Rob Mannix

London

Quant Investing Editor at Risk.net

Quant investing editor, https://t.co/WmvLHcwEx8

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Articles

Investors dip a toe back into Tips despite April losses

1 month ago | risk.net | Rob Mannix

Investors are warming once more to a tariff-driven trade made popular ahead of April's turmoil, despite the bets in question incurring losses during the recent market selloff. Investors had opted for long positions in Treasury inflation-protected bonds (Tips), a trade seen as protecting against stagflation - a combination of low growth and high inflation. The bonds provide protection against rising prices and benefit from expectations of prospective rate cuts.
How Trump's trade talks may play out

1 month ago | risk.net | Rob Mannix

The April 2 announcement of sweeping tariffs by US president Donald Trump ended a consensus in favour of globalisation that had lasted since World War II. Now investors must decide what comes next. At the time of writing, the facts on the ground are in flux. On Wednesday April 9, the US paused reciprocal tariffs after Treasury bond yields soared alongside the selloff in risk assets. The US hiked tariffs on Chinese imports to 145%. China responded by announcing 125% tariffs on US goods.
The case for believing in a Bessent put

2 months ago | risk.net | Rob Mannix

The opening salvos of Donald Trump's global trade war sent 10-year Treasury yields tumbling to a six month low. US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent wants to keep them there. He has his job cut out. The idea of a so-called Bessent put in the Treasury market has drawn close attention from the industry, particularly regarding the tools Bessent might use and whether they'll work. As Risk.net discovered last month, investors are broadly sceptical about what Bessent can achieve.
Can Bessent lower 10-year yields? Investors have their doubts

2 months ago | centralbanking.com | Rob Mannix |Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent wants to lower the yield on 10-year Treasuries. Whether he can or not has become – trade wars aside – “the question of 2025”, says Florian Ielpo, head of macro at Lombard Odier Investment Managers. For the most part, the views of buy-siders on the matter are not encouraging. Many investors – who until recently counted Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, among their peers – are sceptical of his chances. The bond markets, they argue, can’t be pushed around with
Can Bessent lower 10-year yields? Investors have their doubts

2 months ago | risk.net | Rob Mannix

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent wants to lower the yield on 10-year Treasuries. Whether he can or not has become - trade wars aside - "the question of 2025", says Florian Ielpo, head of macro at Lombard Odier Investment Managers. For the most part, the views of buy-siders on the matter are not encouraging. Many investors - who until recently counted Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, among their peers - are sceptical of his chances.
Haidar Capital founder sees global yield curves steepening

2 months ago | risk.net | Rob Mannix

Yield curves globally will steepen amid a coming surge in borrowing to fund defence spending in Europe and widening deficits in the US, according to Said Haidar, founder and CIO of Haidar Capital Management. In Europe, hundreds of billions in new proposed borrowing will push up term premia and cause long end yields to rise, Haidar says. Term premia is the additional yield investors require to hold longer-dated bonds versus rolling short-dated debt.
How AI agents could become investing's crash test dummies

Feb 23, 2025 | risk.net | Rob Mannix

To test the effects of car collisions on the human body, researchers in the 1940s allowed themselves to be jolted to a stop on high-speed sleds, showered with broken glass and pummelled with heavy objects. Those scientists must have cheered the invention of "Sierra Sam", the first crash test dummy, in 1949. Practitioners in investing - a world equally concerned with crashes, though of a different type - may soon use Sierra Sams of their own.
BlackRock tests ‘quantum cognition’ AI for high-yield bond picks

Feb 21, 2025 | waterstechnology.com | Rob Mannix |Mauro Cesa |Anthony Malakian |Max Bowie

BlackRock has teamed up with an artificial intelligence firm established by a US hedge fund to test a new way to classify corporate bonds using AI. The asset manager worked with Qognitive to use the firm’s quantum cognition machine learning model to pick the most similar liquid replacements for hard-to-trade high-yield bonds, a common class of problem in investing. In tests, QCML seemed to do a better job of identifying similar bonds than random forest models, a more conventional form of machine
Quants try investing like Socrates, with help from AI

Feb 12, 2025 | risk.net | Rob Mannix

Last year, Goose Hollow Capital, a global macro investment firm based in the New York area, asked GPT-4o to discuss the prospect of US rate cuts, the likely path of Japanese inflation and the outlook for solar stocks. The exercise was for the education - and amusement - of Goose Hollow's own people and its investors. And to make the activity more fun, the firm's analysts framed the discussion as a debate between three figures from ancient Greek philosophy: Socrates, Theaetetus and Plato.
Bank of England mustering unit to model system-wide stresses

Feb 3, 2025 | centralbanking.com | Rob Mannix |Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn

The Bank of England is establishing a permanent team to carry forward work set in train by the central bank’s system-wide stress test last year. The group of roughly six to 10 people will focus on the modelling and simulation of market-wide stress scenarios, Risk.net has learned. The team will work initially on building agent-based models – models that simulate how participants interact with each other and the system they operate in – using insights gathered from last year’s exercise. The BoE