John Chung

Lyford Group International's primary investment approach focuses on liquid tactical trading to complement the firm's fundamental macro-economic views. They manage the Lyford Fund, a discretionary, tactically opportunistic global macro hedge fund that actively manages positions in equity indices, fixed-income, commodity and currency instruments using fundamental research and technical analysis. Lyford primarily trades highly liquid futures and options. A large proportion of the fund's assets are maintained in cash. The fund seeks double-digit returns while controlling volatility and maintains a negative correlation to most major indices and benchmarks. The Lyford Fund has two different books. Up to 30% of the positions consist of longer-term theme trades of one week to 3 months. These trades represent strong views that the firm expects to play out over time and are sized to handle intra-day volatility without breaching set risk parameters. All positions that Lyford anticipates will have more than 80% correlation to one another are part of the same theme. The remaining 70% of the book focuses on a short-term tactical approach that seeks to take advantage of events on the economic calendar, intra-day price action, asset reversion to the mean, anticipation of correlation breakdowns across a variety global markets and dynamic hedging of long-term themes. Lyford's risk management efforts include a strict stop-loss of 3% of net asset value on all longer-term theme trades and from 10 to 50 basis points of NAV on all short-term trades. The also have an overall hard stop-loss of 6% of NAV in any one month. Once they approach the 6% level, the firm begins to pare down positions in the portfolio and reduce their value at risk. If that level is reached at any time, they will close out all positions. The liquidity of the instruments Lyford trades allows them to collapse the portfolio in a very short time span. Lyford performs a value at risk analysis of their portfolio on a daily basis using Riskmetrics. The previous 30 trading days are used to calculate the correlation of assets. Riskmetrics is also used to determine how a position would increase or decrease the value at risk in the firm's total portfolio and a 95% VaR is closely evaluated. Lyford also performs an internal risk analysis based on their view of correlation and volatility and converts all assets to an S&P futures contract equivalent weighting. The portfolio usually has an average margin/equity ratio of 10%.