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We approach this problem differently than most because of our core belief that: “Offense wins games. Defense wins championships.”
We believe that building a diversified portfolio combining defensive-minded strategies, such as long volatility and trend, with offensive-minded strategies, such as stocks and bonds, provides the best opportunity for long-term capital growth while reducing drawdowns in the interim.
We view true diversification as the ability to accomplish the two things most investors care about in their portfolios:
That is, making sure that if we need to use our assets for a family emergency, illness, or other unexpected life events (dare I say global pandemic?) in the near term, that it will be there when we need it.
That is, maximizing the long-term compounding, or expected terminal wealth of a portfolio.
We believe building a team of diversified strategies with different return drivers is the best way to facilitate these dual objectives.
We take a multi-strategy, multi-asset approach to offer broader and more effective diversification across both offensive and defensive strategies.
Jason Buck is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Mutiny Funds, actively managing its portfolios across dozens of sub-advisors and thousands of individual return streams.
After living through the 2008 financial crisis as a commercial real estate developer, Jason became deeply interested in understanding how investors could protect themselves from such market downturns. But with few, if any, adequate products out there, Jason leaned on his entrepreneurial background to create his own solution, launching Mutiny Funds.
Jason’s broad knowledge base across multiple industries and sectors has made him a sought-after speaker and thought leader in the finance community. With a focus on interplay between offense and defense in investment strategies, his insights are frequently shared across various platforms including numerous podcasts appearances and as a speaker at industry conferences around the world.
Jason is an IMG academy graduate, former D1 soccer player, and currently resides outside Philadelphia.
How can we build more robust, or even antifragile, portfolios?
For the past decade, we’ve been researching and working on answers to that question.
The journey began in the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis. We saw how important it was for investors to have tools to construct more robust portfolios.
The promise of diversification has always been to improve your risk-adjusted returns and ultimately generate higher returns without taking more risk.
However, 2008 and subsequent events suggested to us that traditional forms of diversification were no longer effective. We needed to build more robust portfolios capable of weathering periods of significant equity market declines.
In 2008, a seemingly “diversified” portfolio of U.S. stocks, international stocks, real estate, commodities, and high yield bonds turned out not to be so diversified.
Our search for better answers led us to study many portfolios and asset allocation strategies.
The one that stuck out was the work of a little-known financial advisor from the 1970s, Mr. Harry Browne.
From his Franklin, TN office, Browne had a key insight about portfolio construction and effective diversification.
He identified macroeconomic environments: Growth, Recession, Inflation, and Deflation.
Browne believed any period of recorded economic history in any country in the world can be fit into one or a combination of these four environments.
The most common portfolio construction is a stock and bond focused approach such as the 60% stock /40% bond portfolio. However, stock and bond focused portfolios only do well in two of the four quadrants. Stocks tend to do well in periods of growth and bonds tend to do well in periods of growth with low inflation. It’s like a sports team that is all offense.
It can go through periods such as 1980-1999 or 2010-2019 where it puts up a lot of points. However, when the offense has a couple of off days, the championship hopes go out the window.
Most investors alive today, particularly U.S. investors, have invested overwhelmingly in periods where stocks and bonds performed exceedingly well and so there is a strong bias towards those offensive assets.
We have a different philosophy, inspired by Browne’s work: Offense wins games, but defense wins championships. Offense can work great in the short term for a single game, but you need defense to win in the long run. In the same way, we believe a portfolio requires both offensive assets like stocks and bonds, but also defensive assets like cash and gold.
However, traditional portfolio diversification is still overwhelmingly focused on offensive assets: stocks, bonds, REITs, private equity, and venture capital.
While these all have their role in a portfolio, to effectively compound wealth over the long run while minimizing drawdowns, we believe these offensive assets must be paired with defensive assets.
While Cash and Gold may have been the best tools available to Browne, we felt the defensive components of the portfolio could be improved.
The biggest hole we saw in the traditional Permanent Portfolio was a sharp sell-off leading into a recession. At the time he created his portfolio, using 25% in cash to help dampen the losses in other parts of the portfolio was the best option Browne had.
However, with the advent and increasing accessibility of volatility trading strategies in the 2010s, we came to believe that utilizing a long volatility strategy instead of just cash could better offset losses elsewhere in the portfolio in the event of a sharp sell-off, improving the risk-adjusted returns.
Holding cash dampens the drawdowns in the rest of the portfolio, but long volatility strategies seek to not just dampen the drawdown but to generate profits in a sharp sell-off so that gains can be rebalanced into the other parts of the portfolio at the opportune moment.
The challenge for us was that these strategies were not readily accessible to non-institutional investors. In 2018, we set out to solve that problem. We identified and spoke with dozens of long volatility managers and figured out a structure that would allow us to invest in a diversified ensemble of long volatility managers.
As we spoke with more and more people, we realized that we were not the only people looking to solve this problem and decided to launch our long volatility strategy in 2020.
The second hole we saw in Browne’s approach was the strong reliance on gold for protection against inflation or an extended depression. Volatility strategies can do well in the first leg down in markets where you have a sharp sell-off and volatility spikes. But, they don’t tend to do as well in an extended recession and don’t necessarily have any relationship to inflationary environments.
While gold performed exceedingly well in the 1970s inflationary environment, its longer history is more checkered. We saw that incorporating trend-following strategies on commodity, stock, and bond markets could help to cover these possibilities.
Based on our research, we came to believe that these substitutions of long volatility strategies for cash and trend-following strategies for gold were substantial improvements. We believe that pairing these defensive strategies with offers substantial benefit.
However, we saw that there was a way to improve even further. We believed that investors would benefit from layered diversification. Diversification across the four macro quadrants is a good starting point, but even better is diversification within each of those quadrants.
The Cockroach Portfolio utilizes global stocks, global bonds, four different volatility strategies and three different trend approaches in an attempt to provide the most robust portfolio possible.
Having spent over a decade thinking about and working on how to build the best long-term portfolios, we believe that the Cockroach Portfolio is the best approach for investors seeking to optimize their risk-adjusted returns
We began working on this portfolio in 2018, originally under the name Ataraxia, a greek word meaning “calmness untroubled by mental or emotional disquiet.” (We gave up on the name when no one could spell it and few could pronounce it, though we never gave up on the sentiment.)
Our goal has always been to construct a portfolio where we could hold our savings without constantly worrying while still compounding capital efficiently.
We developed our Long Volatility Strategy in April of 2020 because we felt it was an important component of a well-diversified portfolio that could effectively compound wealth, and, from our own experience, it was very difficult for non-institutional investors to access active long volatility managers.
However, our core belief has always been that long volatility is only a part of a broader portfolio. We developed our Long Volatility and Stocks Strategy in July 2020 to offer a more balanced and diversified approach that included both long volatility and stocks in a single product.
In 2021, we launched our Cockroach Strategy as what we see as a total portfolio solution.
Cockroaches aren’t cuddly, but they do two things well that we also want out of our portfolios: they’re really hard to kill and they compound fast.
You can learn more about the philosophy of our approach by reading the Cockroach Approach Whitepaper.
If you’re interested in investing, you can learn more about our Cockroach Strategy on our website.
We also offer a suite of defensive investment strategies as separate investments. These strategies are part of the holistic Cockroach Portfolio and are intended as diversifiers to be combined with existing offensive assets in an investor’s portfolio such as stocks, bonds, and private equity.
If you have any questions, please fill out the form below and we’ll get back to you.
If you are interested in getting more detailed information about our investment strategies, please complete the form to receive more information about our offerings including historical performance, common questions around investment strategy, fees, taxes, risks and the logistics of making an investment.
Our goal at Mutiny Funds is to help investors maximize the long-term growth of their portfolios. Unlike most, we believe that combining defensive-minded strategies such as long volatility with offensive-minded strategies providing the best opportunity for long-term capital growth, while reducing drawdowns in the interim.
Copyright © 2024 Mutiny Funds, LLC is a registered commodity pool operator and commodity trading advisor with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and member of the National Futures Association. This website is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. All opinions expressed are solely the opinions of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Mutiny Funds, LLC, their affiliates, co-managers of their funds, or companies featured.Investing is risky, and you are reminded that futures, commodity trading, forex, volatility, options, derivatives , and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors, and you should not rely on any of the information as a substitute for the exercise of your own skill and judgment in making such a decision on the appropriateness of such investments.
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This website provides information regarding the following commodity pools: The Long Volatility Fund LLC and The Cockroach Fund, LLC (collectively the “US Funds”) and Mutiny Funds Cayman Ltd. (together with the US Funds, collectively the “Fund(s)“), which are managed and operated by Attain Portfolio Advisors LLC and Mutiny Funds LLC (the “Managers”). Investments in the US Funds are only available to Accredited Investors as defined in Rule 501 of Regulation D of The Securities Act of 1933. Investments in Mutiny Funds Cayman Ltd. are only available to non-US investors and U.S. Persons which are tax-exempt organizations described in Section 501(c)(3) of United States Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended. This content is being provided for information and discussion purposes only and should not be seen as a solicitation for said Fund(s). Any information relating to the Fund(s) is qualified in its entirety by the information included in the Fund’(s)’ offering documents and supplements (collectively, the “Memorandum(s)”) described herein. Any offer or solicitation of the Fund(s) may be made only by delivery of the Memorandum(s). Before making any investment in the Fund(s), you should thoroughly review the Memorandum(s) with your professional advisor(s) to determine whether an investment in the Fund(s) are suitable for you in light of your investment objectives and financial situation. The Memorandum(s) contain important information concerning risk factors, including a more comprehensive description of the risks and other material aspects of an investment in the Fund(s), and should be read carefully before any decision to invest is made. This site is not intended for European investors, and nothing herein should be taken as a solicitation of such investors. Use the following links to view the full terms of use and risk disclaimer and our privacy policy.
