What an Outlier Hunter Is

What changes when the objective is not to predict the next trend, but to make sure we are there when one becomes extraordinary?

Markets do not distribute opportunity evenly. Many trades go nowhere. Many trends fail. Some markets can remain uninteresting for years. Then, occasionally, something happens that overwhelms the ordinary record.

The Outlier Hunter is built for those occasions.

We cast a broad net because nobody can know which market will produce the next consequential move. We keep individual exposures small because most attempts will not become exceptional. We accept frequent modest losses because avoiding every false start would also mean avoiding many genuine beginnings. And when a trend does persist, we resist the temptation to decide in advance how large it is allowed to become.

The architecture is asymmetric by design.

Set against the other recognisable styles of trend following, the Replicators, the Core Diversifiers and the Crisis Risk Offsets, the Outlier Hunter is the one for whom breadth is not merely a portfolio refinement. It is part of the objective itself.

Why Outliers Matter

Is Outlier Hunting simply a philosophy, or does the evidence give us a reason to take the idea seriously?

Outlier Hunting is not built on the observation that extraordinary market events are interesting. It is built on the proposition that they are disproportionately important.

Financial return distributions contain fat tails, skew, clustering and observations far beyond what a thin-tailed model would lead us to expect. Trend-following return streams can be even more concentrated. Many individual trades contribute little. A comparatively small number of sustained trends can determine much of the long-run result.

If outcomes are distributed this unevenly, portfolio construction changes. The question is no longer simply how to improve the average trade. It becomes how to preserve exposure to the small number of trades that may eventually matter enormously.

• The Lifting Power of Outliers

  An empirical examination of how disproportionately large observations influence trend-following outcomes.

• The Markets Nobody Chooses

  Why the future outlier can emerge from precisely the market a concentrated selection process would have excluded.

• The Death of the Bell Curve

  Evidence for why smooth thin-tailed assumptions struggle with the distributions financial markets actually produce.

• Research & Evidence

  The wider empirical ATS library covering fat tails, outliers, compounding, correlation, path dependence, robustness and measurement.

What Outlier Hunting Requires

If the objective is to capture rare consequential trends, what does that force us to do differently?

The philosophy has practical consequences. Outlier Hunting cannot simply be added as a label to an otherwise conventional portfolio. The objective determines the architecture.

These are not independent tricks. They are connected responses to the same problem: the future outlier is both important and unknowable.

The practical machinery is developed further in Foundations and Practice.

How the Objective Changes Measurement

How should we evaluate a strategy whose objective is deliberately asymmetric?

Outlier Hunting does not require us to discard conventional statistics. It requires us to understand what those statistics actually measure.

Volatility describes dispersion. Correlation describes co-movement. Sharpe describes return relative to volatility. Each can be useful. None, by itself, tells us whether a strategy is successfully preserving exposure to rare consequential trends while surviving the path required to reach them.

That distinction matters because the characteristics that make an Outlier Hunter uncomfortable by conventional standards can sometimes arise from the very payoff structure the strategy is designed to preserve.

A positively skewed programme may experience many small losses and a comparatively small number of very large gains. Those large observations increase dispersion. Removing them may produce a smoother-looking history while simultaneously removing much of the reason the programme exists.

• Risk Is Not Variance

  The empirical ATS programme examining volatility, variance, tail behaviour and the assumptions embedded in conventional performance measurement.

• The Geometry of Wealth

  Why multiplicative wealth, sequence, drawdowns and survival matter when evaluating long-run investment outcomes.

Why the Name Matters

Names matter because they shape identity. Traders tend to become what they call themselves.

“Trend following” describes a technique. “Outlier Hunter” describes an objective. That shift, from the how to the why, changes how success, failure, diversification, patience and even the ordinary losing trade are understood.

The name was not coined to reject the history of trend following. It was intended to describe more precisely what that history had already been showing us.

Every mature discipline eventually develops better language for describing itself. Physics moved from forces to fields. Biology moved from isolated organisms to ecosystems. The language of systematic trading can evolve too.

Where the Idea Began

A change of narrative, January 2022

The term grew out of a deliberate attempt to change how classic trend following describes itself.

In January 2022, in conversation with Niels Kaastrup-Larsen on Top Traders Unplugged, I argued that modern research into complex adaptive systems, and the fat-tailed, power-law nature of market returns it describes, gave us a better way to talk about what we do.

The proposal was simple: that we could stop describing the process merely as “trend following” and start describing it as a process that “hunts for outliers.”

The earliest public record currently known is the Top Traders Unplugged episode released on 23 January 2022, titled The Origin of Outliers, followed three days later by my accompanying ATS article on the nature of outliers.

The argument behind it was that a trend follower is not really chasing trends for their own sake. The trend is the visible signature of something becoming consequential. The discipline exists to remain positioned for those rare events rather than to forecast them.

From an activity to an identity, 2023

Through 2022 the phrasing was largely a verb. We hunt outliers.

Over the course of 2023 it settled into a noun and an identity. The Outlier Hunter became a way of naming a particular kind of trader, a defined archetype with a philosophy attached, rather than only an activity we performed.

The earliest standalone public use of the noun so far located is a post from 4 August 2023, with the term also appearing in published article titles from the middle of that year.

The distinction is worth preserving. The idea, the reframing of trend following as the hunting of outliers, dates to January 2022. The named identity, the Outlier Hunter as an archetype, crystallised through 2023.

Into a framework, 2024 onward

From 2024 the term carried a fuller structure.

The launch of the Classic Trend Index was framed around the rise of the Outlier Hunters, and the idea was set out as one of four faces of trend following, alongside the Replicators, the Core Diversifiers and the Crisis Risk Offsets, with the Outlier Hunter defined by its commitment to breadth and open-ended participation in rare trends.

It became an organising idea across the educational material, research, podcast work and wider ATS framework.

By 2026 the concept was no longer simply a narrative about trend following. It had become a lens through which to investigate return distributions, correlation, compounding, complex adaptive markets, portfolio construction, system architecture and the meaning of risk itself.

A Dated Record

A living timeline. Entries are added as the work develops, and revised if earlier evidence appears.

• 2022 · A new narrative emerges

  On Top Traders Unplugged, in the episode “The Origin of Outliers”, released 23 January 2022, and in the companion ATS article three days later, classic trend following is reframed as a process that hunts outliers.

• 2023 · A trader identity appears

  The verb becomes a noun. “Outlier Hunter” begins to be used as an identity in posts and article titles, with the earliest standalone use so far located dated 4 August 2023.

• 2024 · A philosophy becomes a framework

  The Classic Trend Index launches under the rise of the Outlier Hunters, and the term becomes an organising idea across the writing, portfolio framework and educational material.

• 2025 · A taxonomy is published

  The Outlier Hunter is set out as one of the Four Faces of Trend Following, beside the Replicators, Core Diversifiers and Crisis Risk Offsets.

• 2026 · The framework expands into a broader research programme

  The ATS work extends into empirical studies of outliers, correlation, variance, compounding and path dependence, alongside deeper investigations of complex adaptive systems, embedded agents, market structure and system architecture. Outlier Hunting becomes the connecting objective across philosophy, evidence and practice.

On Originality

I want to be accurate about what is and is not being claimed.

The underlying principles are old and are not mine. Cut losses short, let profits run, diversify widely, respect the fat tails. These run back through the Turtles and the broader classic trend-following tradition. The complexity and power-law research the framing draws upon belongs to a much wider intellectual history.

What appears to be new is the packaging of those principles into a named archetype with a precise meaning: the Outlier Hunter, set against the other styles of trend following and organised around the objective of preserving exposure to rare consequential trends.

Independent searches across indexed trading literature, books, podcasts, archived web material and public forums have not uncovered an earlier use of “Outlier Hunter” as a defined investment philosophy or trader identity.

The ordinary words occur in unrelated fields, statistics, machine learning and data science, but not as this concept.

No search can prove a universal negative, so the record is stated as exactly what it is: the earliest evidence currently known. If earlier material surfaces, this page will be updated to reflect it.

Follow the Idea Through ATS

Outlier Hunting sits at the centre of ATS because it connects the philosophy to the evidence and the evidence to the machinery.

Different parts of the site examine different consequences of the same underlying problem: the important future event cannot be identified beforehand.

• Foundations

  Understand the systems, sizing, diversification, drawdowns, backtesting and process that allow an Outlier Hunter to remain in the game.

• Research & Evidence

  Examine the empirical case for fat tails, concentrated outcomes, path dependence, geometric compounding and robustness.

• Complex Markets

  Explore why adaptation, feedback, emergence, reflexivity and changing market structure make prediction such a fragile objective.

• Practice

  See how the objective becomes entries, exits, position sizing, portfolio construction, rollover, execution and operating discipline.

• Reports & Conversations

  Watch the framework encounter actual markets and hear practitioners discuss the realities of systematic trading through changing environments.

• The Compass

  Step back to the complete ATS map and explore the wider body of work.