun I just wanted to see what can be done in the end my conclusion was that point and figure actually works quite well uh almost as well as the existing much simpler tools that I have meaning that yeah it's fine but okans racer in the end if you can accomplish the same thing with simpler tools use simpler tools. >> Back to the question, you know, any other regime filters other than 200 day moving averages that you think could be used. >> Uh, sure. There are many different variants. I usually work with um combination volatility based filters to begin with. Measure volatility that's a great uh great indicator. you can work with um say disposion measurements of >> so when you say volatility um you mean volatility uh of the portfolio or individual stocks and then kind of position sizing accordingly or what what exactly are you trying to >> I I I would look at volatility of the overall market because volatility of your portfolio is always going to be high on momentum side I mean that's what we're doing here I mean you know don't forget that we are just loading up beta that's that's what we're doing it's it's no it's not rocket science uh we're just figuring out where the beta is worth taking and we're loading up a lot of beta. So, we'll have a high vol either way. Now, I I would measure VA on on the overall markets. I would also um measure the look at the um the pattern of the overall momentum of the individual stocks in the index. Once we start seeing that the momentum in general is dropping way too low on large number of stocks, warning signs and you can have multiple multiple um indicators or or analytics if you will that kind of vote together and and come up with different different regimes and you have to define what the regimes are like discrete whe whether fixed steps or discrete uh discrete steps or or continuous steps and where you adapt the um exposure accordingly. >> Got it. That helps. Coming back to now we we we spoke about trend following and then we you know you move to uh momentum investing both are in a way about catching trend at a broad level. So have you looked at you know I'm sure you have but your view on mean reversion strategies which means you know counter trend strategies as a part of your larger portfolio strategies. What kind of strategies what makes sense and what doesn't? Um your thoughts on that? So my my first deployed uh my first deployed model based on on counter trend signals was born out of frustration as counter trend models often are. I just had a tough year on the uh on the uh trend following side. And by the way, everybody has tough years. Anybody tells you they don't have tough years, they're either lying or never traded in the first place. Particularly as a systematic trader, it doesn't work every year. It happens. So anyway, so I had a year where you get this entry exit entry exit or stop out all the time. So, so I started designing a model based on the theory I had. The theory was that a lot of trend following companies out there, much much larger than mine, are doing more or less the same thing, which I could kind of prove or infer by reverse engineering their their um their track record. So in that case, I know more or less where they're stopping out. So, I decided to predict where I think the large players have their stop loss. This is systematic, guys. And then I put an entry point a little bit below that. Essentially, the theory is if they all stop out at the same time, they're going to create an exaggerated move on the down move. If you're talking about a long position to begin with, they're going to push it down a bit further than it should be pushed down. Now, I pick it up from there and I ride the the bounce on a shortterm trade. that worked remarkably well. So that's that one I've been I've been trading for a long time. >> It still continues to be a part of your portfolio. >> That that one is is working quite well. Yes, exactly. That was on futures. Uh on stocks for many reasons, I prefer a little bit longer uh longer holding periods. So I don't do it on stocks at the moment. Doesn't mean it doesn't work on stocks. But on I I've deployed on futures, not on stocks. >> If you if you look at it like this, so be it momentum, trend following and uh mean reversion. How many systems at any point of time would be there as a part of the portfolio of strategies that you um trade? >> Yeah, I try to try to keep it simple and it is a matter of what you want to achieve. Now, in theory, mathematically, you can probably achieve better riskadjusted return by trading multiple strategies at the same time with different different type. But it might not be a good business idea depending on who you're targeting to to raise money from. If you're looking to get money from uh if you're trying to raise investor money from say smaller smaller tickets say from retail or lowerend lower end high net worth that's contradiction of terms but if you're looking for for for that type of money then maybe it's a good idea to combine different different strategies. You do five different things smoothing out your your returns. But if you're looking for, you know, for for big boy money, if you're going to pitch an institution somewhere, they, in my experience, would much more prefer to have clean strategies. They want to know what they're buying. And if you go and tell them, go talk to a pension fund and tell them that I combine these five different strategies or different types for a smoother profile. What he's hearing then is the CIO of this institution is hearing that this guy is trying to do my job for me. Is his job to combine strategies? It's his job to to to to build allocation in his portfolio, not your job. He wants clean building blocks so he can construct the kind of exposure he wants. And he wants to understand what exposure he has, not that some black box by, you know, some weird guy in Switzerland suddenly shifts from trend following to counter trend strategy because of some rule he doesn't understand. It's not a good sell. So in that case, rather create a couple of clean products and let your client decide what he wants to allocate to. >> Makes sense. Going back to uh momentum, I had a question which I forgot to ask you. Uh other than us as a market, have you looked at momentum in some other markets and how has been your experience with that? >> I have a bit yes. Uh the problem is always the complication you add with the uh the currency issue unless of course you have a clean strategy just in India for instance. I have not looked at the Indian market. I have to have to confess. Uh but but yeah, make me an offer and I'll I'll have a look. Uh that's right. No, I I haven't. But um I I have been um trading global momentum. Um it's been a few years ago since I used to trade uh based on stocks in the um the MCI world rather than the US only. The if you have sufficient client base or sufficient as a management to justify it is fine. It adds an operational factor that can be much more work than you might expect. It looks easy in the back test but in the end you need to you need to manage the um a whole different infrastructure and you need to manage the the currency exposure and that can be more of an issue. you need to manage uh you know are you hedging the exposure or you just leaving it open a lot of complication there but it does work in my experience fine you just need sufficient universe I mean I wouldn't deploy for instance a momentum model on the Swiss market because it's too tiny you only have a few stocks that matter and no diversification >> got it so you want liquid stocks and you you need a whole lot of stocks where there is momentum >> yeah you you need sufficient amount of stocks I mean you have enough stocks in there, there will be momentum somewhere. But yeah, I mean I I would absolutely love to deploy something like this on the domestic Chinese market. Unfortunately, that's not so easy from practical operational so on but I think there's a massive opportunity locally domestically in China. Uh as a foreign as a manager of course I I can't really reach that market but that would have been interesting. Uh India I think would be interesting as well. Yeah, there are a lot of momentum uh mutual funds and uh individual momentum traders as well here. So we have an active community but then the market is still small from a market cap standpoint. So um and liquidity can get thin the moment you kind of go to stocks which are beyond certain market cap. So that that's a challenge that we have here in India. So coming back you know the little that I have uh read and uh heard from you this is a specific thing about retail traders and you generally been critical of individual retail traders trading. I wanted to kind of understand where that comes from and uh what does it mean because there are a lot of retail consumers of uh you know your uh be it content books and other things. So they're trying to learn and do something on their own. So I I just wanted to uh I I want your help to set that context. Yeah. >> Have I in which which way? Uh or wait a minute. Are you referring to my my deliberate provocation where I said that trading your own money for a living is is >> Yes. Yes. That's exactly what I mean. >> Okay. Let me explain that. Now I think it's perfectly tra perfectly fine to trade your own money as a hobby. You just don't want to do it for a living. Now the reason for that is let's say you quit your job. You have no other income. You just live on trading your money. So you now take all the risk for a limited upside. It's bad mathematics. Now my point with this argument is that if you modify your your gold a little bit, instead of just trading your own money for a living, you trade other people's money and your own for a living. Now you have a free option. Now your upside is much higher. Your downside is much lower. Now look at it this way that some of the best people in the world, I'm talking some of the very best people in the world have managed to compound at around 20%. any given year anybody can do very very different numbers in a short run but give it you know 10 20 years the best people in the world have achieved 20 22 23% somewhere around there and still you have hobby traders who think well I can double my money every year yeah maybe one year you can but then you're going to lose it all next year you take all the risk now you need to take money out because you need to pay your rent you need to buy food and so on so you're actually decreasing your your your firepower your ability to deploy capital because you need to take out money Now you have a bad month somewhere, you still need to take out money to live and you're decreasing. It's it's a bad bad idea. Now what you want to do instead and again if if you do this in as a hobby, you still have a job and everything, perfectly fine, just not the only thing you do. If you want to do this for a living, it's the only thing you do. You want to manage other people's money first. It will take away the stress factor that you keep pushing for higher returns. If you just manage your own money, you probably start aiming for crazy numbers like 50% a year or something like that, right? Which is not a good idea. You you aim for that high return, you will be you have to be prepared to take an extreme amount of risk and you sooner or later sooner or later you'll take a big hit. What you instead want to do is manage your own money together with other people's money. This way you have an income to begin with. You get a management fee by managing other people's money, perhaps even performance fee if things go well. you no longer have to aim for crazy returns because, you know, most people are perfectly fine getting uh 12 to 15% return. Don't aim for crazy numbers. Play for something realistic. You still get paid. Your customers are happy. You get paid. You're much safer. You can still buy your your your food. You pay your uh pay your rent. So, my point with that article, and I still remember it got a lot of attention like over 10 years ago, I wrote that. My point was not to say that retail traders are stupid. Not at all. My point is if you want to do this for a living then do it for real. Don't do it halfway. >> Makes sense. Makes sense. Absolutely. Okay. So I have a few closing questions and um you know I'll get to that. One of the interesting questions which I have is you work on both sides of both in Europe and America. Are there some fundamentally different approaches that you notice between fund managers from the US versus Europe? I I know it it can get a bit stereotyping kind of a thing but then yeah if you notice something interesting I would love to know. >> Well I mean the thing is even when I only uh when I only worked in Europe I was trading in the US mostly doing things the American way most of the time. So it's not that different really. I mean I think Americans in general are more entrepreneurial minded. So it's a different way of of working a different way of say risk taking on on on company side and personal side. In the end I mean it's fairly similar fairly similar. I think uh we are more a little bit more risk averse perhaps on this side of the of the pond but yeah no no not not really big a difference. >> Cool. Got it. You have you know written four books and writing is is a lot of effort. Now where did this whole interest in writing develop? I mean how did it come about? I think I wanted to write a book for many years before. I didn't feel like I had anything interesting enough to say. I think I started writing books many times. I probably started back in the 90s and draft something and back and forth abandon and and I'm glad I did because looking back I think before I'd actually done real things in the market. I probably didn't have anything interesting to say anyway. So that was quite fun. I mean uh it's like everything else. It's like my my my trading. I got lucky when I started trading. Therefore it was fun. I mean again I was lucky because I started trading in a massive uh bull market. My first uh my my first book I got lucky it sold really well and therefore it was fun. Uh I mean to put in context I was told my publisher told me that most trading books sell around 200 to 400 copies in a lifetime of the book. Now obviously if you spend a lot of time writing a book and you sell you sell 300 copies you'd be pretty angry. I mean it would feel like such a waste of time. uh there's only a few books that really take off and the rest do nothing. So I was lucky I I was one of those that took off therefore it was fun and then I continued. Then I always wanted to write a novel and I also felt for some time that I didn't have anything interesting enough to say and once I had gathered enough market experience to have something interesting to say I I wrote about that. It's it's a hobby really. It's a I mean writing writing books is not something that by itself is going to produce any sort of interesting money. I mean, even if you have a global bestseller, I mean, to put into context, once um um we mentioned uh Jack Schwagger before, market wizards guy, uh I got in contact with him after my uh after my first book. I got in contact with him. Obviously, he sold a lot of books over the years. Jack told me, I think it's funny coming from him. He said that as far as he knows, there's only one person in the world who can make a living selling finance books, and it's not him. So, I'll leave you to figure out who that is, but only one guy. A book by the by that guy has been mentioned in this podcast so far. So I'll let your I'll let your audience uh go find it. >> Absolutely. One last question is beyond markets. How does life look like for Andreas? >> Stressful. A lot of travel. A lot of travel. No. All good. I mean uh my my uh way of working changed dramatically a couple of years ago when I started my uh my American fintech company. uh we we launched a company where we were the first American asset manager who offer completely 100% free asset management up to 100,000 uh app-based asset management systematic based on my models that's that's a very different way of working for me we have um a large number of small users anybody in the US can sign up for free just to download the the uh the Hush investments app then we launched the um the high net worth the uh Hush club uh based on the website on web based uh where we are taking users for uh with over uh over 100,000 minimum 100,000 investments. It's a very very different way of working in the the fintech world. I'm more used to the hedge fund world where business is done quite differently. So now I'm traveling a lot uh all over the world with that uh raising money talking to to investors. Yeah. And we are still open to take investments both in the products and the company for those who are interested just contact me directly. Yeah. It's quite quite different. I am in airplanes quite a bit. I'm going to uh New York next this Friday, this week. Quite a lot of things. Otherwise, yeah, I've been based here in Switzerland and Zurich for the past 15, 17 years, something like that. 5 years in Geneva. It's Yeah, interesting times. Interesting times. A lot of things happening everywhere. >> Got it. Thank you um Andreas. Thank you for taking time out to talk to us and wish you all the best with Hush and uh I hope all these travels that you are uh on to help you even more and look forward to have you with us again sometime later. >> Sounds good. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Thank you NBS.