Today’s guest is Lasse Pedersen, finance professor at Copenhagen Business School, principal at AQR Capital Management, and author of the new book “Efficiently Inefficient”. Pedersen earned his Ph.D. in finance from Stanford University and has over a decade of experience in the industry.
The conversation opens with an examination of the two opposing views on how markets operate. One view holds that markets are fully efficient and reflect real values, while the other contends that market prices are inefficient and tied more to investors’ emotions than anything else. Pedersen discusses his own interpretation — that markets are neither fully efficient nor fully inefficient, but rather a combination of the two — and that it’s this equilibrium that provides the stability needed for investors to make gains.
Michael Covel and Lasse Pedersen discuss the commonalities in the varied strategies of some of the most successful investors in the world, many of whom are interviewed in Lasse’s new book. One such commonality with these investors is their constant awareness of risk management, and the concept of gambler’s ruin. But at the same time, as Lasse is quick to point out, many of these financial legends freely admit that some of their greatest lessons were learned through their losing trades.
Other topics include the rise of quantitative investing, the role of hedge funds in the economy, and how leverage can effectively be used as an investment tool.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:

Discretionary vs. quantitative trading
The importance of sticking to your financial plan
The various investment styles of the successful
How reflexivity affects market prices
Backtesting to identify effective investment strategy
The role of hedge funds

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