On today’s show I am talking to Mike Dever, the Founder and CEO of Brandywine Asset Management.  Mike is a Divergent Thinking Systematic Investment Manager and Author of the best selling book “Jackass Investing”. Mike has been trading for almost 4 decades and shares a wealth of insight to how he has stayed successful and how his trading approach and research has stayed current in an ever changing financial landscape.

Thank you for visiting, now let’s get to the interview with Mike Dever.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• The Evolution of Mike’s Trading
• How Mike almost got in to business with Richard Donchian
• How they developed a systematic trading model in the 1980s
• How Mike met and invested with Paul Tudor Jones, John W. Henry and was the first outside investor in Transtrend
• How Mike went from being a discretionary trader to become fully systematic when launching the Benchmark Program, and Why

“The one thing, if there’s nothing else, that you get from systematic trading is the disciplined risk management approach to trading.”

• About the experience of running the Brandywine Benchmark Program in in the ‘90s
• How Mike discovered the importance of Portfolio Allocation in the 1980s
• The Story of Developing the Predictive Diversification Portfolio Allocation Model
• The Entrepreneurial Storm that Kept Mike away from Trading and Brandywine for Years
• The story of developing the Brandywine Symphony Program

“The question that was being asked, by everybody that was doing portfolio modeling, then and continuing today, was wrong. They were asking, ‘how do we achieve the most optimal performance.’ They got that. The question that they should have been asking was, ‘How do I get the most predictable performance?’ Nothing else matters.”

• How many people it takes to run a system with more than 1,000 strategy/market combinations
• Exploring the track record of Brandywine Symphony Program
• Why one should avoid making decisions based on single return drivers
• 5 Themes in Brandywine’s Asset Allocation Strategy: Fundamental, Sentiment, Event, Arbitrage and Alpha Hedge
• How Marginal Cost of Production Works as a Return Driver
• Are the strategies from the 1980’s just as effective today?
• What is directional arbitrage?

Resources & Links Mentioned in this Episode:

Jackass Investing by Mike Dever

Learn about Dick Donchian the Grandfather of Trend Following

Connect with Brandywine or learn more about them

Learn about Poul Tudor Jones of Robin Hood Foundation

Learn about John W. Henry

*This was originally published in Top Traders Unplugged.

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