About me

Brief Bio

With enough shadows, anyone can look photogenic.

I am Rob Carver; an ex Hedge fund manager and derivatives trader, economist and statistics/finance geek.

I am not:

• A fifteenth century Scottish composer
• The author of Accursed Mountains
• This academic who writes books about statistical analysis
• Definitely not this academic eithier

This blog is about:

  - Systematic and quantitative trading and investing
- Giving more people the tools and understanding to do their own investing better
  - Making the investment industry function better and serve the interests of society as a whole
  - Trying to promote a more correct and complete use and understanding of quantitative economic research in coming to better decisions, eg in policy making.

Lengthy Informal Bio

Rob Carver is an independent systematic futures trader. He also blogs, and writes books. Well he's written three books: “Systematic Trading” (http://www.systematicmoney.org/systematic-trading/) , "Smart Portfolios" (https://www.systematicmoney.org/smart), and Leveraged Trading (https://www.systematicmoney.org/leveraged-trading).

He is a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, where he inflicts an annual course in Systematic Trading Strategies on masters in finance students.

According to his linkedin profile Robert is an expert in quantitative finance, fixed income, hedge funds, trading, portfolio management, derivatives, trading systems and risk management.

He has very few linkedin endorsements for, but is also really interested in: python, bayesian statistics, econometrics, housing policy, and financial economics. He likes the idea of macroeconomics, although it's clearly not an accurate description of how the world works.

Rob recently found out that he is a Data Scientist, and has been doing Data Science for years without even realising it (since hardly anyone used the term Data Science until about 2010). This doesn't stop him thinking that Data Science is a load of over hyped baloney.

He also has an irrational bias against the use of big data and artificial intelligence in financial markets (and deep learning, and machine learning ... whatever they are). And against Bitcoin.

He isn't sure if genuine skill exists in the investment world, but he knows for sure he doesn't have any. He thinks that the finance sector is too big, costs too much, and sometimes doesn't behave in the best interests of society as a whole.



Robert was lucky enough to be brought up in the warm climes of Dubai, where he also spent his early career, with only a brief sojourn back in the UK where he briefly attended the University of Cambridge.

He then made the mistake of going to the wettest part of the UK to attend the University of Manchester where he got a degree in Economics; and met the love of his life, and the mother of his three children (note: these are the same woman).

Robert then went to the dark side: a job as a trader for an investment bank, Barclays Capital. Once it became abundantly clear that he wasn't cut out to be an evil master of the universe Robert left and spent a couple of years working for the Centre of Economic Policy Research where he was lucky enough to work with some of the most brilliant economists in the world. He also found time to do a part time Masters in Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

He spent seven years working for systematic hedge fund AHL, where he was lucky enough – again – to work with some of the most talented and genuinely nice people working in the financial industry. He was less lucky in his timing: his employment spanned the financial crisis of 2007-2009, and the European sovereign debt crisis of 2010. Despite this Robert managed to build a systematic fundamental global macro trading system. He was then put in charge of the entire fixed income portfolio, after which there was the US government debt downgrade of 2011, and the “taper tantrum” of 2013. Correlation or Causation? You be the judge.

Robert left AHL in 2013 to spend more time: with his family, investing his own money, cycling, writing, and independently pursuing his research interests.

For a sufficiently handsome reward Robert is available for consulting projects. For more modest rewards he will write something for your website, blog, or publication. But as an unmitigated narcissist he will happily show up at your conference or event and talk nonsense for free*.

* well free plus expenses anyway.

Formal Bio of intermediate length

Robert Carver is an independent systematic futures trader, writer and research consultant; and a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of “Systematic Trading: A unique new method for designing trading and investing systems" (Harriman House, 2015),  "Smart Portfolios: A practical guide to building and maintaining intelligent investment portfolios" (Harriman House, 2017), and "Leveraged Trading: A professional approach to trading FX, stocks on margin, CFDs, spread bets and futures for all traders" (Harriman House, 2019).

Until 2013 Robert worked for AHL, a large systematic hedge fund, and part of the Man Group. He was responsible for the creation of AHL's fundamental global macro strategy, and then managed the funds multi billion dollar fixed income portfolio. Prior to that Robert worked as a research manager for CEPR, an economics think tank, and traded exotic derivatives for Barclays investment bank. He spent his early career in the Middle East.

Robert has a Bachelors degree in Economics from the University of Manchester, and a Masters degree, also in Economics, from Birkbeck College, University of London.

A note about comments

Because of a sea of spam I now moderate comments on this board. If you submit a comment it won't go up until I've moderated it.  So please don't submit the comment again, assuming something is broken, or I will delete the duplicate.

 

Talks and media

See this page.

Social Media and the like

My home page is here systematicmoney.org

There are multiple boring details of my life on my public linkedin page: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-stuart-carver

You might want to follow me on here: https://twitter.com/investingidiocy

You can like me, or poke me, or whatever else you want to do (within reason) on my facebook page.

My good reads authors page is here. Ditto for Amazon and Harriman House (my publisher).

Contacting me

If you want to get in touch, use one of the following methods:

0) I don't disclose my email address on line, as it would soon be overwhelmed by spam. So you have to jump through some hoops to get in touch with me.

1) If you have a specific and quite short question about one of my blog posts, then leave a comment. Comments are moderated, and if they are obviously spam (include a link and no meaningful text) they will be deleted. Proper comments will be published after a slight delay (could be a long delay if I'm on holiday).

2) My preferred method for contacting me generally is via the contact me box on each page of this blog. I realise it's quite a small box. Send me a short message explaining what you want to talk about and if it's sensible then I'll reply on email.

3) Second favourite is via linked-in. I accept nearly all connection requests, and once I've accepted your request we can mail each other. If you seem genuine, I'll move the conversation to email.

4)  I am not so keen on communicating via twitter; you can tweet at me in public by all means but private direct messaging requires that we follow each other, and I'm pretty selective about who I follow (nothing personal).

5) I rarely check my facebook mail / messenger / whatever it's called that doesn't work properly on my phone because I don't have the right app; so don't be surprised if there is a big time lag between your message and my response, or indeed if it is ignored completely.