Principles
All of the activities at Robolyst operate according to the philosophy and beliefs reflected in the following principles.Business principles
Alignment of interests
We do not exist to take wealth from our clients. We put our clients’ interests ahead of our own and treat all clients equally. We achieve this by investing the majority of our own personal net worth as a client in this fund. Put simply, we have skin in the game, a lot of it.
Transparency
We believe it is your right to know how your wealth is being used and it is our obligation to tell you how we are growing your wealth. We do not create value by being secretive and sneaking around like thieves. We create value by sharing ideas, creating new understanding about how the world works and cooperating with each other.
Time for our families
Our whole purpose for being is to build wealth for our clients and their families. Whatever we choose to do in life, the most important aspect is the family we are a part of. We believe that working for the sake of money is pointless. The wealth we build together is a means to an end. The wealth frees us to spend our time with the people who matter most to us.
Fee arrangement
We fundamentally believe our fees should compensate us fairly for the value we provide and only if value is provided. Our fee arrangement should incentivise us to act solely in our clients’ best interests.
Investment principles
Economics is a science
We approach our activities in a methodical and scientific manner. New understanding and decisions are backed with evidence, specifically, backed with data. We believe that we can approach the topic of economics and investing in a scientific manner. Our investment decisions are codified, tested, defendable and automated. We do not guess or perform any kind of discretionary trading.
Knowledge advantage
The only possible edges you can have are either knowledge, speed or access. For Robolyst, our advantage is knowledge. Understanding the world is what we are about, and we do that with data and independent research. We believe we are able to collect and interpret data better than the majority of people. We go through an intense process of collecting, cleaning, cross-referencing, transformation and quality control for us to consider data reliable.
Minimise risk
Making money when markets are rising is easy, making money when they are falling is hard. The number one way we could erode wealth is by not controlling our risk and suffering permanent loss of value. A key part of this business is survival, making sure our risks are controlled at all costs so that no-matter what markets do, we survive the day when others do not.
Uncorrelated returns
The biggest money-maker in this game is combining uncorrelated returns. A core component of our process is generating new uncorrelated return streams. These are combined to produce positive expected returns with a lower expected risk. Generating these new uncorrelated returns is not easy and we believe the systems and processes we build enable us to do this relatively easily.
Invest for the long term
The only way to gain an overnight fortune is through taking huge risks and getting lucky. We believe real wealth is built over time and we approach investing with a long-term outlook.
Investing is a non-zero-sum game
Many people believe that investing or trading is a zero-sum game. That is, if you make money, someone else lost money. It is true that you can participate in markets with strategies that are zero-sum. However, we believe that great investing is not zero-sum. We believe that great investing means everyone wins. When we deploy capital, we want the people who receive it to win so that we win.
For example, we could choose to trade high frequency or on a more longer term economical timeframe. High frequency trading is all about speed and scraping money from other people’s accounts. That’s zero sum. Instead we choose to figure out how the world works so we can allocate capital. We, of course, buy at the lowest price we can. But, the aim isn’t to steal money from the seller, it’s to profit from good business.