I have to say, I didn't know much about you until very recently I came across some of your work and I was really impressed by the sophistication of your analysis. And only through our conversations have I realized how young you are, which I think goes to show how smart you are. So it's great to have you on. And that also begs the question of how did you get to where you are now? How did you end up looking at the markets the way you're looking at markets now? What's your origin story, so to speak?

Jon Turek (02:28):

Yeah, so I always had a little bit of a niche for markets even going back to high school, but where I am now is that I was at an international school in Israel for university. And for two years prior, I worked at a fairly prominent New York macro fund. And then also I had been running this Cheap Convexity blog that allowed me to engage with a lot of very interesting market participants. And that's led the way to me starting my own research endeavour, also by continuing the Cheap Convexity blog on Substack, and also more weekly institutional product that caters more to hedge funds.

Bilal Hafeez (03:06):

Okay, great. Just out of interest, you tend to focus more on rates and effects and monetary policy and so on. Why did you focus on that rather than say equities, which some people go down the equities part?

Jon Turek (03:18):

Yeah. So I came at markets more from an economic perspective. Actually, my senior year of high school, I competed in the Fed challenge, which is a high school competition that takes place at the Federal reserve in New York. So more of my introduction was from the policy side and economic side. And I found that also the market effects and the intersectionality of it all was really interesting. So as opposed to a lot of people to come into markets, I started more on the econ side as a primary interest. And going through Fed speeches and reading Keynes and stuff like that was more of my origination.