HardAssetsInvestor

Mike Norman: Hey everyone, welcome back to HardAssetsInvestor.com. I’m Mike Norman, your host, here with the second part of my interview with Philip Silverman, managing partner at Kingsview Management. So, you're a trader; you're out there making the bets in the market. If somebody were going to come to you now, sort of a novice or someone, saying they want to get involved in commodities, what would you tell them? How would you tell them to go about it?

Philip Silverman, managing partner, Kingsview Management (Silverman): Well, if someone wanted to get involved, I would recommend that they invest with a commodity trading adviser, CTA, a professional who does this, and have the CTA manage their money in a separate pattern of funds.

Norman: What about ETFs? Do you follow any ETFs, exchange-traded funds?

Silverman: I follow the ETFs, the GLD, the silver one, some different currency ones. But, I find that it’s better to invest straight in the commodity markets, either through the futures or the options, because you get a better correlation. Sometimes with these ETFs, the way that they're constructed, they don’t act exactly as you think they might.

And especially if you're moving towards some of those levered ones, they tend not to perform as you would think. They break down a little bit in how they're performing, like the natural gas one has had tremendous problems over the year. So I would recommend educating yourself and getting into the commodities market because it’s a tremendously liquid market. And there’s a lot of great opportunity.

And for us, we focus a lot on the S&P 500 futures, for which the transactions costs are very attractive. The liquidity is high. And it’s been a very good market to be in, because of those things.

Norman: So you just do straight futures? You’re also a big options trader.

Silverman: More so options than futures. Typically, futures are more to hedge our options unless we have some short-term quantitative trading strategies. And we’re seeing some really interesting things in the options right now, with the S&P.

Norman: Volatility … well not in the S&P, but in the commodity options, volatility must be at an extreme right now.

Silverman: Oh yes. It’s good. Well, in the S&P, it’s more very low because of …

Norman: So, are you selling vol.? Or buying vol.?

Silverman: Well typically, we have a short vol. bent to our strategy because we’re looking to, a lot of times, profit in the options. But we don’t take outright naked bets on volatility, because that leaves you vulnerable to volatility expansions if the market were to have a black-swan-type event. We stay away. I recommend that investors certainly do not try to go out and short naked options, leaving yourself exposed to those rare events. And so, we take a short bent on volatility, but we always hedge our positions in some sort of a spread, or depending on the market direction, whether we’re shorting call volatility or put volatility.

But an interesting thing that we’re seeing, that we’re recommending to some people, is that if you're owning stocks, or commodities right now, and you're going along for the ride, volatility is fairly cheap, in that you can buy put protection at a pretty good price, given this rally. We’re bumping up towards highs on the year in the stock market. Many people follow the VIX, the volatility index; that’s getting pretty low compared to where it’s been recently. Historically I wouldn’t say it’s low, but where it’s been for the last couple years.