Pepperstone Talks Melbourne, held in November 2022, was a live event for Pepperstone clients featuring a strong lineup of practitioners and analysts covering systematic trading, global macro, and trading psychology. The other speakers on the night included Callum Thomas of Topdown Charts, Louise Bedford of the Talking Trading podcast, Mandi Rafsendjani, and Tarric Brooker.
Richard’s presentation focused on the power of trend following during uncertain regimes, which made it particularly timely: 2022 was one of the strongest years in living memory for systematic trend following CTAs, with many programmes up thirty percent or more against a backdrop of collapsing equity and bond markets. The conditions that year were a real-world demonstration of the theoretical properties of the approach: sustained directional moves in energy, fixed income, currencies, and soft commodities all running simultaneously, driven by inflation dynamics and geopolitical shifts that no one had forecast with confidence.
The recordings of the evening’s presentations were made available through Pepperstone, capturing each speaker’s contribution to the discussion. Richard’s segment is a practical illustration of why uncertainty, far from being the enemy of systematic trend following, is one of the structural conditions in which the Outlier Hunter is most likely to find what it is looking for.