IamA the hedge fund managers of Charity Hedge Fund, a service to help average traders/investors profit and learn while donating to charity. AMA!

I work in a hedge fund in the front office. What you're selling here is misleading.

This does not sound like a hedge fund at all. But ignoring reservations there if you are that good, trading at 100k sizes then why sell your moves for $2 to average Joe? Just something does not sit right here

First, we are selling nothing. Who mentioned a hedge fund? If you read carefully it says that we are NOT a fund. If you re-read carefully, we are getting you to donate money to charity, in return we give you Our Service. Or just donate the money and don't subscribe. But seriously, the whole point is that we make money for you and at a time and percentage of your choice, you donate some of the profits to charity. I know that is slightly below the 2&20 you are used to, but heck, we are retired and we like to undermine and make fun of the useless morons running hedge funds these days and losing money hand over fist for their customers.

Who mentioned a hedge fund?

Your website is literally www.charityhedgefund.com, your username is CharityHedgeFund and the title of your OP has the phrase "hedge fund" in it twice.

And that implies that we are a real hedge fund? Because a lot of real hedge funds donate all the fees to charity? Hedge funds are regulated by the SEC and they have subscription memoranda. You send them your money to manage. Do we ask for anything similar? No. We are parodying hedge funds. Sorry if our irony confused you.

I'd say it's misleading to say the best and the parodying isn't clear, it's kind of made worse with a confrontational style to your writing. I'd say your title should be something like charitytradetipsters as there's not much more to it.

I'm guessing you're looking at basing, support and resistance, bollinger bands and some sort of momentum indicator. Probably wrong but I'd like to understand what constitutes a buy or sell signal to you and what constitutes risk and how you intend to limit that risk, so far the answer has been essentially you do what we saya and it's less risky? So asking the question as if I'm risking my money on your system (where I'm finding it hard to track performance and strategy), then I'd definitely want to understand.

Sorry, forgot to say something that is crucial. This service is intended for people who trade actively and who therefore have their own opinions of the markets. Its use therefore is for the subscriber to evaluate the suggested trade against his/her market opinion. It it fits, it is a level of confirmation (however small) of their own opinion. If it does not fit, the subscriber can bin it. It is therefore a reinforcing tool for people who actively trade. And maybe we can sometimes show you trades that you would not have thought of and might like.

If i had the conviction to trade with a margin of 30k of my own money i would not base that decision on you (basically some website with a bunch of people bigging up there opinions) having the same opinion as mine. And if i would do that i should be encouraged to not trade at all.

Infact that's essentially gambling and if you truly want to help people make good investment choices you should encourage them how to learn how to base investment decisions on solid rationals when to get in and out and walk away and to pick a strategy that suits them. Not follow some lead of the internet. A good mantra would be if it's too good to be true it is.

You should be encouraging people definitely to mot scalp or swing trade as if that's a strategy that works. Taking random buy signals from a website.

My original assumption given you didn't answer the key questions i asked seems valid to me, that something does not sit right about it all and people should be protected against being misled into thinking it truly is that easy. You want to help people recommend a book it would be far more useful then this system.

I think we are talking at cross purposes. This is not a site about investing and does not claim to be. It is a site for traders and for trading. I think we state that quite clearly and are not misleading anyone in thinking any different. We make no claims whatsoever about performance. We clearly show the trades and the daily swings in P/L. We do not claim it is easy nor do we claim that any returns are sustainable or in any way guaranteed. Any trader knows that and we are only offering them a service which might or might not be useful to them. We have lots of subscribers who find it useful and educational to some degree and presumably others who don't and then unsubscribe.

A buy or sell signal is a mathematical risk/reward parameter based on a basket of technical indicators and volatility, actual and expected. Systems track all the markets we trade and rank them in order of likelihood of trend continuation/swing against important levels in each market. This way you basically arrive at odds of a basic strategy working. You literally arrive at odds like in a bookmaker's shop. On top we overlay our macro expectations to see if the bet is worth taking. So, the odds might be 100:1 on a market moving in a direction. But if you see no chance of that happening, why bet on it at even 100:1. Better to take the trade at 3:1 which is 90% likely to work. As far as risk control, every trade has an automatic stop loss, which is sent out at same time as the original order, so you know in advance the exact amount of money you can lose on any position taken. Performance is extremely easy to track. Every trade and the P/L generated is there, for every trading day. Where can you find greater transparency? Look in Trades section on website.

I haven't checked all the details on your site yet, but if I understand correctly, you're not actually managing investors' money, you're sending out trade recommendations for them to shadow what you're doing?

That is correct. The individual decides if/when and the size of the trade. We give them what to do and at what price, they decide.

I understand that the service fee is low enough to be accessed by anyone, but what is the sweet spot amount of money one would need to start shadowing your recommendations with worthwhile gains?

If you look at Performance, it shows you the maximum amount of margin we have used. From memory, somewhere around $38k. This means, had you done everything we did, you would have utilised $38k to generate those P/Ls. But we would not want anyone shadowing us with less than 100k in liquid assets, not at our size. But if we send an Alert to Buy/Sell 4 lots of something, there is no reason someone could not do it with 1 lot. Therefore the $20k-30k mark is really the absolute minimum.

Oh boy. This is just like those adds that popup in the background when I visit piratebay and the like. "Nominal fee" charged by "retired hedge fund managers". Mmmkay. With $50 a month and a few hundred subscribers, you can make a good living and especially so if you happen to be some guy living in a 3rd world country. Your site looks new and the "track record" could have been put on the website yesterday. Why charge a fee at all since you should by all accounts be multimillionaires by now? A few grand a month should be nothing to you. Why don't you publish your full names so that we can verify that you are for real?

We don't charge a fee. You donate the fee to charity. Go and re-read it, slowly. Now go to the Trades page. You will see the individual's day's Trade Alerts in every calendar day. Input them into your time & sales. Check them, if you want to. Why would we go to all that bother to have you donate $49 to charity? Where is our upside? Or even better, post asking to speak to one of our long standing subscribers. Or even, even better, donate $49 to charity , receive the updates for a month, do absolutely nothing and verify it for yourself.

When I click your subscribe button, it takes me to Paypal. There, it says the payment goes to you (charityhedgefund.com), not some charity. Where is the proof that you donate the subscription fees to charities? Why is there no company name, address or phone number on the website?

Testimonials from "subscribers" are worthless. Anyone can write anything on the internet. A fake track record would of course have correct entry and exit prices, so there is no point checking those. Why isn't your trade record verified by a third party?

That is not true, and anyone can verify it. Why you would make it up is beyond me. When you click on the "Subscribe to our service" button nothing happens. You get an email asking you to either send us a receipt from any registered charity or to go to the Buy Subscription Now button and do it through us. Your choice. And you have to go through the Subscribe to our service button, otherwise the Paypal money is returned. There is no company name as we are...not a company. All the details are naturally given to and verified by Paypal, as part of their AML. But I guess that is not good enough for you. What would you you need them for? Is there no need for privacy you can respect? As already said, if you think this is a scam, go donate $49 to charity and if we don't register you or you don't get the Alerts, or any kind of cheating goes on, simply get back here and lambast us to kingdom come. Or on any other site...do your worst, mate. Until then, the least you can do is give us the benefit of the doubt. I tell you what I will do, I will donate the $49 for you. Just send me your email to [email protected] and you can verify everything for free for a month. Good enough?

"Buy subscription now" was the button I clicked, http://imgur.com/DAovfhx.

I'm just showing the other readers how to do some due diligence. Nothing personal even though it probably appears that way. Most people that sell trading signals are scammers and finding the rare few that are legit and good isn't easy. Anyone thinking about subscribing to a signal service should do a lot of research before deciding.

If you aren't in it for the money, then you should consider removing the option to pay to you directly and leave only the option to donate to charities. It will look a lot less shady that way.

I can see that you are trying to be difficult, and you are succeeding. How are you going to buy a subscription to something you have not registered for? Why would you do that? How am I going to add you to the database? How am I going to reconcile you between the database and the Paypal account? Therefore, first you Subscribe, then you get the email, then you choose. Or your money gets refunded. It seems so obvious. As far as due diligence, it just seems so easy in this case. Donate $49. Send receipt. Get Alerts. Follow for 1 month. If crap, you donated $49 to your favourite charity. If not you have found a good one. Downside = ZERO. As far as donating to charity: we have our favourite charities (listed), you have your own. It's called freedom of choice. I see nothing shady about it.

Any estimations on an expected ROI/yr?

No. We shoot for $10k/month, as we only send out the safest and least volatile trades. Both margin utilisation and P/L are in the Performance section. This way individuals can decide their own size.

Why look for a fixed return and not base on alpha?

Because we try to generate money for you so that you can donate a percentage of it to charity. What we will generate is naturally a function of what SAFE trades we spot. We are NOT a fund. We give you the benefit of our experience to generate EXTRA trading income. As it says on the site, this is NOT a substitute to your own investing/trading. It is an addition to it.

Got you, makes sense. Great idea by the way.

Thanks

$10k on a base of $100k? $38k? Can you frame this in percentage returns?

I am sure you can use a calculator. But there is no guarantee that you will make that or even that you will not lose money. Therefore working out the percentage return would be like counting chickens before they are hatched. The best advice anyone can give you is to trade with money you can afford to lose and count on no return at all.

What's the reason of having a goal of $10k/month? That number doesn't have meaning if it isn't attached to a base. Also, I noticed you referenced notional accounts of $500,000. If that number is being used to calculate the target goal of $10k/month, then you are wanting to return over 25% a year. That seems very aggresive, especially if you are making conservative investment choices.

Good question. You are right, the 10k figure is meaningless, to a pro. But not to 99.99% of the traders/investors/people out there. What we offer is not a substitute, but an addition to what people do for themselves. If you read the About Us section, you will see that we challenged ourselves to produce that kind of return with minimal volatility to prove that we old timers are still better than all these 1000s of new guys. Naturally, producing 25% compounded return on $500k is a piece of cake compared to $1bn, but I don' t think people will care. We could leverage and produce/lose many times that in a day, but that is not the point. We want to show that nice and steady on small accounts is possible. Then if people want to overleverage, their choice. If you look at the performance to date, we were never down more than 10k in a month and never had a losing month. That, of course, cannot and will not last. But the point you are missing is that the exciting part of our service is NOT the trade alerts, but the Bias Tables, where we show you our positions and where we intend trading tomorrow, with the why. And where we are out. That is worth far more, imho. That is teaching you to fish, rather than giving you a fish.

My point is, why state your monthly goal for an arbitrary subscriber in a specific USD amount without a base or some context to the discussion.

You are probably right, makes sense. Will try and correct it next week.

Where on the Street did you guys start your careers? I'm on a cash equity sales desk right now and love it. Seeing the industry shift away from pure sales/pure traders into hybrid roles a lot more now.

I started at Salomon Bros, Peter at JPM and Julian at Bankers Trust. We were and are pure proprietary traders. Would not catch us talking to a customer :)

Why do you not identify yourselves by your full names? Your own FAQ asks, but does not answer, this question.

It answers it very clearly. We believe in anonymity as far as charitable work is concerned. BTW, our names would mean nothing to you and we really do not want to be trolled through Google by millions. Just not our style.

[deleted]

Backtesting is rubbish. It can give you any result you wish to create. Our REAL track record goes back to 91. We do not show it for several reasons: 1. Legal - we are forbidden by non-compete clauses on sale of our funds. 2. It is not generated using just these instruments. If you traded 200 instruments to generate a track record and then you restrict yourself to 10, what meaning does the previous track record hold? As far as I am concerned it is like comparing apples to oranges. But you are missing the point. We are not running a hedge fund. YOU decide if to follow and f and when to get out. YOU do all the trading. We give you Buy/Sell, price, quantity and stop loss, you follow if/when/with how much you want to and get out if/when you want to. We only show you what would have happened had you mirrored us exactly. But you are ultimately in control. Finally, the Alerts are/should be LESS interesting than the Bias Tables. There we show you OUR positions. That is worth a hell of a lot more...imho.

So then to be clear, your positions you take personally as per your Bias Tables may be different than the ones you send out in your Alerts? If so, what differentiates the two?

That is correct. It is all explained on the site. Our positions are risky. But that is what we do, we manage risk. The Alerts are the safest of the safe. Our attempt at making money for you in the least risky and volatile manner we know of. So that you can profit and donate some to charity.

Got it, thanks!

Great. Pleasure.

[deleted]

Again, we are not a fund. We give you trade recommendations, trying to generate a return, so that you can donate a percentage of profits to charity. This is an addition to, not a substitute for your own investing/trading. But also a very good sounding board for your own decisions. If you are bullish something and we are bearish and short, it should make you stop and think. The fact we show you our positions in the Bias Tables, should be worth a lot to you if you are a serious trader.

if you are not a fund dont make your name charityhedgefund, this is why people dont trust walstreet you are already not transparent GG

Well, it was our attempt at irony. Obviously the British sense of humour is an acquired taste and not easily shared or understood by other nationalities. I am truly sorry if you feel mislead in some way.

Humor and economics do not mix as someone who day trades for a living just based off your post, "humor" and lack of credentials you are as fishy as they fucking come

I respect your opinion. Check back sometime, time might provide you with the evidence you might need to change your mind.

Hi, as long as all questions are welcome, I'm curious about how you all started working in finance, and specifically in hedge funds? I'm an undergraduate right now looking to go the quant route. (Math major --> PhD with stats and computer science emphasis.) I believe I will have opportunity to work on my degrees while completing work experience to receive a CFA, but that may not be the case. Could you tell us how you got started, what your education/experience/story is, and what those looking for work in hedge funds, IB, or with venture capital?

Times are so different now, that our experience is absolutely of no reference to you, in the slightest. When we started almost NO ONE with degrees in finance/economics went into trading side...they all went into corporate finance.When trading exploded, we found ourselves in right place at right time. We literally had 0 competition. And that is how we could set up on our own. When we set up, we were the (believe it or not) SECOND hedge fund in the whole of Europe. Incomparable to the present time and fierce competition.

No worries. I research what I can, but I appreciate it. Thank you, and I wish you the best with this very interesting endeavor. I'm going to keep my eye on it.

Thank you.

Why are your names nowhere on your web page? What kind of "charity" is afraid to show the names of the leaders?

Perhaps this is just a scam to get people to subscribe to your service?

Asked and Answered, at nauseam. Read the FAQ, or the posts here.

Which FAQ: Please link to it. I sure can't find it.

Also, where was it asked and answered as nauseam? I see one question that is not exactly like mine, but at least somewhat similar. Ad nauseam implies numerous times. Please link to them.

I think you are liars and scammers.

Answer my questions and prove me wrong.

http://www.charityhedgefund.com/#!faqs/ckji Q2

post replyIamA the hedge fund managers of Charity Hedge Fund, a service to help average traders/investors profit and learn while donating to charity. AMA! from christian1542 via /r/IAmA sent an hour ago Oh boy. This is just like those adds that popup in the background when I visit piratebay and the like. "Nominal fee" charged by "retired hedge fund managers". Mmmkay. With $50 a month and a few hundred subscribers, you can make a good living and especially so if you happen to be some guy living in a 3rd world country. Your site looks new and the "track record" could have been put on the website yesterday. Why charge a fee at all since you should by all accounts be multimillionaires by now? A few grand a month should be nothing to you. Why don't you publish your full names so that we can verify that you are for real?

post replyIamA the hedge fund managers of Charity Hedge Fund, a service to help average traders/investors profit and learn while donating to charity. AMA! from hadtoupvotethat via /r/IAmA sent an hour ago Why do you not identify yourselves by your full names? Your own FAQ asks, but does not answer, this question.

Voila...and as an added bonus, I will donate the $49 for you and let you subscribe, just send me your email to [email protected] If you spot anything fishy, you can come back here or anywhere you like and state it with proof.

And there is a third, but I just dont know how to make this thing turn the page without losing the post box. Now I get what you want: you want our surnames, so you can sell them to some mafia dude who is going to come and kidnap our children. Not likely. We do not live in NY and walk around with bodyguards and we would like to keep it that way. I think you are an evil kidnapper. Prove to me you are not.

Do you feel that LTCM should have been bailed out, or was the fear of systemic risk overblown?

With the benefit of hindsight, overblown. Did not feel like it at the time, though. With all due respect to my friend John M.

Thanks for the response. Regarding JM, whatever else, he's lived an exciting life.

lol... you are buying this shit.

these guys are total scammers. Just ask my friend John M.

Feel free.

For sure.

I'm not an investor or anything, but it all seems very lucrative for both short and long terms. If I didn't have much money (say in the couple of hundreds or thousands), what would be the best path to follow to grow my wealth into a significant level? Like, literally, what steps should I take?

Invest in a mutual fund and add monthly, whatever you can, each and every month, however little. Regularity is key.

What does a day look like for you guys?

Start around 5am, review what Europe and Asia have been up to. We have our preparation from night before (Bias Tables). Then we just execute and monitor. We have guys who work for us and do all the rest. So most days we are out of there by 2pm and can go fishing. If this bloody wind would die down!! :(

How much market manipulation do you guys think actually occurs by large hedge funds?

Depends in what. In individual shares or bonds, short term (quarter end, etc) quite a bit. In other instruments, none.

Hi.. Congrats on your philanthropy! Trading question. I would argue, a common misunderstanding about frequent trading is the impact of commissions, specifically that there are scalping techniques available that can, but only work, with extremely low fees, usually reserved to big players.

Are there any suggestions you can offer about a smaller trader reducing fees? I see you seem to trade futures, is it just a matter of being a high volume trader and negotiating, or potentially getting big enough to lease or buy a seat on the exchange to get the costs down?

No, fees are very competitive these days. Go and have a look at Tradestation or Introducing Brokers or similar. You are talking $5 all in per round trip, for retail low volume accounts. It really is a pittance these days, as it is all automated. Its impact on performance is in the low decimal points. Big players negotiate volume discounts, but to any normal trader it makes very little difference.

Thank you for your reply. Best of luck with your efforts!

Thank you, pleasure.

So my question is:

You won't tell us who you are. Nor will you tell us if you actually follow these trade recommendations with your own money. You presumably are fairly wealthy as you live in the Bahamas. But you want to charge people 2 usd to read some random technical analysis with no corroborating data. I don't get it. Honestly, I don't get it. You will raise a tiny amount of money for charity, if any. So what's the point? Is this an ego trip?

Your first point is well explained in the FAQ section of the site, Q2. It has been answered here many times. If you cannot accept it, that is that. As to the second point, I have clearly stated that we do follow it with our own money, in a size much larger than the ones in the alerts. It could not have been clearer. The point is exactly as explained on the site. We send out no technical analysis, we tell you what we are doing and give you our positions. We give you Trade Alerts and show you the exact results, to the penny. If that has no value for you, then you should walk away. If it has some value, you can donate to charity. I can understand scepticism, but what will happen if in 1-2-3 years time everything is as described and profits are nice and steady? Will that not attract a lot of people? Will donations to charity not increase? If they do not, then we have wasted our time, but at least we gave it a shot. How can anonymity provide an ego trip?

Where do you think the global markets are headed and of course, what are your thoughts on oil?

I wish I knew. Modestly bearish at the moment, but no real conviction. Markets have discounted quite a bit of bad news. We really need something pretty bad to come out to give us another leg lower. Oil is basing, will have many false starts, but as any human made crash, humans will eventually put it right, when it hurts too much not to. Does that give you a bottom price? No, but it gives you a bias to trade with for next 6 months. I believe the countries involved cannot take much more of this price level, but I could easily be wrong on the timing. That is why I prefer to play the currencies (AUD and CAD) which should have discounted most of the bad news. Look at the Bias Tables for our positions at the moment, will give you a flavour for what we think.

Hi, What type of markets do you trade in and what are your strategies/setups do you employ?

Also, how frequent do you enter a trade and what is your average hold time?

Thank you

It is all on web site under Trades. Every trade, time, P/L, etc...for every day. including our trading strategies (How we Trade).

Considering your margins, what do you consider the bare minimum to be able to invest effectively?

Any particular emerging markets that you have your eyes on?

As answered somewhere below, if you do 1 lots as opposed to our size...somewhere around $30k should be the absolute minimum.

I have $30, let's make music.

Go busking and make another $20 :)

Which instruments do you tend to trade the most/which asset class? I primarily trade FX and fixed income, however, I see more consistency of returns on FI. Thoughts on FX?

Every trade is on the site, so you can check it out for yourself. Every monthly trading sheet with every trade for that month is in the bottom corner of month on Trades. All our views/comments/positions in FX are in the Daily Bias tables, just download it.

Have you ever been to belize?

No.

[deleted]

Not really. It is a full time job...and it takes many, many years and a lot of losses to learn properly.

I'm looking for an internship with a nonprofit for the summer that intersects with finance/ consulting. Any openings?

I am afraid not. We are in the Bahamas and no work permits allowed for visitors. Plus, we are a very small operation. To learn something valuable and rewarding work, try some of the big NY names.

What exactly is shown on the Performance page? Is it a hypothetical performance using your own trades (according to the Bias Tables)? Or the balance of a real brokerage account?

What is the performance of the Trading Alerts?

No, the Bias Table trades are separate, as explained in posts below. They show the actual performance of the Trade Alerts, in the size of the Trade Alert. So, some people will do less, some people will do more..its up to them and the size of their account. We do more. Naturally, many Alerts remain unfilled. This is the performance of all filled trades.

Thanks, but when you talk about the "actual performance", do you mean that you have a real brokerage account where you made those trades with real money and the numbers shown are the balances of that trading account? I want to clarify this, because you've said elsewhere that your own trades are different.

Again, from the top. We do the trades in the Trade Alerts, just in much larger size. We also do other trades, which we show in the Bias Tables. In the Alerts we only recommend the safest trades we can think of. Therefore, yes, there is a real brokerage account with those trades, just in much larger size. And there are lots of subscribers who have smaller, equal and larger trades and P/L in real accounts. Yes, it is real and in real time.

So why don't you show us this actual performance?

I have. It is on the site.

Hi there, thanks for doing this and well done for using your knowledge to help charities, an idea which few would believe city types would give a second thought to. Is there anyone in the city that actually invests long term on any share as opposed to looking for short term gain. Leaving aside Warren Buffet, if someone came into work, then on the odd occasion (once every couple of weeks or months), made a buy or sell order how long would they last?

Lol, about one paycheck. But seriously, there are funds which specialise in long term value investing. They just tend to have very poor performance during bear periods and underperform during bull phases too.

So why is it always stressed to Joe Public that investing is a long term game, when the professionals timescales are are short term and trade countless times during the day?

Trading and investing are different games. A bit like F1 and GT touring. You would not take an F1 car to Le Mans and you would not take a GT to Monza. The best Joe Public can do is invest each and every month and therefore smooth out the return over the decades. And if he has some spare cash, he can trade and invest the winnings (if any) again, as above....

Good answer!

I belong to an investment club in the UK (with a group of friends). We meet monthly so our only trades are once a month unless our stop losses kick in. What are the key figures in any company report that you would look at to gauge if the company was worth buying shares in?

Net free cash flow. Debt structure. Moat. Everything else is secondary. Lets see if this baby survives, first.

I take it then is the company in question has zero debt then this is the best debt structure a company can achieve?

not exactly...but if net cash generated will not cover the debt structure, or it is tight, or the company has a small moat, you are looking for a potential short.

If Joe Public has only two opportunities to see the company's accounts (interim and final results), is this the only time to appraise how well it is trading (at that point in time), knowing by the time they are published they are out of date, or do you as pros have better access to their accounts outwith these times?

Before I answer that, we are macro guys, so have not traded individual shares for maybe 2 decades. But, as responsible for a team trading equity long/short a long time ago, the answer is that you get hints, especially if you are a large shareholder in the first place. Used to be wonderful in the 80s, before all this frigging regulation came in. You would get anything you wanted. From what I understand, now you would go to jail. So, we count our blessings we no longer do equity long/short.

Any advice for people who want to break into the industry? I've been a bit hesitant to go the finance route because I sort of wanted to do something with a charitable bend, so naturally you've captured my interest.

I've been running a small business for the last few years and I'm thinking about selling it and getting a job in finance, is it too late if you're already nearly 30?

It's not too late, but why would you want to leave something you presumably love, to do something you presumably don't? For money? I would not...

For money? I would not...

Spoken like a person who obviously doesn't worry about money.

....or who has learnt the true value of time....

[deleted]

Hi, please read How we Trade on our website. We are not a system, although we utilise systems to give us trends, we are fully discretionary and over-ride our systems all the time (if we don't agree with them). In theory therefore market conditions are irrelevant as we need to be right in our opinions. In practice we make most money in orderly markets without too much volatility on upside or downside. Please do not rely on past performance. It can always be followed by the exact opposite performance.

Do all of you like pie?

Yes. Especially cherry pie. With whipped cream.

What charity do you donate to?

They are all listed under Charities on the web site.

Gotcha, any reasoning in choosing these groups?

Each one of us has his favourites. I like animals, therefore have chosen the RSPCA, Peter is ex-military so he chose the Paralysed Vets of America...and so on. Just personal preferences and biases, with many joint favourites.

How much of the movie "The Big short" is real?

LoL, I have no idea. Not seen it yet.

Do you yolo options on earnings with high iv and 3x leverage?

Maybe, if I knew what you meant. In all seriousness, no. We are and have always been macro guys. No individual equities. Look at the website for what we trade.

How do you, "profit" off of charity ?

Not quite sure what you mean. Care to elaborate your question?

How is this not a scam?

This smells worse than 4 week old fish. 1. Logic 101 if you have a successful trading strategy and want to give you money to your favorite cause celebre the best way is to trade the strategy leveraged yourselves at a profit ,not get rubes to invest in it. 2. You piss on backtesting,backtesting can be abused but without it you are in the category of "not even wrong" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong 3. You dont reveal your records for x bullshit reason. 4. You use tech analysis,and tech analysis is bullshit. 5. You use charity and greed to appeal to simultaneously the better and worse natures in people. "I can be a good person while getting rich",good scam guys. Conlusion, I wouldnt give you con artists the steam off my piss on a cold night,let alone 2 dollars a day.

Well, we do that. We trade leveraged and we do donate to charity a percentage of the profits. But what is wrong with encouraging others to do the same? Does it not make good sense? Is more not better that less in this case? You say we give you bullshit reasons. Non-compete clauses are nothing if not a real, legal reason. We disagree about backtesting and tech. analysis. The rest I will not dignify with a reply. BTW, you are not giving us anything, nor are we asking for anything. It is charity you are depriving. Now, off to bed with you, it is past your bedtime, surely?

Is your charity just a front that its wealthy patrons use as a tax haven and to satisfy the whims of their trophy wives and stupid daughters?

Don't see how it could be. You don't donate to us but to other charities. And, believe me, it takes a lot more than this to satisfy the whims of trophy wives.

What do you feel that you contribute to society?

Wow, tough one. Probably not as much as we should, but at least we are trying something which might. If it fails, it won't be for lack of effort nor honest endevour on our part.

1.) What kind of initial sum should I plan to have before I start investing?

2.) How much money do you need to work with if you want to go full time into investment?

You can start investing with any amount, however small. I believe that some plans start at $50 r even less. Look for a good mutual fund with low costs and add monthly whatever you can spare. Full time investing is not a matter of initial capital as much as ability/knowledge, which takes many years to acquire.

These days, many ETFs are broken, and certain things that were previously interchangeable in hedging - like oil and SPY or gold - don't necessarily move in complementary or inverse directions anymore. Short covering the last two expirations made big enough moves in the overall market to almost look like bear reversals. So how are you guys approaching the market this year? What is different than last summer?

Lots of things. First market liquidity. The Fed has started tightening cycle. Corporate credit spreads are very different. Oil prices are 25% lower. Hence FEs are down across the board and falling. While multiples are still relatively high to previous bear markets, they are no longer ridiculous. We are at about 15.5-16 times, which is not that far away from the long term average. This is going to be a trading market awaiting new developments. A technical market as opposed to a trending market. Until new info comes in...

I'm 23 and am in a high paying finance job, but have no idea what to invest in (at the moment I'm saving for a buy to let house). What do you recommend?

Also, is there anything like your business in the UK? And what charities do you donate to?

I would recommend a simple long only equity fund. You are so young that if you pay in monthly you are bound to average out a very good return over the decades. You do not need to time the market. As far as I know, there is nothing like us anywhere else. The charities are listed on the website, but anyone is welcome to donate directly to whatever charity they hold dear.

This assuages your feelings of guilt but does very little to address the root problem. The solution I don't think you guys can handle. Obligatory ? mark.

Not really sure we have any feelings of guilt...guilt about what?

I think he believes hedge fund managers are the enemies of the world because they make too much money

oh, ok. We are retired :) Hope that counts us out.

haha that and considering you're going full time on an impressive charity initiative, I also hope he counts you out

Thanks.