CIO & Founder, Convex Asset Management
3 dated public stances tracked since 2024-08-05, most recently 2024-08-05. Each line carries the date and the venue it came from; quotation marks mean verbatim. Methodology.
The stances below are c8alpha's editorial distillation of Noel Smith's public commentary — television, podcasts, and interviews — compiled by automated transcript analysis and dated to the episode they came from. They may lag the speaker's current view and may contain extraction errors. Text in quotation marks is verbatim from the episode; everything else is our paraphrase. Noel Smith is not affiliated with c8alpha and has not endorsed this page. Nothing here is investment advice.
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Raw direction-aware returns on public statements — long calls credited when the price rose, shorts when it fell, shorts capped at −100% — in a rising market this mostly measures who was long, not who has skill. Returns run from the stance date; calls are rarely closed publicly, so fixed 90-day / 180-day / 1-year horizons are used. A horizon shows only once it has fully matured, and only at 5+ scored stances. “% correct” is the share of those scored calls whose direction-aware return was positive at the horizon — in a rising market a bullish call is correct by default, so read it beside the market, not alone.
Scored calls
Every tracked call with at least one matured horizon: the rows behind the Returns
line above. A dash is a horizon that has not matured yet.
| Date | Name | Call | 90d | 180d | 1y |
|---|
| 2024-08-05 | VOL | short | +39.3% | +50.1% | +52.4% |
Most-argued themes
| Theme | Stances | Lean | Mix | Last |
|---|
| VOL | 1 | | 1 bearish | 2024-08-05 |
| YIELD CURVE STEEPENERS | 1 | | 1 bullish | 2024-08-05 |
Tracked stances
bullish / bearish is a view they argued; owns / short is a position they said they hold.
2024-08-05
short VOL / long VOL
other
Forward Guidance · video
Short front-month VIX (faster theta decay funds the carry) to finance long back-month VIX call spreads (tail-protection inventory), so that 11 months of quiet vol decay pays for the one month of explosive vol that delivers outsized gains
“if you can have one month of explosive volatility and 11 months of nothingness you can make money on the short end”
Global Stock Market Crash Shocks Wall Street | Volatility Veteran Noel Smith
2024-08-05
VOL
short
Forward Guidance · video
VIX at 65 is crisis-level pricing (2008/pandemic) inconsistent with the current macro shock (BOJ rate hike + carry-trade unwind), so implied vol is overly bid and should normalize lower
“I am selling volatility today I am opportunistically seeing where I think it's overly bid”
90d +39.3% · 180d +50.1% · 1y +52.4%
Global Stock Market Crash Shocks Wall Street | Volatility Veteran Noel Smith
2024-08-05
YIELD CURVE STEEPENERS
owns
Forward Guidance · video
BOJ hiking rates while the Fed is now expected to cut aggressively creates structural steepening pressure; Noel holds the trade with defensive names as hedges and has been publicly advocating it
“I think steepers are a good trade I think they will continue to be a good trade so we have that on”
Global Stock Market Crash Shocks Wall Street | Volatility Veteran Noel Smith
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