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Running Alpha™ is your smarter way for seeing investment opportunities before they arrive and get noticed; helping investors be first at exploiting high-impact performance trends with confidence.
Why We Exist
Every Investor Needs a Way for Best Expressing What They Know, while having Equal Access to New Opportunities for Growth. That’s Why We Built Running Alpha.
Our Mission
To play a leading role in helping investors and business executives have pain-free experiences on their journey toward better decision-making.
Our Vision
To see ourselves as part of a story for rethinking the way we can collaborate with nature, to better exploit uncertainty, and compensate for the human condition and machine biases that get in our way of both perceiving world events in high-definition and making bold decisions with attention to detail.
Introducing a smarter class of Sentiment-Aware Portfolio Solutions™: Running Alpha’s™ flagship suite of heat map products — the Grid 100™ and Focus 15™ — capture financial measurement uncertainty and latent unseen perception biases of key decision-makers, to decode when divergent perceptions of trend change will interact in the order-book to magnify the price impact of positive news-flow and shrink the volatility footprint of negative events, in favor of performance outcomes that work for You!
Running Alpha™ is designed for helping you expand your idea-generation and build intelligent portfolios that know where the global influencers will be tuning into next.
We are your all-access pass to seeing — in all directions — the future price impact of sentiment breaking news from around the world. We expose actionable, below-the-radar alpha investment opportunities from your favorite market and trading ideas, and instantly self-organize them on a grid by strength and sustainability of forward sentiment bias.
How many times have you seen good news ignored by the market, only to watch other stocks or alternative assets that you do not own climb higher. This is precisely the problem the AlphaIdeaGrid™ — Grid 100™ and Focus 15™ — attacks head on;
so by augmenting your current knowledge of the prospects for positive corporate announcements and economic reports, you should start finding yourself pleasantly surprised by the degree to which positive events surrounding Running Alpha opportunities’ translate into highly favorable asset price performance outcomes.
To this end, Running Alpha’s actionable business intelligence is currently being successfully deployed by North American retail investors and leading boutique fund managers in the Bay Street area for narrowing the gap between discovering great ideas and making money on them.
Exclusive to Running Alpha, the Grid is powered by machine intelligence that endows it with the ability to intrinsically know what it’s like to be inside the muti-dimensional momentum and volatility perception space of both your future self and tomorrow’s versions of today’s global marketplace.
[ Imagine a giant liquid soap bottle ( the market ) in which every bubble and droplet contains particles ( individual decision-maker perceptions ) that have been encoded with the product’s manufacturing history ( security market price and volatility behavior ) — from how it was made; the order its particles ( active market players’ ) were mixed; and to what factory ( marketplace ) they were sourced and when — sort of like a digital footprint of human perceptions & machine trading activity. ]
This is what Powers the Alpha Idea Grid™.
By rendering visibility into the architecture of human perceptions that define our individual biases of market trends across all time-scales, and their relationships with the collective biases of the global decision-making audience, we are helping our clients anonymously capture insights into the movement of people and capital in world financial markets; and the reflexive impact that these organic predispositions have on the forward facing development of economic and market moving events.
This enables the Grid to apply a new category of diversification that selects component securities on the basis of reducing the overlap among their current and future perception spaces. This matters to you because when combined with your existing asset mix, it it can serve to lower your total portfolio volatility and elevate your risk-adjusted returns.
This would not be possible without disrupting the way you can access “Dark Data” — hidden insights and perceptions of the world around you, held by future versions of today’s global decision-making brain-trust.
To give you an idea of just how significant this new class of intelligence can be on your pocketbook, it is important to understand that in today’s modern markets:
Decisions to buy and sell are made by people and machines, based on filtering for news events and other fundamental and technical information that correspond with their individual perception biases of unfolding world trends; while
Prices are set by markets through matching up these orders;
So why are we still measuring the pulse of market prices, instead of
“Listening to the Beat of the Global Decision-Making Perception Audience.”
This is a big problem, because information without such human context is inherently meaningless, thereby rendering virtually all of today’s conventional strategy framework’s blind to the ambiguous nature of their hard data inputs.
The problem with placing so much emphasis on such data is compounded by the fact that the mind-space and perceptions of today’s decision-makers are actually different than those that played a leading role in creating the data we are analyzing.
To address this challenge and convert information uncertainty into meaningful intelligence that you can act on, Running Alpha’s founder, Efrem Hoffman, has invested nearly two decades combining two analytic technologies — Crowd Physics and Quantum Encryption — that have never been mixed before in just the right proportions for illuminating insights into human perceptions yet to be revealed to the world of social media and the marketplace at large.
This is a game changer because traditional media sources can only access visible data — those insights and questions that people have chosen to share with the public.
In pursuit of true north investment outcomes that shrink your emotional footprint on your P&L, Running Alpha is on a mission to leverage these insights for helping you decipher when markets will be climbing the great “wall of worry” or descending a steep “slope of hope.”
To this end, Running Alpha’s insights-building platform has been applied successfully for helping private equity investors and financial & commodity market traders thrive into today’s marketplace, and better navigate around market noise and volatility storms — erupting in the Energy, Currency, and Global Equity Markets.
To give you a glimpse of what it’s like to see through Running Alpha’s window into the future, here are a few epic watershed events that matched up squarely with our actionable research guidance.
These include the anticipated magnitude and duration of market activity surrounding the 2008 Mortgage Meltdown, the May 2010 Flash Crash, and recent Crude Oil Crash and US Dollar Meltup; all identified week’s to month’s in advance with high specificity —
revealing early insights that plugged our clients into the quiet and subtle moments of decision-making leading up to crisis and opportunity during these fearful and greedy episodes of mass panic and mania.
What is most actionable about this intelligence is that this new class of insights are discoverable before asset prices initiate their descent / rally from market peaks / troughs; and even before smart money influencers start expressing unusual patterns of trade activity.
That means, as a subscriber, you will find a large percentage of highly ranked security components on the Grid simultaneously making frequent and persistent appearances on the top performers and unusually active list — across multiple time scales from intra-day, daily, weekly and monthly investment horizons. At the epicenter of Merger and Acquisition ( M&A ) activity, on many occasions, these opportunities turn into successful take-out candidates with premium valuation recognition.
The technology is also being deployed for exploiting information inefficiencies that arise when agencies and market participants do not accurately factor in the potential collateral damage that inappropriate timing of IPO releases, corporate, financial, and economic announcements have on the forward sentiment structure of market prices and social media activity.
By anonymously filtering for investment opportunities with sentiment and perception dynamics that are not only insensitive to future timing windows of such information releases, but also designed to enhance the favorable price impact of positive news flow,
Running Alpha also shrinks your digital foot-print and time-to-action for turning your favorite ideas into Alpha faster.
By studying markets as human and machine networks of disparate ecology, and combining this rich structure with conventional fields of visible data, Running Alpha is opening new ground for economic and financial decision-making, that makes better sense of the context of the world around us, and how you can better prepare for fast and disruptive change in today’s complex competitive business and financial market environment.
How Do We Do It?
Standard theory misguides us into falsely assuming that manias — episodes of rapidly rising prices — are caused by excessively bullish optimism and “irrational exuberance”; but under closer examination, over 80 years of modern stock market history tells us otherwise.
Running Alpha researches have uncovered a blind spot in our measurement of market momentum that gets in the way of seeing how specific outbursts of pessimism and downside volatility are actually the root sources that uniquely tune our perception fields of market trends — across a wide range of historic time-lines ( look-back intervals ); in such ways that:
When these perceptions collide in the market-place, their sum non-linear bias tends toward persistent periods of positive sentiment — ultimately driving capital inflows and higher prices. The opposite applies during bear markets.
To help you visualize how this can all play out, imagine yourself at a political demonstration surrounded by a large crowd of tens of thousands of protesters in what starts out to be a peaceful procession, much like the orderly sequence of a one way trend. Now all of a sudden, a riot erupts, seemingly out of the blue, as people start getting pushed around aggressively and trampled on.
You would think that it was either the actions of unorganized mobs that instigated the aggression; and/or stampeding herds of tightly packed pedestrians trying to escape the congestion by intentionally forcing themselves through the crowd as it thickens.
What you might be surprised to learn is that new scientific investigations into the dynamics of crowds show that it’s not atypical for none of these “usual suspects” to factor into these disruptive actions, but rather, there are special situations whereby if the people are clustered into certain pockets of arrangement, with just the right time delay and sequencing of movement, the toppling effect and stampede-like response can start resonating throughout the mass of people and get amplified over time.
These configurations often do not occur in the presence of any one or combination of individuals orchestrating the movement, and cannot be revealed by simply assuming that humans behave as sets of repulsive particles, that tend to move out of the way with increasing momentum when surrounding patrons are getting “too close” for comfort”;
but rather are predisposed by the way humans are hard-wired to avoid collisions, particularly by anticipating when the velocity and trajectory patterns of neighboring bodies pose a clear and present danger.
The study of these dynamic processes of self-organizing behavior and turbulent flow is known as Crowd-Physics, and has relevant applications across all scales of trend observation, for charting out the migration patterns of financial market participants.
Building on the founder’s patented Big-Data Analytics technology ( Patent # : 6,278,799 and 6,035,057 ), and over 18 years of thought-leadership in Hunting Down the “Architecture of time” — and the human-machine perceptions that live inside its boundaries — we can now identify previously unseen tipping points between ordinary events and unusually extreme outcomes.
Running Alpha’s Grid 100™ and Focus 15™ are the first Sentiment-Aware Portfolio Heat Grids™ that are plugged into the physics of how these financial measurement observations are made, and interact in hyper-real-time among the wide-ranging perspectives of future versions of today’s global decision-making audience — both human and machine.
We call this Crowd-Physics 2.0.
To give you an idea of how this scientific framework parallels in the financial markets, you need not look further than to situations where investors start feeling threatened — when they start anticipating that critical prices levels are at risk to getting violated or too close for comfort; they stand aside and wait for weaker hands to temporarily drive down prices to levels that are deemed attractive from either a valuation basis or supply and demand perspective. Because every group of investors have the freedom to apply a different set of observation viewing scales for making critical judgments of when these perceptions collide, it’s paramount to cast as wide a net as possible, by simultaneously accounting for how each group of decision-makers will be perceiving changes in sentiment momentum.
Tractability constraints of mainstream analytics simply forces current decision-making practices to aggregate and compress these potential points of view onto singular price-event time series axes;
thereby, not only blinding us to how diversity and network interconnections among market participants play a key role in decision-making outcomes, but also making a statement that the context of:
“How Decision-Makers Disagree on Value for Arriving at an Agreement on Price” doesn’t matter. It does.
You may be asking yourself, “Why should this Matter To Me?”
It matters because it elevates your game from responding to what people have already reacted to in the marketplace and talked about in the social-sphere, to how both people and machines are going be perceiving, interpreting, and working in concert for putting new spins on upcoming news events and social buzz, that are driving tomorrow’s most relevant trends.
No other sentiment intelligence sources available today have yet addressed how the torrents of emotional expression, residing in today’s social-data stream, can be put to work for accurately and unambiguously seeing when “good news will be “descending a slope of hope,” and when “bad news will be climbing a wall of worry.”
At best, standard models, such as Monte Carlo Simulations and Random Matrix Analysis are still limited to drawing statistical correlations between future stock returns and combinatorial sequences in historical patterns of social mood, embedded within tweets and blog messages, and other digital sources. This only speaks to one-side of the sentiment equation.
What they fail to address is how the changing ecology and non-linear context of market player interactions, playing out each trading day, comes to bear on the way current events and social-media chatter get perceived and interpreted in the marketplace and greater public arena.
They are designed for optimizing performance by either over-fitting or over-generalizing data from a finite universe of past outcomes, instead of capturing the underlying symbiotic relationships among decision-maker perceptions and marketplace reactions to current and forward-facing exogenous events.
It’s not just these types of sentiment modeling that fall short on these counts, but virtually every technical, behavioral, and fundamental indicator ever created runs into these bottlenecks. That’s because the sources of their inputs are all founded on two recurring errors in logic, namely:
(i) guestimating how rational minded and behaviorally biased people would be expected to respond to positive or negative events, without taking into account how the individual perceptions of traders, observing trends on different time horizons, could braid together in highly complex, dynamic, and counter-intuitive ways to produce responses that no one group of decision-makers would be expected to make on their own or even in the midst of a crowd; and
(ii) falsely assuming that outputs of hindsight — events that have already occurred — can be interchanged with inputs for mining meaningful patterns of change from price, volatility, and social sentiment behaviors.
Without knowing the root cause of why these output patterns present themselves, our judgments are being distorted by how standard models are measuring and perceiving time-delayed changes in momentum from dis-jointed perspectives.
Rising above these challenges, Running Alpha’s Sentiment Heat Maps do all the heavy lifting in working out the physics surrounding the interactions of these inseparable perceptions of market trends; foremost by accounting for the how the measurement biases inherent in our current paradigms are inconspicuously interfering with:
(i) the way the global investing audience are observing momentum change; and
(ii) the presumed role that group-think and animal spirits play in turning rational-minded and independent thinking decision-makers into irrational speculators.
Our research and history of market calls indicate that the most profitable opportunities arise when it appears as though these phenomena are causing outbreaks of irrational excess;
where in reality they are born out of the resonance of supply and demand pressures of independent market players, often acting out in error based on what history has fooled them into believing is trustworthy, namely,
measurement observation mirages and skewed perceptions of world events around them, caused by not seeing how other market players, similarly acting out on their perceptions, are constantly creating illusive states of feedback; thereby altering the expected path of the initially observed trend, and ultimately eroding the psyche of the trader, as they begin to call into question what they know, believe, and trust.
(iii) the causal chain of market contagion; although there are times when: (a) investment charter mandates on sector/position limits calls for automatic portfolio rebalancing; (b) market regulatory mechanisms, such as forced margin call liquidations; or (c) even failures of prime brokers unleash a blizzard of order flow in a singular direction, there are countless other instances, where the internal demand factors play a more prominent role in buffering the specific portfolio elements from the otherwise capricious effects of contagion. Wouldn’t it be great to know which of your portfolio components and those among the equity universe would offer the safest harbor against such disturbances?
Without demanding a framework for seeing the world in a way that pierces the veil of “Why the Context of What We See Matters,” the wisdom of markets and natural sciences will never expose the truth that the light of apparent reason ( ephemoral patterns ) that lands on our eyes is not only inherently meaningless, no matter how fast our processing power or large our data-centers, but also disruptive on all three counts above.
What makes Running Alpha different boils down to three elements, namely that:
(i) Over years of research & development, the Founder built a framework that directly answers this need from the ground up; applying these principle each trading day to guide his own actions as well as those of his clients in markets and business life;
(ii) We don’t abhor uncertainty; We embrace it by constructing portfolios’ that are designed to respond most favorably in aggregate to random external event triggers, regardless of their novelty or the context of their current market regime — i.e. even when exposed to periods of market correlation breakdown — where virtually all sectors move in lockstep; and traditional diversification practices do not work to protect your portfolio assets. That does not preclude Running Alpha from identifying idiosyncratic endogenous factors in the network structure of human-machine perceptions, to reveal special instances, wherein the market has the effect of amplifying positive news events, while at the same time attenuating the impact of negative external triggers.
Why It Works?
(iii) Unlike most opportunistic arb models that have short half-lives for profit-making, Running Alpha’s framework of logic is virtually one of the few exhibiting exploitable market inefficiencies that cannot be arbitraged away, even with knowledge of position-level transparency. That is because, unlike alternative arbitrage opportunities, which disappear when explicit rules of thumb ( heuristics ) or patterns of output events, such as observed price, volatility and/or sentiment, are discovered,
Our research framework is based on a new foundation of meta-logic and higher-order gauge geometry that cannot be extracted from the vantage point of a specific market view or set of observable market sentiment patterns, without proprietary knowledge of the physics ( residing outside of our pattern-seeking minds and the market tape, and inside our measurement devices, and the inherent logical ambiguities and incongruencies of their standard observation ) that underlie the bending of our collective perceptions toward the market reality.
That’s why we are so confident that Your Alpha Advantage is sustainable in all market environments.
The Alpha Idea Grid™ ( the Grid 100™ and Focus 15™ ) raises the bar in leveraging Predictive Analytics and Mathematical Gaming Strategies for re-claiming your vision of these otherwise invisible biases and recurring arbitrage opportunities, so that you can:
(i) Start Capitalizing on Market Uncertainty, while Managing your Expectations with Peace of Mind; and
(ii) Start Maximizing Your Efficiency of Capital by Accessing a Level of Market Timing Insights Not Found Anywhere Else.
What makes Running Alpha’s insights most unique is that unlike many of our industry peers that focus on timing the market — i.e. getting the timing of entry/exit events right occasionally, or even the general magnitude of the overall trend, we fine-tune our intelligence for consistently timing, with high specificity, the dynamic roles that market participants will be playing during a given inning of the forward trend.
This distinction alone is important because it redefines what timing the dynamics of the market can do for you, namely, telling you just how fast and persistent the unfolding of events can play out; thereby:
Transporting you in front of the line, so you no longer have to be kept waiting for an order to fill when the train has already left the station;
Allowing you to stop missing opportunities; avoiding frustration; and preserving your confidence, energy, time, and money for making bold decisions.
In concrete terms, What Does this Mean To Your Pocketbook?
It means that if you followed just one of our market intelligence calls on September 12th, 2014, you would have had early insight into the magnitude, velocity, and uninterrupted one way descent of Crude Oil, starting from October 7th, 2014 into the week of January 16th, 2015, where it’s price started falling off a cliff from near $90, before leveling off into our expected interim target near the mid $40s.
While the frequency of such events in a given market are somewhat unevenly distributed, Running Alpha is especially committed to searching the world over for regularly putting you in front of the next great investment opportunities, among the thousands of US and International companies, exhibiting similar characteristics of big, fast and sustainable trends.
Armed with this breadth of information, you will be better prepared on three fronts, namely, knowing when it’s time for:
(i) putting together your investment shopping list;
(ii) adjusting your conviction levels and portfolio weightings in a given industry, or company; and
(iii) shifting to/from an active-aggressive management style to simply a passive buy-and-accumulate approach.
In plain English, here is How We Do It in Steps, Least Traveled:
First by Anonymously Tracking the Movement of Capital, Ideas, and Emotions across Global Financial Markets; and then
Displaying Future Hot-Zones Of Sentiment Perception Insights that Underlie Decision-Making of the Market Influencers;
the ways they will be Interpreting and Reacting to News Events, and Shaping Social and Consumer Trends.
Rather than trading on past outcomes and news events, Running Alpha takes a giant leap forward beyond rear-view thinking, and differentiates itself by simultaneously exploiting two unique properties that are constant among markets, geographic regions, time-horizons, economic cycles, and across the evolution of trading exchange instruments, infrastructure technology, and the regulatory climate:
(i) Digital and emotional footprints left in the wake of previous transactions and attendant volatility events, to go to where people will be before their future perceptions of the marketplace tell them to go there; and
(ii) Special market state transition switches ( Self-Organizing Tipping Points ) in the Sentiment Perception of the Investor Universe, that allow you to benefit from unknown variables and market news-flow uncertainty; thereby helping you protect your portfolio even as you act on these windows of opportunity.
At the core of Running Alpha’s Idea-Grid is a powerful new class of Heat Map Technology that embraces these benefits, and offers you a smarter way for Expressing, Prioritizing, & Intuitively Displaying High-Impact Alpha Ideas with Confidence, Precision, and Speed.
Navigating around hidden vulnerabilities from among the 6700+ equities in the Wilshire Total Market Index, including Global Companies and ETFs listed on the deeply liquid US Exchanges, the Grid 100™ short-lists and illuminates the Next 100 Biggest and Brightest Trading and Investment Ideas, that are in the pipeline for being ignited by future hot zones of sentiment activity.
There are regularly from 300 to 400 high-grade opportunities that make the cut annually, with a minimum of 100 high-conviction names in our active universe at any given time. What our clients find most interesting is that even when broad market sentiment turns down during bear market intervals, the capital flows into these opportunities get more pronounced; particularly so as the investor community starts taking notice of the oasis of green among the rising sea of red. When more money starts funneling into fewer and fewer names, market demand begins outstripping supply, and prices rise more rapidly. To accommodate investing even during the darkest hours of market turmoil — like the eve of the Lehman Brothers Collapse and the Flash Crash of 2010 — the founder’s sentiment perception technology, that is now at the heart of the Heat Grid, has been re-formulated to make it easy for you to seek safe harbor in these green-light havens.
Unlike most investment analysts and fund managers that typically have at most 5 to 10 great ideas dominating their portfolio performance, Running Alpha sources its 100+ active opportunities from among the most promising, undiscovered, and overlooked investment themed motifs and industry groups, that show not only the strongest signs of upcoming capital flows at the early stages of sustainable business spending cycles, but also emerging social sentiment built around them for the duration of the portfolio opportunity window. This allows for large AuM capacity to be built at strategic price levels over considerable periods of time, and removes the risk of offsetting the contribution of a few great ideas with a large number of mediocre performers.
As elaborated below, these benefits are a result of a unique source of Alpha intelligence that is not currently available in the wealth management industry.
Inside the Idea-Grid is a powerful Predictive Analytics Engine, founded on Patented Machine Intelligence; serving as a precision-crafted time-piece that not only wakes you up when it’s prime-time for making critical decisions, but is also calibrated for telling history from the perspective of tomorrow’s versions of today’s decision-makers.
To implement these functions, we created a Heat Map for classifying and color-coding opportunities across 4 Sentiment Dimensions — (i) Magnitude (ii) Intensity, (iii) Leadership Momentum, and (iv) Sustainability of Positive Sentiment Dynamics; formulated for telling you when the forward impact of future News-Flow — both scheduled announcements and unexpected events — is most likely to be tilted in your favor through synchronized volatility feed-back cycles of social, consumer, corporate purchasing, and M&A Activity trends.
In plain English, for each featured equity, the colors’ lighting up on the Heat Grid doesn’t just show you what investors are going to be looking at before they arrive at their conclusions in the future, but also when and to what degree “bad news will be climbing a wall of worry and “good news will be descending a slope of hope.” We are not just talking about short term investor biases to one-off news events, but sustainable widespread investor reactions to new-flow that supports longer-term sentiment trends.
This innovation also has huge implications for transforming the way digital media enterprises anonymously capture consumer interest trends — without infringing on personal privacy rights — for helping companies sell more “stuff” in a targeted way.
For further details, you are welcome to review some of our recent article posts on the Founder’s LinkedIn Profile or by linking directly to: Is Your Investment Strategy Smarter Than Mother Nature; Start Mapping Out the 2015 Sentiment Jet Stream; and Future-Sourcing Perceptions’ of Tomorrow’s Versions of Today’s Global Decision-Making Influencers.’
By employing these time-relevant insights, Running Alpha™ has engineered a new Equity Valuation Framework that can anonymously measure and display human and algorithmic perceptions of market momentum and volatility from the context of their forward-looking versions of reality. This enables Running Alpha to Precast the emotional response to momentum changes in decision-maker sentiment biases across multiple information channels and investment time-lines, before actualized as transactions in the open market; thereby, telegraphing when upcoming perceptions of market opportunities and capital flows will get absorbed, broadcast, and amplified in your favor through the marketplace.
To reiterate,
We hope that with our company, we can play a leading role in helping investors and business executives have pain-free experiences on their journey toward better decision-making;
We really want to see ourselves as part of a story for rethinking the way we can collaborate with nature, to better exploit uncertainty, and compensate for the human condition and machine biases that get in our way of both perceiving world events in high-definition and making bold decisions with attention to detail.
Explore the Grid 100™ and Start Investing in a Smarter Future Today!
BIO | Back-Story: Efrem Hoffman, CEO and Founder, Running Alpha.com Capital Markets
The Running Alpha Trading Strategy Framework is:
Helping Investors & Money Managers Make Intelligent Decisions in World Capital Markets for:
Identifying Regime Changes in the underlying generator of Volatility and Momentum Perception Biases; and
Profiting from them using a combination of:
Extreme Reversion; and
Outlier Trend-Capture Strategies in conventional world capital and crypto-markets.
We are disrupting the hedge fund world and ETF space with a new alpha sourcing mindset, that is orthogonal to everything the industry thinks is so.
It is rooted in the first real-world deep-tech application of Assembly Theory of Complex Systems, where counterfactual broad-scale observers are brought into the trading equation for helping:
systematic / semi-systematic and discretionary managers time regime switches between momentum crashes, extreme reversion events, volatility capture, and trend capture — absolute momentum, cross-market momentum, and micro and macro trend following strategies.
Efrem is dedicated to bringing his unwavering passion for deep physics, innovation, and thought-leadership, for applying his two decades of real life experiences in these areas for:
inspiring and augmenting alpha trading solutions at proprietary trading firms and hedge funds in your coverage universe.
We created a trading markets research framework for enabling both traditional and crypto traders / investors to amplify the value of their strategies with a regime-sensing overlay, that’s not just
anti-fragile to market volatility and positioned for compounding in good times, while capturing outlier trends, but is also:
designed for generating consistent returns in down markets —
empowering clients to sleep without thinking about overnight market swings, recessions, or about how inflation is eating away their hard-earned wealth.
To this end, we see ourselves and our research framework as a time-relevant asset to your firm’s success.
Running Alpha is Where High-Performing Analysts & Traditional and Crypto Money Managers Go for Making Smarter, High-Conviction Trading Decisions with Bleeding Edge Innovations in Zero-Knowledge Trust-less Transparency that give new meaning to Investor Transparency —
Sharply Raising Anxiety-Adjusted Returns™; and
Improving Client-Manager Experiences by:
Shrinking the Gap between Reported Fund Manager Performance and Individual Investor Returns.
Because it is understood when emotionally healthy people and organizations are more engaged, leadership success and productivity enhancements follow, especially in wickedly chaotic and hostile market regimes,
Running Alpha and its founder are on a mission for capturing time-relevant windows tail-risk and opportunity, by levering unconventional outlier strategy frameworks that show
no fear in hunting down and seizing super-market anomalies at moments of peak uncertainty and anxiety,
when most other investors and traders are either running away from perceived hostility in markets or piling onto crowded trades at the wrong moments.
That is why it’s so important to lower investor frustration and anxiety, because once the client becomes emotionally detached from the purpose and initial investment goals, they are less likely to follow coarse; thereby, upending the strategy before it can produce the desired results.
More than often, investors abandon their strategy when things feel more uncertain, yet history shows us that this is exactly when market opportunities are asymmetrically in our favor.
That’s why our metric of success is Anxiety-Adjusted Returns™. Anxiety is related to ambiguity over expectations — when there is little conviction toward alternative outcomes, in a world where many negative tailed possibilities abound.
Our technical edge and source of alpha goes beyond focusing on emergent feature discovery and signal generation in the classical computing domain, where virtually 99.99% of today’s and tomorrow’s strategies find their home.
Instead, we take a first principles risk-first approach, that is unified from the ground up –
Utilizing non-conventional systematic quantitative approaches for constructing “Anti-Fragile” Diversified Portfolios,
not only from a co-integrated and correlation basis, but also drilling down beneath the surface from a quantum-entangled resource perspective, which
Introduces time as a dependent, counter-intuitive, and anomalous dimension, that unlike simple power-laws or exponential distributions in conventional Self-Organizing Criticality and Phase Transition Models, faithfully captures emergent feature structure with many degrees of freedom, thereby:
quantifying the entropy of entanglement and discord among the inner product of market participant perceptions in the quantum domain and the many-to-one mapping of outputs — market price behavior patterns — in the price domain.
We then initiate a process for taking this Bottom-Down Intelligence™ Framework and Bringing Together Math, Deep Physics, and New Insights on Human Behavior and Machine Perception Biases for:
Shrinking Billions of Entangled Data Points Down to a Single Point of View,
So That the High-Performing Proprietary Quantitative Trader Can:
Start Amplifying their Alpha Edge for:
Fearlessly and Systematically Profit from
The Next Big Super-Anomalies and Outlier Trends,
Before Others Eat Your Alpha Pie.
At the core of our patented and proprietary research framework and algorithms, Running Alpha harnesses proprietary innovations at the intersection of computational system complexity and non-classical machine learning data transformations ( constructor theory and assembly time ) for:
Redefining Far-From Equilibrium Thermodynamic Regime Switching States and Phase Transitions ( both slow and fast ) in:
Financial Market Responses to Endogenous Market Feeback and
Known and Unknown Exogenous News Events, so that:
We can either Convert Positive or Negative Black Swan Perceptions into “Grey Swans” and “Dragon-Kings” that we could Hedge for a Profit Instead of a Cost, or
at least mitigate Tail-Risk from authentic rare and unpredictable events of High Consequence ( true Black Swans ).
Rather than focusing on using Machine Intelligence for doing what 95+ percent of quant trader crowd is pursuing –
i.e. analyzing past outcomes ( outputs ) and pattered structure in alt. data; and predicting price behavior, economic factors or future news events, that are inevitably unpredictable by nature,
We Monitor the Inner Product of Emergent Action-Reaction Feedback Layers among Observers – the Broad-Scale Market Participants,’ particularly their Momentum Perception Biases of Price trend and News Sentiment ) for:
Identifying when market players will be asymmetrically amplifying positive and negative information –
that has recently entered the market place, yet was supressed by behavioral and perception biases, but which are now expected to wake up in the next market phase transition; and
create a pronounced market inefficiency that we can exploit in an uncrowded trading setting, until the next transition.
We are essentially finding assets with pockets of persistent negative entropy ( syntropy ) using time-delay and quantum embedding functions, that offer
foresight into:
when positive entropy production can be delayed and reversed for specific assets and collections of assets, such that our portfolios diverge and/or are uncorrelated from assets within a similar category, style box, or factor composition; and
when the market will be lengthening its reaction time for absorbing, processing, and propagating new and old information ( old news being replayed as if its new ) across its complex interconnected network.
These are the windows of opportunity when trend-following shines, until such time the algos’ sees an infamous momentum crash that inevitably shocks the system and disrupts not only the trend,
but, also the entangled arrangement of market actor perception biases that play a role in the next fractional price and volatility sequence.
This approach enables Running Alpha to be agnostic to information flow – high or low- frequency – and do what crash-test car engineers do best, create antifragile structures ( in our case, portfolios ) regardless of the specific unknown risks thrown at them.
To this end, we are on a mission for bringing broad-scale observer interactions and market-player entanglements into the algorithmic processing equation, so that:
Classical entropy can be reconstituted as a quantum-entangled resource instead of a statistical ensemble that is blind to the “unknown known” fact that:
the composition of market participants, creating the trends and patterned structures the machines’ are learning, are not the same one’s who are either observing momentum trends, or are trading them today and into the future.
Whether we are looking at life, our business, or any situation that is presented to us,
We see the world not as it is, but as we are, through our unique observer lense,
which is influenced and biased by our senses and beliefs —
formed through complex positive and negative feedback chains built up over our lifetime,
between our experiences and all of those things that make up our history,
which is always expanding at each new moment of interaction with ourselves and the environment.
That’s why we are fooling ourselves into thinking we are authentically seeing the world 100% accurately.
So, what does it even mean to see the world as it is, instead of through a single human or machine perspective?
It means that by acknowledging that you are seeing things through your unique perspective,
you are recognizing that you are missing out on observing, experiencing, and feeling the world of possibilities through:
the vast landscapes and broadscale interactions of other unique perspectives and vantage points.
So, from our observer, we take actions, and those actions are trading order decisions taken in the hopes of unlocking alpha.
But there is a big problem in the way 99.9% of trading market observers assess alpha and fine-tune their strategies.
If they get positive results, they think their observer selves were right.
If they get negative results, they tend to go back and change our action, but they never go back to question the generalization or edge-case suitability of the observer vantage points for the range of future possibilities they may be interacting with,
many of which not only lie outside their own unique domain of experience,
but also, the totality of human and machine experience, scrolling back to the big bang of modern capital market formation.
That is why Traders must always question your beliefs of what you think is true when you are not achieving the right results.
When you become super curious, you open your mind to new information and the possibility that it may augment a weak or noisy signal, and
transform into a powerful new decision-making tool.
We must start Differentiating between living human-machine combos with life experiences and the baggage of individual observer histories, and
static snap shot of the system parts ( Human and Machine Resources ) – which lack
any reference to the self-organizing arrow of time or more appropriately, the info-dynamics arrow of complexity, which shapes the forward behaviours of quantum machine-augmented human observers.
Quantum Resources ( quantum entanglement and discord ) encapsulates the multi-directional relationships among the system parts and their observing selves.
Supervised and Self-Organizing Feedback in Machine-Learning Networks are action based — mostly tuned to results or (output/input)-based parameters,
rather than rooted in the underlying cause of our decision-making errors, which are pre-input based — a function of:
perception biases; and our observer self, which self-imposes limits to expanding our vantage points.
By introducing an arrow of information complexity, a sort of new dimension into the trading time equation, we are not only correcting for this recurring and pervasive data science error, but are:
Gaining an Alpha Edge, as markets mature and the complexity derived from the functional information advantage of both an:
ever-expanding alternative data universe; and
the attendant voracity and scale of its userbase —
be it of a financial data context, or one defined by the cadence of things in the natural world.
This Enables Traders to Exploit Market Uncertainty for Catalyzing Alpha and Optimizing Human and Machine Resources at the Lowest Cost Points – both monetarily and emotionally — in an Operational Trading Setting,
within all market environments and across broad-scale geographies, time-lines and asset classes, even as the total system complexity and competition for alpha dominance continues to grow.
We live in a world that is more hostile, volatile, uncertain, unambiguous, and more complex than ever before. Not only is this the case today,
but outside of local pockets or perceived reversion of complexity and uncertainty,
universal thermodynamic laws of information complexity shows that in the infinite game of life and financial market systems in particular,
these measures of hostility and frustration of competing tendencies will continue to increase with each new decision and piece of data exhaust we
( the universe of human and machine interactions and experiences )
generates [ along the way ].
As we move from simple to more complex problems at an accelerated rate, the conventional mathematical algebras that virtually every trading system and modern classical machine intelligence is founded on is:
now faced with “WICKED” open-ended challenges — elusive expectations chasing the infinitely tall-tail and fuzzy, unknown solutions,
lacking any historical record of human/machine experience –
going back to the big bang of capitalism —
that can show us the way forward from our problem space of compounding wealth,
be it deterministically, as a closed form mathematical solution, or
by virtue of a trivial agent-based iterative simulation from present to future state.
A shout out to all investors — passive and active, novice or masters of the trade in traditional and crypto-markets –
if you are looking for a new angle or mathematical edge that is calibrated to solving Wicked data problems, lying outside of classical AI; and
uniting quantum-inspired machine unlearning / computing principles with the science of computational circuit complexity, for:
making sense of natural system expansion and contraction, especially during wickedly uncertain times,
Efrem’s trading market thought-leadership at the Running Alpha Trading Box™ is for you.
In a nutshell, here are some of the actionable foresights for each asset we cover – both from an active and passive vantage point:
✔ Imminent Super-Outlier Growth in Price Action, as well as;
✔ Market Leadership and Dominance,
✔ Powerful Alpha Performance Enhancers; and
✔ Diversifiers beyond Traditional Fiat-Based Asset Classes, while offering
✔ Time-Relevant Buffers against Extreme Equity, Bond Market, and Currency Volatility,
that we have correctly anticipated, and for which we expect to offset the impact of equity market volatility, which is poised to sharply accelerate from here into November, with Extreme Reversion Potential thereafter.
Actionable Intelligence includes the:
✔ Specific Names and Symbols of both these Conventional & Digital Asset in focus;
✔ Market Player Positioning, along with:
✔ Critical High Conviction levels for trading around core positions;
✔ High-Definition Timing Windows for outlier equities and commodities when Market / News Events Get Amplified; and
✔ Dominant Time-Frames to Zero-In on for Avoiding Market Noise and Confusion.
Trading Signals include Regime Switch States for:
✔ Extreme Reversion;
✔ Momentum; and
✔ Novel Trend-Following Strategies; as well as our new industry innovation in:
✔ Zero-Knowledge Trust-less Alpha Index Solutions.
Back-Story: Founder, Running Alpha | Trading System:
Connect with the Running Alpha Trading Box Founder, Efrem Hoffman on LinkedIn, and be sure to:
Signup to his LinkedIn Newsletter, Hoffman Financial Storm Chaser™; and
Listen to Efrem’s Bulls, Bear, & Outliers Podcast, co-hosted with David A. Janello, PhD, CFA, ex-CBOE and ex-Goldman Sachs Execution and Clearing Trading Professional, and Best-Selling Author, who currently runs an Options Trading Platform.
A shout out to all investors — passive and active, novice or masters of the trade, if you are looking for a new angle or mathematical edge that lies outside of classical AI; levering quantum-inspired machine unlearning and computing principles and the science of computational circuit complexity for making sense of natural system expansion and contraction, especially during wickedly uncertain times, the Running Alpha Trading Box™ is for You.
Efrem Hoffman is consistently ranked on Thinkers360’s leaderboard of the world’s top 50 Fintech, Quantum Computing, and Cryptocurrency thought-leaders, and has been:
Featured and Quoted in Best Selling Amazon Book Releases in the categories of Option and Derivative Trading, and [ B2B Business Technology Innovation ], including:
The Nuclear Option: Trading to Win with Options Momentum Strategies; and
The Remarkable Effect.
Efrem has been an invited keynote speaker and roundtable moderator at international financial trading technology and machine intelligence conferences, including, but not limited to panel discussions on the state of the economy and markets with Technical Trading Market Hall of Fame luminarie(s) on Bloomberg Charts day.
He also offers professional key-note speaking and private fire-side chats and breakout trading innovation and discussion groups — both on live digital and in-person events — to educational and research institutions and public and private corporations, including a special key-note invitation for a Semi-Annual Addresses to University of Toronto Risk Lab – an NSERC sponsored organization;
Appearing internationally in PhD theses, and Fortune 500 AI patents and those granted to Preeminent Educational Institutions and Federal Research Thinktanks,
Efrem has also broke stories with Eamon Javers on MSNBC, Bloomberg, BNN Bloomberg, which were syndicated across world-wide mediate networks and leading digital magazines.
Efrem started out in the StormTech space figuring out ways of mitigating catastrophic outcomes – collaborating with a research consortium, including Environment Canada’s Prairie Storm Prediction Center, Info-Magnetic Technologies Corporation, and TR Labs, the Electrical and Computer Engineering research arm of the University of Manitoba, for developing Fault-Tolerant Early-Warning Tornado Alert Systems for safeguarding human life and property from extreme weather events.
With over 300 worldwide citations to Efrem’s work, research frameworks, and patents ( covering 27 systems and process claims — U.S. Patent #s: 6,035,057; 6,278,799 ),
from many world-class financial and academic institutions, national research labs, tech power houses, and fortune 500 companies,
including, but not limited to:
Avionics and Military Instrumentation (Rockwell Collins, Lockheed Martin Corporation), Atmospheric Weather Agencies, Enterprise Software & Hardware Management firms, including IBM, Microsoft, & Sony; Mobile Communications Operators — Nokia, as well as Government and Private Think-Tanks, including MIT, the U.S. Department of Energy alliance partner — Pacific North-West Labs Battelle Institute, and the U.S. Navy. ( Full list can be found in the links above ),
Efrem is continuously expanding the frontier for building and maintaining Running Alpha’s investment strategy infrastructure and expanding the use cases of alternative data pipelines; and
actively collaborating and partnering with a global network of thought-leadership thinktanks and industry-leading research scientists, economists, quants, professional on-and-off-the-floor traders, institutional investors, and FinTech industry veterans, many of whom are Data Science powerhouses.
Ranked Global Top 100 Fintech Influencer in 2022 by Growth Gorilla —
a UK based world leader in comprehensive rankings and go-to-market strategy for global FinTech enterprises; and
Short-listed by Efi Pylarinou, the Visionary of Daily Fintech,
a seasoned Ph.D. Wall Street financial professional and independent Blockchain advisor,
who ranks as No.3 influencer in the finance sector and No.1 woman influencer, by Refinitiv Global Social-Media 2019; where Running Alpha was featured in Daily Fintech publication among the Top 10 Emerging Financial Technology Platform Leaders and Sentiment Fin-Techs in the U.S.,
focusing on “the AI business of “sniffing out” [signals] in digital wealth management, and changing the value proposition of financial analysts and asset managers.”
Running Alpha’s financial technology solutions have also been:
Nominated in 2016 for the Benzinga ( BZ ) Fintech Awards, (aka, Global Fintech Awards), where Running Alpha placed as a Finding Alpha Finalist, where Benzinga News interviewed Efrem about Running Alpha’s technology innovation, Live and in-person, at a New York Gala event;
Scouted out and vetted by the Founder of Toronto, based Street Contxt Exchange in 2018, hailed as the “Netflix of [Market] Research,” to be among the first 35 independent investment market research intelligence contributors on their global marketplace;
bringing the buy and sell sides of Wall Street and Bay Street closer together than ever before; with client coverage of over 300,000 individuals across 47,000 firms in 153 countries,
Efrem has been privileged to:
establishing many ongoing relationships with world-class giants in the field of real-money trading and investing, innovation thought-leadership, including practitioners, and academics;
who made life-changing contributions to both science and society –
people at the intersection of curiosity and genius, that he thought were interesting and incredible citizens, who were pioneers in their respective disciplines, from
asset pricing, economics, game theory, floor trading, artificial intelligence, swarm intelligence, quantum mechanics, predictive and prescriptive analytics, data science, field-programmable logic, fractional calculus to
zero-knowledge proofs, multi-dimensional Visual Decision Support Systems (VDSS) and digital information murals, real-life tornado simulations, atmospheric and climate physics, and space weather forecasting, including:
Efrem’s undergraduate computer engineering thesis advisor, an early pioneer of Field Programmable Gare Array ( FPGA ) computer hardware logic circuits, and a prolific innovator of AI prediction Networks and Autonomous Digital Satellite Control Systems,
who supervised a Ph.D. level thesis project, which I actively worked on with a consortium of
research scientists and industry professionals — participating from Canada and abroad;
World Class Trading Psychology Coaches that Transformed the Science of Human Fractals for Managing investor Anxiety;
a revered Chicago Floor Trading partner of the late Nobel Laureate and founding father of Capital Asset Pricing — one of the first successful option market making model applications in a real-word setting; and
a Windows World Open – Smithsonian nominated Quantum and Atmospheric Physicist, who studies under Albert Einstein’s and Werner Heisenberg’s prodigies.
With these experiences, Efrem brings a unique perspective to managing human and investment capital,
one that provides a new level of transparency to the individual investor —
offering a play by play on how to augment human intelligence with science for:
Efficiently “Battling for Investment Survival in our times of wicked uncertainty.
Efrem’s mission is to transform the Individual Investor’s biggest fear–
Knowing that something is coming for them, but not knowing when —
into actionable opportunities that produce Anxiety-Adjusted Returns, with less monetary and emotional capital exposure.
Efrem’s thought-leadership insights have been numerously quoted in the international press:
CFA Magazine, NASDAQ news, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair / Hive Magazine, Hamburg News, Bloomberg View, Thompson Reuters / WSJ, CNBC breaking news article by Eamon Javers, CNBC Anchor and Senior White House Correspondent, relating to Presidential Market Factor.
Efrem was short-listed among industry peers, to share his unique expert insights on trading market strategy in a chapter of “Learning the Secrets of Successful Investing,” which became a #1 Best-Selling Amazon Kindle Book in the category of Investing & Commodities –
edited by Larry Jacobs, the 2001 World Cup Trading Championships® Winner for stocks, and founder of TradersWorld, now operated by Halliker’s Inc.; and
has also appeared on Live on-air Business Innovation and Investing Education Interviews and Expert Knowledge Sessions on North American business market intelligence podcasts and radio broadcasts, including:
In-person show(s) in Chicago on Benzinga PreMarket PREP, where, on one of several digital episodes, Efrem shared his market intelligence live on-line from Toronto, Canada on a special morning lineup;
featuring prominent Wall Street financial and economic experts, who independently kicked off the morning broadcast, including: Ron Insana, former CNBC anchor and author of Insana Market Intelligence; Michael Corcelli of Alexander Alternative Capital; and Mohamed El-Erian, Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz;
frequent guest invites on Benzinga PreMarket Prep News and Radio Network, where on live-air he is known for making winning bets with the host on extremely bold, contrarian, and timely market calls on outlier events, right before watershed market extremes, where history has proven out that those on the other side of the trade were overly pessimistic or optimistic; and
Global Industry Events in North America and Geneva, Switzerland, including moderating roundtable discussions on “Innovative Trends in Multi-Factor Investing and Alternative Data Augmentation – Smart-Beta 3.0,” alongside founders and C-suite hedge funds and ETF industry innovation specialists from boutique and big investment banks at Trading Show Chicago 2017,
where Efrem was as an invited keynote seminar speaker on ” How to think Differently about Financial Market Trends using Running Alpha’s “Bottom-Down Intelligence™;” also
serving on live in-person expert discussion panels at:
Terrapin’s QuantWorld Canada 2017, moderated by Ernest Chan, adjunct faculty at Northwestern University, Master’s in Data Science program on best practices in finance and machine learning; and
Trading Show Chicago 2017, and Toronto-based Hedge Fund Hotel (where, WSJ-Dow Jones Reporter & Columnist, Evelyn Juan interviewed Efrem for a Dow Jones Newswire article [ Portfolio Stress-Testing in Financial Market Hurricanes ]),
on topics ranging from trading on social sentiment trends, to unique machine intelligence and alternative data strategies, with luminaries of finance, including:
a market data specialist from one of the most respected hedge fund trading firms;
a world-leading quant commodity pool operator and trading advisor, who is an influential data science teacher and prolific author of machine learning principles for democratizing access to algorithmic trading strategies.
Featured by Value Inspiration Network,
hosted by Ton Dobbe, a 30-year veteran and globally recognized business strategy and B2B software innovation thought-leader in Spain,
Efrem’s lively podcast exchange on “How Human and Machine Combos Can-Be Used To Avert Financial Tornados,”
captivated and inspired Ton so much, that he not only featured Running Alpha’s competitive edge and Efrem’s educational quotes on risk and innovation, alongside 100global industry influencers and leading tech-entrepreneurs-on-a-mission,
in his Best-Selling paperback / hard-cover/ and Kindle formatted Digital Business Software Innovation Book – The The Remarkable Effect; but also,
included Efrem’s profile and blurb on the back-cover.
John Rubino, a former Wall Street Star Analyst and featured columnist with TheStreet and prolific author of several books, including The Money Bubble, interviewed Efrem for a feature article in the Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) Magazine, Volume 27, Issue 3 on Sept. 16th 2016, called “My Favorite Robot.”
Here is a portion of the Efrem’s dialogue with John Rubino:
“Two-way transparency will also become increasingly important. “Right now, money managers are judged based on performance relative to target indices. That obscures a lot of important [nuances],” says Hoffman. Next-generation AI, [Running Alpha has developed] “will be able to not only compare fund performance with peers but track the underlying reasons for the performance so it’s more aligned with the [investor].”
The same technologies will offer better insight into exactly who customers are and what they need. “Every new client defines their risk tolerance and other preferences upfront, but that information has a short shelf life and is potentially inaccurate,” says Hoffman. “Most people don’t know what their risk tolerance is. And a [ Portfolio Manager ( PM ) ] managing [over] 400 accounts can’t track their subsequent behavior in response to volatility episodes.”
Consider an imaginary scenario: Two clients both claim moderate risk tolerance, but a sharp market correction elicits a “sell everything” call from one and a “buy the dip” from the other.
Future AIs will be able to track these responses and “put clients with managers who align with their behavior,” says Hoffman, who proposes a new performance metric called “anxiety-adjusted return[s]” to gauge this relationship.”
Efrem has also been recently interviewed by a prominent London-based buy-side Alternative Financial Market Big-Data Vendor with international operations,
for showcasing Running Alpha’s augmented data intelligence services to their premium platform subscribers – including large institutional investment banks, hedge funds and data science thinktanks in the fintech vertical,
who are looking for new sources of data that will be amplifying the alpha-signal strength and extending the shelf-life and reliability of their existing data sources.
With exclusive invitation, Efrem proudly serves as:
Industry Survey Alliance Partner, to ChangeWave Research, a division of 451 Research — providing time-relevant Insights on current consumer and business Trends impacting the financial community, with a focus on IT and Networking Technology; and
Corporate Research Member to Tactical Rabbit Inc, an elite closed intelligence network offering break-through military intelligence gathering methodologies to ascertain the relevant information so that the right mission-critical business, economic, and social decisions can be made under conditions of extreme and apparent uncertainty; and has been actively engaged as a:
Canadian Research Member to the late Barydyne Traders Group Project; a breakthrough global think-tank, whose mandate is reinventing the future of trading in a live trading lab. The mission there was to contribute valuable insights for promoting the science of prediction to trading.
As a member of this trading group, Efrem actively participated in group decisions with the director to select buy, sell, entry and exit strategies, and was instrumental in helping members reorient their views on time-relevant opportunities for investing in emerging semiconductor megatrends, right near a pivotal point in history in the 2010s, proved prescient.
Efrem also received formal instruction on Professional Real-Time Trading Floor Technologies and Data-Provider Architectures/Configurations, and Multi-Dimensional Visualization and Data-Mining of Real-Time Financial Data – in New York (Waters Corporation) and Toronto (Visible Decisions, Inc.), alongside senior executives of Fortune 500 companies, including some of the world’s largest investment banks and software development firms [1997]; and
actively shares his insights on Strategy Development and the Future States of Markets, which include:
frequent trend-pieces, published and accessible to his over 27,600 direct LinkedIn Connections and Followers, and over 2680 subscribers, that joined in the first few weeks after launching his LinkedIn Newsletter: Hoffman Financial Storm Chaser™.
With a strong practical understanding of financial innovation use cases,
Efrem brings a broad-scale practical perspective to making sense of capital market and economic movements, for advancing the science of precision wealth-intelligence;
Founded on a unified framework, of three innovations:
Multi-Valued Computing Logic, Bottom-Down Analytics™, and Crowd-Physics™,
Efrem is opening new ground in levering Quantum Machine Intelligence strategies,
for giving precision insight into international capital and domestic liquidity movements in both publicly listed and dark markets — off-exchange venues, where market dealers work on behalf of big institutions to mask their order-flow intentions.
Efrem started out at a time when few in the business community were aware of our framework’s universal potential in other industries — over 15 years before it became a buzzword on Wall Street and Main Street.
Although the initial focus was Tornado Prediction from high dimensional radar imagery, which unlike a picture of a car, as seen with a camera, 3D weather-radar reflectivity echoes of wind patterns, and signatures of whirling cloud droplets, colliding and bouncing off each other in the sky, are only abstractions of reality.
His scientific approach was so unconventional and promising that, not only did Efrem receive special recognition by a lead research scientist at the Atmospheric Environment Service (AES) Prairie Storm Prediction Center,
for making significant contributions to StormTech science and transforming the way experts can start thinking about making better sense of hierarchical patterns in just about any unstructured multi-dimensional big data sets ( including financial markets ),
while teasing out, at remarkable speeds ( up to 1000 times faster than conventional AI and more accurately than classical algorithms on a supercomputer ), the salient predictive features at local and global scale,
but the technology innovation use case also played a role in pilot-test studies, and later featured by Braindex, as among the top 250 most fascinating weather radar inventions.
Efrem has an unwavering fascination for bringing the common ground, unique challenges, and bleeding edge solutions he discovered across multiple disciplines to building solutions for observing the collective human perception and behavioral traits and biases that make markets tick; and give rise to sudden outbursts of extreme bullish and bearish activity.
These interactions have humbled Efrem to appreciate the importance of knowing when to start applying and investing in a technology; and of equal relevance, avoiding situations when the underlying assumptions of a technology’s function and utility create unacceptable trade-offs that are incompatible with the current and upcoming market environment.
By augmenting the benefits of industry knowledge and human judgement with non-discretionary strategic insights from academia and industry, Efrem has acquired a respect for how the human condition, trying to make sense of the unknown, both interacts and interferes with mathematical modelling.
That’s why Efrem Hoffman’s strategies and research frameworks are challenging the fundamental limits of conventional logic for which almost every life and death, career-changing flight or fight, decisions we make, are based on.
So, Efrem’s message is clear — we better be prepared to see outliers, irregularities, and uncertainty for what they really are — the most persistent windows of opportunity that should be embraced for converting strategy into action inside the World’s Thinnest Risk Horizons™.
What really catches Efrem’s attention is when the underlying premise of the consensus view, particularly of the market’s collective behavior and expectations, not only diverges wildly from reality, but is founded on a rigid monochromatic belief system and theory, that is not verifiable in the real world.
He especially derives pleasure from assisting investors with making sense of current conditions, and then levering this dynamic knowledge for generating high levels of anxiety-adjusted returns.
To this end, Efrem is delivering insights into what’s not only new,
but also, how his new innovation in investing technology and prescriptive analytics has the power to inspire audiences to innovate at a new level, and transform specific industry and organizations forever.
Efrem’s insights are rooted in the philosophy that not all things in the world can be rendered with immediate visibility. This is especially relevant to human-driven financial enterprise.
His passion is focused on waking up our capacity to see more, and reveal the dynamics of the whole manifesting in the system parts. Only then can we start to comprehend the big picture and make informed decisions that can deliberately paint the canvas.
Efrem hopes to play an inspirational role in helping investors and business executives have pain-free experiences on their journey toward better decision-making.
Efrem has over 100,000 hours of operational real-life experience as a trading markets analysts, putting the scientific method to work for improving investment outcomes, and most importantly the proven systematic processes and repeatable quant-based frameworks that are genuinely creating them,
He has an unwavering commitment for: helping investors and traders navigate the complexities of today’s converging capital flows and wicked macro challenges — coming from all directions; and harnessing a new financial thinking maps and metrics for Bringing Calm to the Chaos.
Our mission is to provide strategic intelligence and actionable insights and foresights — information that is empowering novice to professional investors and advisors for surpassing their trading and investing goals.
His vision is to see RunningAlpha.com as a leading part of a story for rethinking the way mankind can start collaborating with nature for better exploiting complexity and uncertainty; and compensating for the human condition and machine biases that get in our way of both perceiving world events in high-definition and making bold decisions with attention to detail.
Applying this philosophy to his daily life, Efrem is able to identify hidden Support and Resistance Boundaries for all major markets for impressive results when investors overlay these levels with their own trading tools. When combined with the critical times identified on his inhouse proprietary Time Maps of Momentum Perception Biases and Future Sentiment Jet-Stream Behavior, traders and investors of all skill levels are expected to discover a unique edge they never had before in their trading experience!
To make this experience seamless, Efrem does all the heavy-lifting by embedding this time-relevant decision-making into Running Alpha’s Actionable Intelligence and Trading Idea Commentary.
To best protect yourself and thrive in today’s markets of peak uncertainty, take a “walk into the future” with Efrem, and join him on his journey for opening new avenues of trading and investing clarity, empowering you with original and stimulating insights that are complimentary and refreshingly unique from anything you will find in the global trading research and educational investing arena!
Coverage Universe:
With over 3000 highly liquid equities, ETFs, and commodity assets Running Alpha monitors in just our non-global coverage universe, we are virtually never at a loss for a steady pipeline of high-performing assets, that can move the performance needle in any market climate.
What’s even more unusual about the investing framework is that it does not require the use of complicated strategies, other than simply buying and selling a unique subset of equities that do well in bull and bear markets, even when leverage is not applied.
Trading Market Intelligence Performance Traction:
Running Alpha has captured many highly profitable trades this year for its subscribers; here are a few:
“an Unexpected Bullish Reversal in the S&P;
a Surprise Move Up in the Semiconductor Index; and
a Very Surprising Melt-Up in the Precious Metals Sector.”
Here are the Performance Highlights of 2022 Global Market Intelligence
2022 was one for the record books, where:
We gave early warning about the historic bond market crash,
the relentless rally in Mortgage Rates, and
the unusual acceleration and stickiness of inflation and inflation expectations, and the lack of control central banks to putting the inflation genie back in the bottle.
We were not only early and right about the breakout and broadening of geopolitical conflicts and war igniting in 2022 based on our unique leading indicators of global money and commodity flows,
but, also the precise timing ( to the starting and retreating interval ) of the historic spike in Natural Gas and Electricity prices in Europe.
We were spot on regarding the manic buying in energy stocks and agricultural commodities, right as we were leading up to the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
We were right about the corners of the marketplace that would experience extreme volatility shocks, as well as the opportunities for harnessing the power of our proprietary Bottom-Down Intelligence platform for identifying, with high-conviction,
precisely when market activity of the smartest institutions on unlisted (Dark Pool) Liquidity venues will be forcing the hand of listed (Lit) markets, that everyone else participates in.
We successfully applied this intelligence for correctly informing our premium subscribers of impending “momentum crashes”– those special moments in time and price, where some of the poorest performing securities and markets would become the best performers in the following interval.
As an example, on late January 2022, moments before the war broke out, Efrem was a special guest on a private webinar to High-Net-Worth Investors and Portfolio Clients of a Bay Street market intelligence firm — Strategic Analysis Corporation (SAC), founded by Ross Healy, Chairman, who also serves as a regular featured Market Call expert on Bloomberg BNN Television.
On the webinar, Efrem issued a high priority Red-Alert back in January 2022 on imminent inflationary pressures, which also featured Geopolitical Escalation Alerts to our premium subscribers before the Russian-Ukraine war erupted –
indicating that grains, corn, soybean prices – GCC and GNR, and DBA would surge, along with a Massive Historic Spike in Natural Gas prices into double digit territory – and
then went on to pinpoint the opportunity window in the best-in-class equities in the Energy space that would benefit the most from the anticipated disruption in supplies, and the rest is history now with the inflation genie out of the bottle.
We also:
Generated market calls ahead and during the 2007-2008 market crisis that were significantly more accurate, bold and timely in both initiation and exit:
- Compared to performance ratings of over 3000 equity analysts at 432 leading firms, followed by Bloomberg Magazine, Aug 2008; also outperformed security selection of banks that were listed in Bloomberg’s 2011 Risk Report.
- Successfully assisted a Merchant Banking Firm and alerted several High Net-Worth Individuals, including a leading Canadian venture capitalist; a serial technology angel investor, and multi-billion-dollar hedge fund manager, from assuming Market Risk prior to Running Alpha’s accurate New York City and Toronto Road-trip crash alert of the 2007 & 2008 crisis;
- Warned Senior directors and traders at Bear Stearns of looming crisis and told their workers to find new jobs, while stock was still near $100.00;
- Addressed a leading Toronto-based Value-Investing group that is among a market call feature favorite on Bloomberg Business News Network,
Efrem on behalf of Running Alpha, correctly made the high-conviction case of surging Energy, Natural Gas, and Agricultural Commodity price inflation, with uncanny timing of its magnitude and persistence,
ahead of the breaking news on the Ukraine Crisis. Efrem also successfully alerted the firm with high specificity of an impending $1000 point prolonged sell off from Gold’s 2011 highs during the European Crisis,
when virtually all on Wall Street and Bay Street had only general outlooks with relatively bullish targets.
- Research Framework originally generated advance alerts on an Investment Roadshow Presentation in Toronto and New York of an impending volatility storm threat, with specificity more than 3.5 years ahead of the Great Financial Crisis event, & to within 3 days of the specific markets melting down – with over 3 months lead time.
- Correctly warned of toxic volatility several weeks in advance of the May 6th, 2010 intraday Flash Crash, & made early notice of its absolute magnitude and speed, and the V-bottom rebound that followed.
Running Alpha’s Research Intelligence showed similar foresight ahead of the Pandemic, Housing Crash, Dot-Com Bubble, 1997 Asian Crisis.
The strategy framework was stress-tested going back up to 400 years, covering 82 spectacular crisis situations, including:
the 1987 Stock Crash; 1970s inflation; 1930s Depression, 1929 and 1921 Market Crash; the 1800’s banking panics; the South Sea Bubble and the Holland Tulip Mania; and subsequent recoveries across world capital markets.
Also, more recently, when many analysts, before year-end 2022, were underestimating the amount of money that would flow into semiconductors, hoping to wait out for valuations to get as cheap as they have been in previous market troughs,
Running Alpha’s market maps were telling investors to be as aggressive as they can; and
since we were on the public record on New Year’s Eve. 2022, with over 2630 members subscribed to our Financial Storm Chaser newsletter, many which are some of the most sophisticated global asset managers and quant traders at big institutions and ivy league academic thinktanks,
the strategy has, on-balance, displayed over 40% gains without leverage in semiconductor ETFs alone;
with much higher performance in individual companies, all of which were selected outperformed their benchmark on average, particularly when accounting for active trading around core positions;
at which point, some analysts finally called in the towel on their bearish outlooks and did an about face – not once,
but on an industry-wide basis, as they frequently get caught up in either entering too late or getting in too early with too much exposure to underperforming equity assets.
This is not a one-off event; in addition to capturing every notable bull and bear market panic wave, and secular recovery and mania in the current century,
we have also recently been gaining industry traction, with not only our successful market calls and line-up of requests for feature interviews on live streaming television and digital press, but with also a very large professional following, now approaching 29,000 strong on the founder’s LinkedIn digital rolodex,
including prominent tech innovators and serial entrepreneurs, quantum computing specialists, astrophysicists, award-winning film directors and authors, economists, financial news and geo-political anchors and award-winning media correspondents to high offices.
This investment intelligence and thought-leadership was amplified after
successfully making a series of high-conviction bullish market calls on September 30th, 2022, and reiterating them in finer detail on Oct 6th, regarding an abrupt and anomalous shift of historic market-wide bullish sentiment on and after Oct 13th, 2022,
that would catch many investors – both novice and veteran — by surprise, given both:
the increasing consensus expectations for an economic hard landing and an accelerated market meltdown, premised on the broadscale markers of an unprecedented inversion in the treasury yield-curve; and
the disbelief that the Oct 12th low would be one of the highest valuation troughs in history, at 17X earnings.
Efrem specifically alerting his clients of an imminent and remarkable set of turnaround events in beaten down sectors, industries, and niche segments.
Building on Running Alpha’s traction of nailing the date and price levels of the stealth bull market in equities, that started in October 2022,
many retail and professional traders alike are questioning whether the rally can continue in the key benchmark equity indices in 2023.
Find out now, so you can get positioned, along with your emotional capital, ahead of the next big move.
More specifically, our investing research framework correctly called all 23 watershed turnaround moments in North American and Global Equity Markets, between 2011 and 2022; and now once again it is signaling imminent unprecedented change, including
the volatility that started increasingly gripping the capital markets from around the time of the global trade conflicts late last decade,
to our current post-pandemic re-opening era and supply-chain, energy and food security crisis ( and that’s not including our similar success in other asset classes);
In the 6 days leading up to the Oct. 13th and Oct. 21st turnaround, and the 3 days leading up to the mid July 2022 turnaround,
as well as the May 20th and Jan 28th 2022 price surge, Running Alpha accurately alerted investors of pivotal outlier trend changes, with at least 3 days lead time.
are 23 recent major money-flow calls made successfully by Running Alpha:
Nov 18th/23rd/25th/2011
Jan 8th/13th/15th/21st/25th/27thand Feb 10th/11th 2016
Nov 4th/9th/16th 2016
Mar 23rd/April 2nd 2018
Nov 2nd/2018
Dec 26th 2018
Dec 28th/29th and Jan 2nd2019
May 31st2019
Aug 14th 2019
Mar 3rd/6th/25th and April 1st/7th/8th/14th/17th/21st/23rd/30th2020
Oct 28th/2020 and Dec 11th/17th2020
Sept 30th and Oct 5th/13th2021
Dec 3rd/2021
Jan 25th/26th/27th/28th2022
March 11th/14th/15th 2022
May 13th / 16th /20th 2022 – to be announced to clients with premium subscriptions
June 14th
July 14th
Oct 13th/21st
Nov 3rd
Nov 22nd
Nov 29th after-hours / 30th day-session
Jan 6th, 19th, 25th/2023
Spring and Summer 2023 – Discover what’s next with an Alpha Trading Box Premium Subscription
In each of these instances, Running Alpha detected stealth money flows by big institutions in non-listed liquidity pools; and is now once again signaling unprecedented change for 2023.
Consistently and Correctly at odds with the consensus, Running Alpha has also delivered similar foresight in its performance stress-tests,
across over 82 instances, over a 100-year interval of global bullish and bearish modern market history; covering periods of extreme crisis and instability, to more tranquil range-bound and noisy markets.
In this period, the average length of a bear market is 289 days, or about 9.6 months. That’s significantly shorter than the average length of a bull market, which is 991 days or 2.7 years.
40% of the return in a bull market is squeezed on average into 1% (the 10 best days) of a bull market’s duration, which is 991 days (2.7 years).
Stocks lose 36% on average in a bear market. By contrast, stocks gain 114% on average during a bull market. So, it is more profitable trading bull markets passively, but actively trading around core positions in bear markets with higher volatility, offers a higher total return.
That is why we choose to apply our trio of predictive intelligence for invest in extreme reversion events, which have a more defined and measured pathway; offering a faster alpha capture cycle and more frequent opportunities for benefiting from periods of volatility expansion by trading around core positions at strategic price points and time windows and using it as your alpha performance edge.
Since mid October 2022, Running Alpha’s research intelligence has already correctly called all six of these outlier market anomalies to date, giving early notice just before any trend emerged – the most recent being the remarkable upside reversal on Nov 29th after-hours / 30th and Jan 6th 2023 day-sessions for technology stocks and the broad global market indices.
Making things even more challenging, especially for the retail investor is that over 68% of stocks tend to go down in a bull market, with as many as 95% of front-line assets falling in a bear market.
Imagine if you could shrink your risk window by zeroing in on investing in the right corners of the market, just ahead of the best days of each year.
Running Alpha is dedicated to alerting premium subscribers to the coordinates of these actionable opportunity windows.
Data records show that retail investors activity increases when markets are falling, often leading to buying into ‘bull traps,” at those times when volatility is generally higher.
So, unless you have an extreme mathematical edge for overcoming a poor first step into the market, at a time when volatility is expanding, to get your trade-sizing and positioning right, you will need to determine if volatility will continue expanding or start contracting;
and if your strategy involves: managing uncertainty; hedging against market risks; or levering bets on the direction of asset prices, then
knowledge of changes in asset price volatility and optimal expiration dates, that match with the expected duration of the opportunity window, will be even more important.
That is precisely why Running Alpha makes it a high priority to ensure that our actionable alerts and insights are only delivered to you when they are happening inside of a persistent interval of special market states;
specifically, those, where we can apply the fundamental properties of quantum systems for anticipating a powerful asymmetric opportunity advantage –
here the volatility scale to the upside is measurably larger than the downside by several orders of magnitude.
When this edge is combined with our strategy’s, exceptionally high hit rate ( >90% ), we are better positioned for helping you overcome drawdown, particularly during periods when volatility is rising and highly variable.
This strategy also gives us a clear advantage of knowing when to buy into the extreme boundaries, of a volatility expansion, not just because price is moving lower;
but, because volatility changes faster than price, and volatility of volatility changes faster than volatility, particularly in fast moving down markets, where risk averse younger retail investors participate,
it is highly beneficial to have leading indicators that tells you when and for how long these relationships will be reversing.
At Running Alpha, we have several, that we use inhouse, for making informed decisions about when to turn your shopping cart of investing and trading ideas into actionable opportunities that can start raising your anxiety-adjusted returns.
We close the gap between perception and reality by coming to the realization that:
It’s decisions that drive price action; so why, after over 100 years of market observation, are virtually all market-players and technicians still following cycles in asset prices —
which are nothing more than outputs of millions of decision-maker orders coming together as a result of initial decisions and long-memory and short-range feedback processes ) —
for calculating changes in fundamental and macro-market variables,
instead of analyzing momentum cycles in the perception biases of decision-makers, which are the inputs of the price formation process, that only subsequently gets converted, by the orderbook’s function, into what really matters –
the actualized future price action that has a material impact on the most watched fundamental metrics.
With passive investments such as index funds and exchange-traded funds eating everyone else’s lunch, and accounting for the lion’s share (~60% ) of equity assets;
so much of stock buying and selling is now out of the hands of humans, with
the market increasingly sensitive to headlines, and more prone to sharp and often unmanageable swings.
The problem is “not whether passive investing ( buy and hold ) works in theory; it does not work on average in practice,” because:
the people who are making investment decisions, and humans who are relying on machines for generating ground-based risk intelligence,
do not have the fortitude to resist media chatter and market noise ( i.e., data exhaust — redundant data and statistical information mirages ), especially during periods of elevated uncertainty.
For these reasons alone, it’s not too hard to see why only 35% of portfolio managers, who get paid for making decisions on behalf of investors, beat their performance benchmarks.
85% of actively managed large-cap funds underperformed the S&P 500.
In fact, a minuscule 5% of large-cap US funds have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years through June 2022, according to the S&P data.
Even in stock pickers’ best years, over half of them still lost.
It is even worse when it comes to passive thematic index funds and ETFs, that are mostly copycats, living within the confines of negative space; and
suffering from low active share ( unique holdings relative to industry peers and benchmarks ), poor tracking error, strategy drift, and low liquidity.
These index funds could be easily replicated with simple concentrated stock portfolios, given the all-too-common disproportionate weighting of a few assets, which at times can be unacceptably high, in the order of 20% or more.
Identifying situations when not only prices will be erupting into volatile and fast markets, but also knowing when the quality and sources of risk, underlying price action, are changing as the trade unfolds is what our market intelligence insights is all about.
This is critically important, because if the sources of the risk are not matched with the alpha opportunity generator, the rationale and thesis behind taking on the trade or investment will start breaking down.
So, this serves to inform you as to when you should start pre-empting your investment, and moving on to other opportunities with a more robust mathematical edge.
This will help you know when a weakening trend ends and a new dominant trend emerges, particularly from the perspective of extreme reversion events and trading around some of the most challenging chaotic square wave momentum patterns.
This is a non-subjective exercise; it’s a lesson that should be top in mind of every trader, investor, citizen, and policymaker.
So instead of trying to go on an illusive chase for event outcomes that are essentially unpredictable, we are looking at those special situations when implied expectations of the marketplace will impart changes in the structural connection among market players in the network, such that old news and current information will continue to be processed by the market before it is fully reflected in price. This gives traders and investors the freedom of:
avoiding the emotional energy drain of unknowingly watching paint dry; and
showing up with a clear mind when the market will be ready and active for making the highest probability outlier trends;
thereby raising your anxiety-adjusted returns over defined time-lines.
Backstory:
Here is some pertinent background information written about Running Alpha’s founder and his connection to this story.
Efrem is focused on rethinking the way we can collaborate with the underlying physics of nature for:
“Seizing opportunities from a place of curiosity instead of predicting elusive one-sided outcomes from a position of what is familiar,” yet no longer relevant; and
Sharing Actionable Time-Relevant Investment Allocation Decisions on the Movement of People, Capital, and Ideas, with its Running Alpha Trading Box™ Subscribers.
Efrem has devoted the better part of his career passionately absorbed in creating a giant trading edge for:
augmenting the performance of trading and investing strategies of many types –
from momentum and trend-following strategies to extreme reversion and undervalued growth investing
– for all skill levels and account sizes, and is now making it super clear in his new trading markets intelligence launch, the Running Alpha Trading Box™, just how dramatic that trading edge is, and
why his experiences, background, company, and product are now placed at a perfect starting moment in history for making it matter to every living being and investor,
who want to generate superhuman performance with engaging insights and actionable foresights;
minimizing anxiety and maximizing your capacity for turning market anomalies, crisis events, and tech disruption into profit centers,
that get more powerful as market uncertainty gets more elevated.
Riding trends that make big quick moves over several weeks to a few months —
30 to 95 days upwards to 4 to 6 months–
is one of the most profitable approaches to trading for full-time and part-time traders.
Here is some of our recent traction to show it.
SpreadHunter, a Chicago based option trading technology company, cofounded by David A. Janello,
a published author of computer science, an ex-CBOE professional with over 50 years experience designing and trading options volatility strategies at several hedge funds;
also serving as quantitative consultants for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ( CME ), the Options Clearing Corporation, and Goldman Sachs Execution and Clearing,
has recently partnered with Running Alpha in levering the proprietary real-time spread-trading scanning engine and trading platform of SpreadHunter, for:
providing premium subscribers to Running Alpha with Real-Time scans of Call/Puts/Verticals on all actionable opportunities and trading symbols,
short-listed by Running Alpha’s recommendation engine,
right inside the SpreadHunter Platform, with direct, collocated exchange execution on all signals.
SpreadHunter is partnered with Running Alpha to give Running Alpha Trading Box Subscribers™:
the same level of custom trading education SpreadHunter offers to its own professional accounts, tailored to Running Alpha’s actionable trading opportunities; including
exclusive access to a never-before-seen chapter of the #1 Amazon Book Release in Option Trading, The Nuclear Option — TBA.
Efrem’s clients benefit when he sees pivotal changes on Running Alpha’s proprietary market maps — pushing time-relevant alerts and actionable foresights straight to your mobile device and desktop, in a secure two-way direct communication platform,
where you can also make special request for analysis of your favorite assets and markets.
In a recent product review by SpreadHunter of industry-wide trading intelligence solutions,
Running Alpha was featured based on SpreadHunter’s live R&D real-money portfolio —
capturing several profitable surprise outlier momentum trends,
generated by Running Alpha’s strategic technology innovation framework, including:
an unexpected bullish reversal in the S&P 500,
a surprising move up in the Semiconductor Index, at a time when trade disputes and tech weakness were creating big pain points for traders, and
a very surprising rally in the Precious Metals Sector, at a time when rates were rapidly rising.
Because of SpreadHunter’s ongoing success with Running Alpha’s Actionable Trading Market Intelligence, the Running Alpha Trading Box™ :
Running Alpha was also featured as a “rare gem,” with real trading examples, in David. A. Janello’s recently released Amazon #1 June 2023 New Book Release in the category of Commodities and Option Trading.
Running Alpha was built on the foundation that the Highest-Performing Assets tend to have two things in common:
Smart Real-Money Institutional Buyers and
Lots of Uninformed Traders with Bearish Momentum Perception and Sentiment Biases,
who are positioned on the wrong side of order flow in terms of price, gamma, and/or volatility.
Running Alpha Maps out Forward Market-Player Perception Biases and Scrutinizes Unusual Outlier Sentiment Activity and Trading-Flow Trends in Dark and Lit Markets, for:
Capturing alpha from Tomorrow’s Smartest Real-Money Market Movers and Unusual Buying and Selling Activity in the Most and Least Fragile Links of the Economy and Market;
powering the most antifragile trends in terms of price magnitude, trend duration; and volatility expression and optionality.
The Running Alpha Trading Box™ was developed by Tornado-Chasing Storm-Tech Innovator, Efrem Hoffman,
who has dedicated over 25 years Hunting Down Extreme Events in Nature and Markets using innovative Tools at the Intersection of Physics, Computational Circuit Complexity, and Financial Auction Processes –
designed for telling you precisely when the interaction effects between the smartest real-money influencers and the most uninformed investors will be aligning just right for seeding super-outlier opportunities to life.
One should never forget that when people start noticing statistics matching up with what they are currently experiencing,
they also make logically inconsistent rule of thumb assertions like –
the market should tend to do Z on average.
But two things to always remember:
we don’t experience averages; and
markets are vulnerable to switching regimes at the extremes, just when we have built up the most confidence in the current trend.
Not only are the market observers who are perceiving and following momentum trends today, not the same ones that created them, but also,
their expectations of the future are in constant flux;
and because of that, the biggest outliers and emotional outbursts tend to occur around surprises — when consensus expectations are not met.
Also, markets do not set alerts or ring the bell when a historically significant hardline needs some nudging.
The high-stakes world of trading does not live in this fantasyland, but
rather where real-life decision-makers are interfacing in the now and present – and
that must be captured for getting a genuine reading of the broad-scale market-player momentum perceptions, powering tomorrow’s sentiment bias.
That is exactly the kind of systems thinking that I, as Founder of Running Alpha, have been embracing from day one.
It’s in Running Alpha’s DNA.
Running Alpha Capital Markets is leading trading market intelligence at the intersection of Physics and Wall Street, for untangling system complexity and levering uncertainty, entropy, and computational circuit complexity for competitive advantage;
challenging conventional wisdom and the status quo consensus by bringing the human observer and machine interaction effects into the investing equation, for adding meaning and sensibility to our understanding of our potential futures’.
Instead of giving in to conventional wisdom of the consensus, Running Alpha built its investment philosophy and legacy around having the courage for “thinking differently” about solving problems of high consequence.
Efrem believes that the biggest risks are the “known knowns” — where we think we understand something but we do not;
overconfidently applying tools that work in average times, only to discover after the fact that conventional wisdom is inadvertently applying the wrong assumption repeatedly, at the moments when tail-risk management is needed most —
when markets are most vulnerable to unintended consequences like a Long-Term Capital Management debacle.
That is why Running Alpha specializes in telegraphing and profiting from extreme events and super-outlier trends of high market impact.
When Efrem has been right – whether about the global financial crisis in 2008 when he was on road-show in New York warning Hedge Funds and Bear Stearns Employees to look for a new job in the months ahead when their stock was trading above $100, global growth in 2016-2017, the V-bottom Recovery off the pandemic lows, the stealth reversal of markets since mid Oct 2022, the unexpected bullish reversal in the S&P 500 from Mid March 2023, the surprise move up in the Semiconductor Index, at a time when trade disputes and tech weakness were creating big pain points for traders, or
the very surprising rally in the Precious Metals Sector, at a time when rates were rapidly rising,
this is how I have been right.
To achieve this Alpha edge, Running Alpha starts where others leave off – not limiting ourselves to picking up obvious patterns in the unfolding data, but calibrating forward by imagining scenarios and running smart outlier simulations of the broad-scale interaction effects of tomorrow’s universe of market observer momentum perception biases. We do this by levering properties that are found everywhere life exists — states of low entropy, where if you shake things up with uncertain external event outcomes, you get both increasing complexity and increasingly ordered states, that can give us insights into those times when trends restart, get amplified, or become fragile and breakdown —
leading to opportunities where traders and investors can thrive from uncertainty and market surprises — thereby profiting from momentum crashes and extreme reversion events.
Most importantly, the founder has found this approach to problem solving especially useful when faced with an unexpected challenge in his trading life – when many of his dire and uncanny predictions came true in the 2008 crisis —
when he needed to start thinking creatively, outside the box, about the different scenarios of government intervention; and how that would impact the signaling of markets as to the state of its health. First it was interference in the 30-yr treasury markets and now in the London Inter-Bank Markets Rates ( LIBOR ).
From there, Running Alpha started thinking about organic hedging strategies, particularly defending oneself against this externality — an unknown threat to the conventional wisdom of market independence and the apparent capacity for free markets to inform investors of market forces, unconstrained by central bankers and sustained government interference.
With these challenges in mind, Running Alpha will help you thrive and battle for investment survival with a Winning Edge not available anywhere else.
Our focus is profiting from outlier trends and momentum crashes, one of the most misunderstood market phenomena in the world of investing, yet the most important to figure out, given that the stakes are the highest when the markets tall-tail strikes.
Alpha is not only about matching or outperforming a benchmark, historical average, and risk-free rate, but more importantly about looking at what you own and comparing it both to assets with similar attributes and the real-time future expectations of the marketplace.
Efrem has a natural curiosity and fascination with looking at blind-spots in decision-making — Information Black Holes that get in the way of untangling the complexity behind how each part of the system puzzle interacts and comes together to create the whole picture that is bigger than the sum of the parts — emergence in complex systems speak.
What makes our Quantum Information Framework unique lies beyond the data – it’s a meta-data resource — a mathematical structure.
We take a contrarian trading approach – not anchored to the opposite side of what the consensus has already done or their real-time expectations of future price and volatility action, but rather how and when the sum non-linear interaction effect of market-players future versions of the momentum perceptions of their current self, will be diverging from real-time expectations of the marketplace.
At the heart of our analytics engine, we apply a quantum-inspired computing process — Compressing millions of correlations among market-player momentum perceptions, down to a number you can count with your fingers – giving our premium subscribers an unfair advantage at diversifying across the different sources of risk and opportunity, while having the foresight for spotting persist trends, across multiple time-lines before they happen.
We also offer a Zero-Knowledge Investing Claim – new category of transparency beyond position level transparency and frequency of performance – this new innovation is designed for building trust in the underlying sources of alpha.
Because the underlying sources of risk change as a trade unfolds, we focus on capturing opportunities arising from unexpected regime changes. We do this by scrutinizing relative performance and momentum perception correlations and entaglement across groups of assets ( and how they change over time).
This edge enables us to initiate positions when lots of momentum perception biases are driving liquidity on the opposite side of the trade – so for institutional investors or hedge funds, building extremely large positions, without material price impact, is not an issue, particularly in liquid securities.
Behind the scenes of every actionable trading idea and outlier risk assessment delivered to Running Alpha Trading Box™ Members at:
You can be sure that Tornado-Chasing principles, Quantum-Inspired Machine Logic, and Crowd Physics Intelligence are playing a leading role in harnessing computational circuit complexity and market uncertainty for Sustainable Alpha Advantage.
Growing up and being mentored by a world-class floor trader who made it big in the 80s, Efrem has a preference for treating price as king — watching supply and demand of traders meeting at a certain level, where they disagree on value but agree on price. Price may reflect where people meet in the moment but to get ahead of infamous momentum crashes, you need to augment price with something no one is talking about and that is what’s beneath the surface — markets do not always slow down and smoothly break trend line — often gap into outliers against the main trend or become the stages of a fresh trend — to see these sudden regime changes, so they are not a surprise, you need to.
Running Alpha has uncovered a blind spot in conventional measurement of market momentum, that gets in the way of interpreting and profiting from over 80 years of modern stock market history — telling us why the “madness of crowds” and “irrational exuberance” are not the underlying mechanisms behind panics and manias.
Running Alpha has observed that if the people cluster into certain pockets of arrangement, with just the right time delay and sequencing of movement, the toppling effect and compression from crowd turbulence do not occur in the presence of any individual or localized group of actors, orchestrating the movement; and
cannot be revealed by simply assuming that people behave as sets of repulsive particles, that tend to move out of the way with increasing momentum, when the distribution of their cross-market trading ideas, momentum perceptions, and positioning histories get overcrowded and “too close for comfort,”
but rather are predisposed by the way humans and machines are hard-wired to avoid collisions, particularly by anticipating when the velocity and trajectory patterns of neighboring bodies pose a clear and present danger.
In other wards, it is not how close price gets to violating a trend that sparks people into emotionally-charged action, but the perception that the speed of change of either an asset’s price or a related fundamental or macro variable is threatening to break trend.
Knowledge of changes in these emotional market state potentials gives us foresight into changes in both volatility and uncertainty surrounding volatility, which informs us when:
we have an extra edge at forecasting episodes of price/earnings compression;
investors, who are feeling less certain about the future, are more likely to pay less for more earnings; and
vertical option spread strategies will be in their sweet spot for sharply outperforming their historical average mathematical edge.
That is why Running Alpha has created an inhouse tool – a Financial Weather Map, for visualizing a 360-degree view of how buyers and sellers feel about an asset’s pace of momentum change – be it sunny or stormy skies.
These Momentum Maps give insight into the shape of the waves and their transit points from one market regime switching state to the next across multiple time scales. Help traders of all types to know when to apply their strategies for maximum effcy productivity and alpha extraction.
When it comes to how markets are reacting to incoming information and news events, there is a big difference between being heard and being listened to. — markets are mostly being heard.
At Running Alpha, Efrem uses inhouse proprietary Momentum Perception Maps for:
telling you when such information will be listened to, and when it will be falling on deaf ears or replaying old news as if it were Bill Murray’s Ground Hog Day all over again; and
measuring how deep the action-reaction feedback chains of market players of a given asset or group of assets are, for:
gaining insight into when market reaction times to new information will be expanding or contracting –
the longer the chain, the more the message gets globally propagated and amplified ( in terms of price, volatility, and negative gamma reversals ) across the market network, through non-local long-term correlations-at-a-distance, and the less efficient the market is at resisting change,
creating inefficiencies that we are exploiting relative to other assets with shorter links, which are more efficient at absorbing information locally and supressing the message among market players.
When news or incoming information into the marketplace is not being heard, latent divergences build up between the inertia ( resistance to change ) of the market’s emergent inner momentum perception state and its outward presentation of the prevailing momentum biases in the market tape.
Running Alpha hunts down the future time intervals when our favored assets will be entering special market network states, specifically those that will serve as catalysts for unwinding these latent pressures.
We issue alerts to our premium members as soon as we see these market tells, so that premium members can be in a position of financial and emotional strength for consistently buying into pessimism and selling into optimism.
Most importantly, we are dynamically placing investors into an advantageous starting position,
by accurately and precisely narrowing our coverage universe to those specific assets that already have action-reaction feedback chains in place, which are exponentially magnifying investor attention levels and capital in-flows,
while at the same time attenuating the impact of negative macro events and external threats.
This enables us to put boundaries around the future price and time impact of news events, so that traders and investors can be empowered to start feeling the confident about the durability of the momentum behind the asset price behavior and sentiment effects of market history before it happens; thereby,
giving you time-relevant foresights for adapting and amplifying your defense and profit opportunities to future scenarios –
not only found outside the borders of history, consensus, and conventional practice, but also those the market place may have ever imagined.
To help you get in early with less risk, we observe Negative Gamma positioning of Market Dealers on Public Exchanges and identify situations when Dark Pool activity on unlisted venues (off-exchange) are showing large institutional buying, while public markets are diverging with heavy selling pressure.
This makes Running Alpha a unique solution for both very large institutional investors, as well as small retail investors who are looking to reduce the cost of trading a smaller accounts.
The Bottom Line to Efrem’s Ongoing Research at Running Alpha is:
The events we perceive as ordinary every-day occurrences are born out of the background noise of prior crises and unusual market aberrations.
Thus, by focusing on the rare 1% outlier class, rather than eliminating it, the agenda is to gain clarity with fewer resources on the 99% of market pressures, influencing decision-makers each trading day!
In a nutshell, we Identify windows of information inefficiency — market inefficiency for processing incoming information and news events. Instead of focusing on what is constantly changing and cannot be consistently forecasted, like future price and event outcomes, we are locking in on what does not change, namely market regime structures we can count on that inform us of an asset’s market-reaction time and action-reaction feedback cycles of news events.
Relative perception biases making up this structure do not change, that is what defines the unchanging geometry of these structures, yet it is the interactions of these biases that are creating price. We observe the term structure of the information biases for systematically quantifying regime changes in market sentiment and market information reaction times.
The rules do not change over time; yet the behavior produced by following those rules are describing emergent market structures and patterns. Emergent rules are the substance of alien configuration – how the rules change would be very interesting to watch in action.
So instead of trying to go on an illusive chase for event outcomes that are essentially unpredictable, we are looking at those special situations when implied expectations of the marketplace will impart changes in the structural connection among market players in the network, such that old news and current information will continue to be processed by the market before it is fully reflected in price. This gives traders and investors the freedom of:
avoiding the emotional energy drain of unknowingly watching paint dry; and
showing up with a clear mind when the market will be ready and active for making the highest probability outlier trends;
thereby raising your anxiety-adjusted returns over defined time-lines.
With the insights we extract from these maps, you no longer need to wait for breakouts to confirm high probability signals – in fact those who wait for such events are lowering both their risk-adjusted and anxiety-adjusted returns.
To help you get in early with less risk, we combine these insights with observations of Negative Gamma positioning of Market Dealers on Public Exchanges and identify situations when Dark Pool activity on unlisted venues (off-exchange) is showing large institutional buying, while public markets are diverging with heavy selling pressure.
Efrem formulated the intelligence framework to go one step beyond AQR’s rigorous industry-leading sniff-test for sustainable investment alpha creation on five axes of merit, namely, it:
(i) produces an analytic record and walk-forward risk-return structure that indicates that the empirical investment edge is “persistent, pervasive, and robust across all asset classes and market regimes;”
(ii) offers an [ “explanation as to why and how the market inefficiency ( creating the opportunity ) comes into existence in the first place, and why it has not been and
(iii) continues to not be arbitraged away with evolving market pricing” ];
and takes a giant leap forward by:
(iv) requiring that there are no logical inconsistencies in the alpha-signaling logic across different fractal viewing scales that have overlapping position holding time-lines
By solving for the Quantum Measurement Uncertainty Enigma in the Financial Marketplace, Running Alpha goes beyond exploiting a simple risk premium based on a systematic behavioral bias or intuitive economic rationale, but leverages a long-held deeply entrenched philosophical model paradigm blind-spot that exploits the inability of conventional decision-makers ( both human and machine ) from:
anticipating Known Unknowns — ambiguity over factoring in and determining the market impact of our own buying and selling decisions, especially others reactions over several iterations of asset price formation;
and
acknowledging Unknown Knowns — market players who naively dismiss that their actions can adversely work counter to their intentions;
(v) [“generates market positioning histories at the times of strategic opportunity ( entry and exit ), that have a well-defined group of financial actors on the other side ( with limited arbitrage flows ) ] of the contemplated open market transaction, so there is ample liquidity.
Unlike virtually every other classical trading system operating in today’s markets,
which requires an over-specialized rule-set of exceptions for accommodating anomalies and avoiding ambiguities in signaling logic, that result from resultant inconsistencies in forward expectations, when an asset is observed from different temporal viewing perspectives,
Running Alpha is not only capturing epic opportunities for investors to capitalize on, but offering built-in mechanisms for:
elegantly generalizing relationships between different fractal viewing scales, for
ensuring that the boundaries we are putting around future events, and across a broad spectrum of time-scales and market climates, are logically consistent; and
amplifying the mathematical advantage as the emergent and evolving financial market system gets ever more complex — when disruptive technologies and new categories of economic actors and financial market agents inevitably get attracted to it.
These strategic edge does not exist in classical strategies available in the marketplace today, who’s mathematical advantage and generalization ability drops off disproportionally ( non-linearly ) as more data and increasing competition among market participants both raise the complexity and neutralize the alpha-potential of prevailing strategies – no matter how sophisticated they are, and no matter how broad their classical or statistically-sourced data sources become.
This gives us confidence that our competitive advantage can be trusted and sustained.
These models are simply built on the wrong logic for making sense of today’s financial chaos and global market complexity.
To circumvent this logic constraint, Running Alpha is levering quantum uncertainty for competitive advantage by creating a new class of arbitrage that is both exploiting and solving the fundamental mismatch between markets that are fundamental producers of uncertainty and legacy investing platforms that are designed to running away from it to mitigate volatility at almost any cost.
This leads to the inefficient allocation of monetary and human capital resources right at the moments when elevated uncertainty can offer the biggest slice of the alpha pie.
Efrem started out at a time when few in the business community were aware of our framework’s universal potential in other industries — over 15 years before it became a buzzword on Wall Street and Main Street.
Although the initial focus was Tornado Prediction from high dimensional radar imagery, which unlike a picture of a car, as seen with a camera, 3D weather-radar reflectivity echoes of wind patterns, and signatures of whirling cloud droplets, colliding and bouncing off each other in the sky, are only abstractions of reality.
His scientific approach was so unconventional and promising that, not only did Efrem receive special recognition by a lead research scientist at the Atmospheric Environment Service (AES) Prairie Storm Prediction Center,
for making significant contributions to StormTech science and transforming the way experts can start thinking about making better sense of hierarchical patterns in just about any unstructured multi-dimensional big data sets ( including financial markets ),
while teasing out, at remarkable speeds ( up to 1000 times faster than conventional AI and more accurately than classical algorithms on a supercomputer ), the salient predictive features at local and global scale,
but the technology innovation use case also played a role in pilot-test studies, and later featured by Braindex, as among the top 250 most fascinating weather radar inventions.
Efrem has an unwavering fascination for bringing the common ground, unique challenges, and bleeding edge solutions he discovered across multiple disciplines to building solutions for observing the collective human perception and behavioral traits and biases that make markets tick; and give rise to sudden outbursts of extreme bullish and bearish activity.
These interactions have humbled Efrem to appreciate the importance of knowing when to start applying and investing in a technology; and of equal relevance, avoiding situations when the underlying assumptions of a technology’s function and utility create unacceptable trade-offs that are incompatible with the current and upcoming market environment.
By augmenting the benefits of industry knowledge and human judgement with non-discretionary strategic insights from academia and industry, Efrem has acquired a respect for how the human condition, trying to make sense of the unknown, both interacts and interferes with mathematical modelling.
That’s why Efrem Hoffman’s strategies and research frameworks are challenging the fundamental limits of conventional logic for which almost every life and death, career-changing flight or fight, decisions we make, are based on.
So, Efrem’s message is clear — we better be prepared to see outliers, irregularities, and uncertainty for what they really are — the most persistent windows of opportunity that should be embraced for converting strategy into action inside the World’s Thinnest Risk Horizons™.
What really catches Efrem’s attention is when the underlying premise of the consensus view, particularly of the market’s collective behavior and expectations, not only diverges wildly from reality, but is founded on a rigid monochromatic belief system and theory, that is not verifiable in the real world.
He especially derives pleasure from assisting investors with making sense of current conditions, and then levering this dynamic knowledge for generating high levels of anxiety-adjusted returns.
To this end, Efrem is delivering insights into what’s not only new,
but also, how his new innovation in investing technology and prescriptive analytics has the power to inspire audiences to innovate at a new level, and transform specific industry and organizations forever.
Through Efrem’s close observations of his dynamic market maps, he noticed that there is a “constant pressure, pushing toward patterned structure –
a tendency in matter and belief systems, to evolve into ever more complex and emergent forms;
those elemental properties nature has employed for billions of years, to create rich diversity, including us and the biosphere we live in today.
It’s a kind of pattern gravity; a latent energy and driving force in the cosmos, markets, business, and life gives rise to internal behavior of financial market players,
that are spontaneously giving rise to energetic market action, in the absence of both external shocks and financial, monetary, and social stimuli,
much like the self-organizing pattern that you may have seen emerge when a swarm of bees or a flocks of birds interact.
With a mindset bent on exploring the most profitable motifs — alternative future system states inside the world’s thinnest risk windows,
Efrem, with the aid of Running Alpha’s proprietary Quantum AI-Powered Momentum Perception Maps™, is periodically running
Simulations of what would happen to the mindsets of broad-scale market players ( and their field effect on forward sentiment changes),
when both active market agents in the present and diverse pools of available investors from the future begin dialing up or dialing down the extent to which their momentum biases,
traveling along future strips of time,
are in agreement or disagreement with each other.
Knowledge of these timing windows breaths fresh insight and life-changing foresight into pivotal changes in the Sentiment Jetstream, driving tomorrow’s most powerful asset price actions and alpha opportunities.
These quantum effects that we observe behind the scenes for you on our maps, are revealing the location and time coordinates of market player momentum perceptions ( objects ), from data ( the light ) that has yet to actually touch these market participants, let alone register on their market monitoring instruments.
In other words, no longer does an object ( market player biases ) have to be in the field of view of the camera ( market measurement device ) in order to take a picture.
It’s Like Seeing Things Without Looking At Them.
By unlocking access to special entangled states and market structures, that were previously invisible,
Efrem has built the foundation at Running Alpha for Reverse Engineering What Competing Market Players at Broad-Scope Scale Will Be Observing and Acting on in The Future;
Enabling investors to gain early insights into when market biases are not in a coordinated configuration, thereby, indicating when investors should simply stay away from making new capital allocation decisions,
given that markets in this state, strongly tend to offer fewer meaningful arbitrage opportunities, after risk and reward is factored into the equation.
You now have a choice of being the statistic or making it work for you, before the light ( the data ) that gets collected from the next event becomes the next future touch point, that is used by most market practitioners and risk managers in hindsight, for updating their playbook.
Momentum Perception Maps™ gives our founder, Efrem Hoffman,
a springboard for stepping up your game and elevating your edge at better anticipating which catalysts will have the highest potential for disrupting the status quo of crowded trades and turning them into your alpha gain.
What would have normally taken a team of 20 upwards to 100 or more market analyst’s days or weeks to analyze at lower fidelity, a single individual can start using these actionable buy and insights,
systematically derived from Efrem’s Momentum Perception Mapping technology; thereby
singlehandedly completing the task intraday, ahead of critical market events, and doing so, not only emotionally free, but with much higher confidence, fidelity, clarity, and precision;
enabling you to start:
boldly expressing best-in-class bullish or bearish trading and investing ideas in the face of unprecedented uncertainty, with a simple stock buy and sell order,
all without the use of leverage or any kind of complex trade positioning strategy.
With a 360-degree view of global markets, Efrem is now captivating an audience of professional traders, retail investors, and portfolio money managers of all skill levels, with engaging market intelligence and education that is uncovering actionable outlier trend opportunities in uncrowded liquid markets, while positioning for capital defense and profiting from momentum crashes and trading around Chaotic Momentum Crush.
Efrem built Running Alpha from the ground up to ensure the adoption of a Risk-First Culture; laser focused on raising the trader’s capacity for understanding how and when the underlying sources of risk are changing, specifically:
how the risk matrix can be quickly transformed from one regime to the next with just a single changing variable as subtle as the passing of time itself, spontaneously shifting the correlation among the momentum perception biases of broad-scale groups of interacting market players.
This intelligence is of high-value to every trader and investor that is looking to profit from momentum trends, short-squeezes, and violent extreme reversion events, because it is designed for shrinking their time-exposure to risk in all market environments and avoiding Momentum Traps, Negative Gamma Squeezes, and Value Traps.
Our leading indicators and Momentum Perception Maps render visibility into the Future Sentiment Jet Stream – specifically correlations the marketplace cannot see –
previously unseen connections among market-players and cross-market perspectives of momentum change and sentiment bias that give foresight into sudden and often surprising market swings and broad-scale changes in both trend and capital information flows in Dark and Lit Markets.
We do this by:
Homing in on uncrowded trading markets inside focused trading windows, where there are many sources of perceived risk coming from all directions, when few traders and investors have the courage to step into markets that are least travelled – thereby amplifying the inefficiencies we are extracting.
Running Alpha was founded in 2012 by Efrem Hoffman to Shrink the Time-Lines for:
Catching Falling Knife Markets; and
Profiting from Emergent Outlier Trends and Momentum Crashes.
Running Alpha does this by helping investors fearlessly trade inside market windows that are dominated by emotional trading behavior – including panic-markets that are in freefall, just before high-momentum trends begin spectacular turnaround events that both crushes the prevailing momentum, and seeds new rounds of super-outlier growth – both in magnitude and duration.
Instead of creating flashy dashboards presenting the kitchen sink of rear-view conventional indicators, our focus is on observing leading indicator of change for understanding when you need actionable information, and for making critical decisions that will either lower your risk, and increase your anxiety-adjusted return after inflation.
Running Alpha does this by Elevating Your Capacity For Re-Imagining a Different Future and Capturing Alpha Momentum Outlier Trends and Chaotic Momentum Crush, a special class of Extreme Reversion Events,
Never Experienced Before in Equity and Option Markets.
At Running Alpha, we give you a new window into the future, where:
Every moment in history is really like no other – not just in our time, but every time — because the decision-makers that create the perceptions of our current conditions are not the same ones who are observing them.
As history expands and the number of potential connections and interactions among market players gets more complex, the variety and magnitude of future outlier growth expands relative to outlier events we have experienced in the past.
By putting the effects of observer interaction and market system complexity of decision-makers back into the trading equation, Running Alpha is helping traders’ profit from future market paths yet travelled; and get ahead of market players that are still fitting their models to rhyme with yesterday.
What sets us apart is that Running Alpha is levering principles at the intersection of deep physics and finance, including quantum-inspired computing and computational circuit complexity, for quantifying windows of maximum market inefficiency, when the sum of these expanding numbers of globally interacting market system parts –
the non-linear action-reaction feedback chains among market players for a given asset —
will be growing exponentially larger than the effect produced by the individual parts acting locally within the expanding whole.
Inside these windows, where market reaction times to emerging events take longer, Running Alpha is boosting the productivity of traders by:
Amplifying what makes decision-making most productive – telling you when your data assets and trading methods will offer the highest reward and value at the lowest risk points.
In other words, we tell traders and investors when to show up in the trading room, thereby reserving emotional and trading capital for those moments that matter most –
when markets are least efficient at reflecting current events and future expectations.
Running Alpha is providing actionable intelligence for capturing live real-money and high-conviction trading and investing opportunities, flying below the radar, at the most change-making moments, Inside the “World’s Thinnest Uncertainty Windows,”
where we can be most confident of market action — producing the longest and most sustainable outlier trends. runways to growth and earnings price expansion, from our entry prices.
Running Alpha is not simply focusing on Finding Alpha based on the prevailing market structure in lit ( on-exchange ) public markets, but is
opening new ground in revealing market imbalances and predicting super-anomalies and otherwise invisible outlier opportunities,
that arise when Dark-Liquidity Pools ( off-exchange unlisted venues ) interact with lit markets.
Instead of betting on known outcomes of future asset price or news events that cannot be predicted in principle, Running Alpha brings a new level of transparency into the investment analytics equation; capturing the broad-scale momentum perception biases, governing the sum-non-linear observer interactions and action-reaction feedback chains, within and across markets, and in all directions.
Whether you are a stock market wizard or a first-time investor, you can count on Running Alpha’s game-changing insights.
We put high priority in letting you know in plain English when our Alpha Windows of high-impact market activity become active. That is when trading opportunities should be taken very seriously.
Our Trading Windows span from 50 to 95 days, and at times can extend beyond 3 months, upwards to 6 months, given that this is a typical cycle duration of individual sources of risk in the post-crisis era.
Within these intervals, we trade around core positions, by dynamically assessing risk exposure per unit of time, and identifying whether reward-to-risk parameters, still available in an existing core position, has sufficient potential to match up with fresh opportunity candidates of at least equal conviction.
This keeps us agile to changing market conditions, while still keeping our portfolio turnover manageable, regardless of the size of our portfolio, be it concentrated with 3 to 4 positions, or diversified with 12-to-14, 21-to-30, or even 40-to-50+ high-impact opportunities.
We are not tethering our decision-making to historical relationships in price or any other factor;
instead of following the trend directly on the time horizon of interest, we are trading inside narrow time windows when the current market trend is in agreement with the latent market energy stored in the self-organizing inner momentum structure of longer-range market-player connections, that are:
driving the market physics of outlier asset price formation in the order-book, particularly
when human emotions will be disproportionally amplified in the direction of the trend, and prevailing over common sense and reason surrounding the fundamentals or news events.
By analyzing the collective dynamics of financial systems, comprised of many interacting parts and economic agents, especially when facing unusual or emergency situations that have limited or no historical analogs; we are essentially:
working out the sum non-linear behavior, that results when many different types of market participants, with competing preferences, are colliding at different speeds.
Efrem has discovered that when these preferences are placed in a competitive environment, sometimes they can self-generate unique forms of motion.
This new class of “unsupervised” market intelligence, which Running Alpha’s founder coined as Bottom-Down Intelligence™ ( BDI ) is exciting for investors, because it offers a new wrinkle into understanding and predicting the behavior and piece-wise chaotic momentum trends in complex systems with many interacting parts .
Likened to the moments when phase transitions are triggered in physical systems, so too there exists special moments, when the spontaneous motion of market actor biases become manifested in future price.
These special types of regime change are known as exceptional points.
[When many disagreeing agents are put together, this creates a constant collective movement, generated by the “frustration” in their competing tendencies.]
It’s unusual because there’s no external force or stressors causing them to change their spin (upside or downside bias).
The rotation of the momentum flow simply comes from the spontaneous field effect created by how the agents are continuously communicating their interactions through acting or in-acting on their perception biases and expectations of the surrounding market environment.”
Understanding momentum-based strategies of this new type for capturing the forward sentiment bias across asset classes, are especially useful in high inflation environments, like we are experiencing today.
The underlying logic is that momentum in consumer prices leads to persistent reactions in both central bank and private investment decision-making, which in turn drives asset price action.
A combination of unexpected and sharp spikes in inflation and/or inflation expectations, cloud cover surrounding the duration and extent of supply-chain disruptions, and export restrictions and protectionist trade policies, give rise to situations,
where emotional reactions to these highly uncertain outcomes can get elevated to such untenable levels for economic capital allocators to reliably manage business expectations and purchasing decisions. Such situations lead to exaggerated momentum movements in asset values.
When asset prices get pushed too far in one direction too quickly and/or over a prolonged period, they can quickly start reverting from an extreme, when investors in the prevailing trend begin unwinding their concentrated bets; thereby sending asset prices moving at an even faster rate in the opposite direction.
Our research intelligence framework and Momentum Perception Map technology, is designed precisely for this task, namely,
telling us when these extreme reversion events are knowable, and in those special time windows when we can see them before they happen,
we alert our premium subscribers of these critical transition price points, which have high potential for triggering the onset of:
Momentum Crashes – when the relative performance of the stronger and weaker assets flip direction, momentum strategies that were working before the transition begin failing ( which is distinct from the notion of a stock market crash, which, we have a remarkable record of seeing before they happen ).
Efrem built mechanisms into the strategy for performing this task unlike any other advanced AI model in existence today –
by uniting the super-exponential power of special quantum entanglement states in complex dynamic systems –
with early insights into the evolving underlying instantaneous and spontaneous network connection structure and interaction effects among financial market agents – and their sentiment perception biases, driving emergent trend changes.
This allows us to deliver our premium subscribers with the highest probability investment and trading signal confirmations inside the World’s Thinnest Risk Windows™, just before a falling knife begins a spectacular reversal.
We do not need to wait for breakouts to confirm our best signals – in fact those who wait for such events are lowering both their risk-adjusted and anxiety-adjusted returns.
To render visibility of the broad-scale interacting momentum rotations that are giving rise to these exceptional points, Running Alpha has developed an inhouse tool, called Momentum Perception Maps™ ( MPMs ) –
forward curves overlaid on price charts across future time points, that correspond to asset price levels in the future where market players with different holding periods ( making decisions on different time lines ) will be observing pivotal changes in trend around the zero-point momentum levels.
We scrutinize these momentum flight paths of market players, across the complete scale of trader and investor time-horizons, for seeing a birds-eye view of how momentum perceptions of different market players will be combining in just right combination at the right moments, for: generating the dominant Sentiment Jet Stream; and driving both directional asset price and forward volatility behavior over the specified trading window.
Instead of adding assets blindly to create a diversified portfolio based on correlation matrices or functions of risk and return, that are anchored to past multi-variate relationships, we calibrate forward by combining assets with Sentiment Momentum Jet-Streams that are not only varied in shape and scale, and staggard in the phase of their component momentum term-structures.
This gives us the confidence for constructing portfolios that can respond uniquely, yet beneficially to different news sentiments and risk/return factors; thereby elevating our sentiment factors to a form that is significantly more stable than factors of return or even risk.
We have found that risks of high consequence to portfolios usually resides in a few momentum perception factors — price, volatility of price, and variance of volatility of price — that you can count on your finger.
This makes our momentum perception filters superior for:
compressing the dimension of the portfolio “factor zoo,” thereby, reducing the chance that some sets of assets are unknowingly taking on an unreasonably dominant or concentrated role; and
uncovering a blind spot in conventional measurement of market momentum, that gets in the way of accurately seeing how over 100 years of modern stock market history shows that we can exploit the false assumption that the “madness of crowds” and “irrational exuberance” are the underlying mechanisms behind buying or selling panics.
Running Alpha has observed that when people are clustered into certain pockets of arrangement, with just the right time delay and sequencing of movement, the toppling effect and compression from crowd turbulence do not occur in the presence of any one or combination of individuals orchestrating the movement, and
cannot be revealed by simply assuming that humans behave as sets of repulsive particles, that tend to move out of the way with increasing momentum when the distribution of their cross-market trading ideas, momentum perceptions, and positioning histories get overcrowded and “too close for comfort,”
but rather are predisposed by the way people and machines are hard-wired to avoid collisions, particularly by anticipating when the velocity and trajectory patterns of neighboring bodies pose a clear and present danger.
In other wards, it is not how close price gets to violating a trend that sparks people into emotionally-charged action, but the perception that the speed of change of an asset’s price is threatening to break trend and set off wild fluctuations in market-wide correlations, at a speed and magnitude that is not yet reflected in future expectations ( implied volatility ).
This is why we do not need to wait for breakouts to confirm our best signals – in fact those who wait for such events are lowering both their risk-adjusted and anxiety-adjusted returns.
To help traders and investors get positioned early with less risk exposure and confusion, we observe Negative Gamma positioning of Market Dealers on Public Exchanges, and identify situations when Dark Pool activity on unlisted venues (off-exchange) is showing large institutional buying, while public markets are diverging with heavy selling pressure.
By combing this extra layer of transparency into dark and lit markets with insights gleaned from our Momentum Perception Maps™, we are not only:
exposing extreme reversion event risk from the perspectives of individual and cross-market volatility, and variance of volatility, before trends change direction, but
we are also revealing the hard lines and state transitions, separating “falling-knife” markets with “dead-cat bounces” from true market capitulation events, that lead to V-bottoms/W-formations and sustainable anti-fragile market recoveries with intermittent square wave price behavior, followed by high price persistence and asymmetric volatility expansions, within longer-term secular trends.
This gives Running Alpha an edge at helping traders and investors get ahead of 99% of market players, for: previewing changes in market mood well before they are reflected in price action, uncovering emergent narratives and the most convenient ways for expressing actionable opportunities that will benefit from the next big transformational changes in both Developed and Emerging Markets, including selected single stock equities and General Market ETFs and Index Factors ETF Instruments, covering:
Exponential Technologies, Digital Communications and Semiconductors, Infrastructure, Manufacturing, Industrial / Commodity Producers, Mobility Logistics and Electrification, Renewable Energy, Agriculture, Timberland, Dividend Kings, Covered Calls, Royalty Streaming Companies, Precious Metals, and Battery Minerals, and specialty chemicals –
Companies and Industries that are Making the World Tick.
The difference between success and failure is whether you were born at a specific time for technology to take you places. I was fortunate to intersect not just one of the transformational changes in scientific thought, but two – the age of internet communication and human knowledge creation and authentic understanding of large-language and quantum-thermodynamics models from the perspective of computational circuit complexity, for delivering multi-modal application solutions across disruptive disciplines.
The world is in the throws of converging trends in all directions, for which Efrem has spent my entire adult life passionately absorbed in creating a giant edge over the competition in these areas.
Running Alpha’s trading markets intelligence advantage, along with Efrem’s experiences, background, company, and product category and focus is at perfect moment in history for making it matter most to every living human being and investor who want to generate superhuman performance with engaging and actionable foresights that not only minimizes anxiety, but increases their capacity for turning market anomalies and tech disruption into profit centers that get more powerful as market uncertainty gets more elevated.
Large Language Models and Transformers can solve man-made problems — human problems. Human and computers are good at modeling what we have already experienced, as well as naive stochastic reconstructions and re-combinations of the available data sets.
Not only is the language of markets not the language of humans, but at a more elemental level, there lies an enigma at the heart of the language of thermodynamic systems for describing and distinguishing between the interior fundamental features of nature and those that are a secondary emergent behavior arising as a consequence of the system parts interacting with themselves and the surrounding.
We are referring to the mistreatment of time as an external independent variable that is not given any role for increasing the capacity for a complex system of many interacting parts to lower its entropy ( inertia to distributional change at the macro-scale ), and thereby its ability to store latent energy for doing work on its future path of interaction with other elements of the system.
Running Alpha is addressing this shortfall by making a transformational change to the notion of time. Instead, we transform time from being an arrow into a self-assembling geometric structure that is intrinsic to the system and expressing the growing computational circuit complexity of the network’s ever growing number of interacting parts —
corresponding to the number of ways one can partition the increasing cardinality of the data set with each new observer vantage point ( measured in terms of the interaction touch points between observers, which are creating new nodes in accordance with a power-law growth function that is calibrated to the number of touch points ).
If You want a superintelligence, you need to think no like no other trader or machine has done before; that requires a system that is pre-installed with a Bottom-Down™ Operating System, running on a logic circuit that is synchronized to the growing computational system complexity — an exponential function of the interacting touch points corresponding the connections among the system parts ( the nodes of the network ) — each interacting from a unique observation angle.
These interacting touchpoints is what inspires the system to perform quantum-like computations in highly parallel ways with deep memory, high levels of information compression for describing the quantum circuit in the shortest logic form ( aka Minimum Circuit Complexity – which shrinks when system is calibrated ( primed / nudged ) into a Maximum Superposition of States,
corresponding to the current size of the Self-Organizing Bottom-Down Network™ ) using long-range correlations among the system parts for avoiding intractable computations through the increasingly exponentially large combinatorial search space ( aka Maximum Computational Circuit Complexity ), with the passage of each touch point sequence of power-law growth).
Instead of observing patterns based on the outward expression of the macro-state behavior of price and volatility, we focus on the quantum-scale for revealing which observer vantage points inspired orders to be sent to the exchange, in such a way that the internal interaction among these observer perspectives ( which we call touch points, that keep track of intrinsic time – aka fundamental time, aka assembly time, aka structural time ) catalyze the formation of a new price point after the orderbook matching process is complete.
What makes this Bottom-Down™ system framework super-intelligent is its capacity for converting classical thermodynamic heat death ( convergence to long-term equilibrium ) and high system entropy regimes into persistent states of syntropy ( a negative entropy condition that reverses the effects of the positive inertial distributional tendencies perceived by macro-scale observers.
So, in this sense alone, differential changes in entropy over time ( the time derivative of entropy ), a thermodynamic measure, can now be transformed into a fundamental unit of measurement that equates to the difference ( aka Computational Circuit Delta ) between the Maximum Computational Circuit Complexity and the Minimum Computational Circuit Complexity.
When this value is increasingly positive, then the capacity for the system to do work goes up and when gap shrinks, the free-energy available to move the prices corresponds to a much more efficient market tape.
Since Momentum Trading and Trend-Following tend to perform best during times of higher Computational Circuit Delta, when markets are less efficient at processing incoming information, given that they are occupied with unlocking latent energy trapped and stored inside the network, when the We can now compare how well markets are factoring in the effects of pain across different market periods and momentum regimes in an unbounded way.
What makes this Self-Organizing Bottom-Down Structure truly disruptive across every facet of data science and predictive/prescriptive analytics is that it redefines the notion of time as a fundamental feature of reality ( system interaction touch points, and computational circuit complexity ) that is gauge invariant and overcomes the ambiguity over observer-dependent time.
Fearless Outliers: Profiting from Market Meltups & Chaotic Momentum Crashes
If you’re an option trader or an equity investor looking to reduce your exposure while still gaining access to potential high-impact opportunities, all Premium Subscribers of Running Alpha through this link ( https://spreadhunter.com/tested-profitable-trading-signals/ ) will also get access to actional guidance and special educational resources made available at:
The Nuclear Option Substack, which will: Show You How To Trade the Option Momentum and Spread Strategies discussed in David A. Janello’s Amazon #1 Best Selling Trading Book Release ( in the category of Options and Derivative Trading ) –
The Nuclear Option: Trading To Win With Option Momentum Strategies, an ex-CBOE professional with 50-years experience –
Showing you how to supercharge Running Alpha’s stock strategies with high probability option spread trading strategies, including:
Exclusive access to a never-before-seen chapter The Nuclear Option, TBA, as soon as it is released.
SpreadHunter is partnered with Running Alpha to give active Running Alpha’s Premium Subscribers™ who sign up to The Nuclear Option Substack, one free hour of online group coaching from Nuclear Option Trading,
Showing you how and why to construct option trades to capture moves using these services, as well as: the same level of custom trading analytics SpreadHunter offers to its own professional accounts, tailored to Running Alpha’s actionable trading opportunities.
To become an elite member of Running Alpha, connect with Efrem Hoffman and David A. Janello, PhD, CFA on LinkedIn, and subscribe here for access – then: within a few minutes, you can start receiving exclusive actionable insights from Running Alpha’s Trading Desk –
as soon as Efrem sees pivotal changes on Running Alpha’s proprietary market maps –
Pushing alerts and commentary straight to your mobile device and desktop in a secure two-way direct communication platform, where you can also make special request for analysis of your favorite assets and markets.
DISCLAIMER: The Fearless Outlier trading show is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and does not serve as a solicitation for buying and selling securities of any kind whatsoever in the present and/or future.