Background

Variant Perception was founded by a team of market professionals with decades of combined experience within asset management, proprietary trading and the qualitative/quantitative modeling disciplines.

Our macroeconomic commentaries provide a high level of value to any firm or individual that is interested in using independent research to aid decision making, formulate trading strategies or manage assets.

What distinguishes Variant Perception from other research providers?

> We use leading indicators to give us leading insights, allowing us to have an advanced read on the business cycle and recessions in real time.

Economists are terrible at predicting recessions - 9 out of 10 economists missed the last four recessions. Economists miss recessions because they focus on lagging indicators, rather than the leading indicators we reference.

> We are independent, highly data-driven and agnostic. We are not wedded to any point of view and follow our leading indicators even if the consensus disagrees.

Economists also miss recessions because of the vintage data problem; they reference heavily revised data. Our data-driven and forward-looking analysis removes any reliance on data that will later be revised, and our independence allows us to always take the agnostic viewpoint.

> We only write about outliers and good trade ideas; the blow ups and potential success stories.

Wall Street research is produced by rote and is too copious. An economist for France will write about France regardless of the importance or relevance of the content.

> Our style is crisp and short with powerful charts. We respect our client’s time and believe the data tells the most powerful story.

We are not fans of convoluted research, and we wish anyone luck in finding what is important in an 85+ page report, or knowing which of twenty daily emails is important! We keep our reports succinct and let the data tell the story.

Approach

Our approach is data-driven. We try to focus on data that has historically done an extremely good job at predicting GDP and industrial output nine months forward. We don’t need to be able to predict the future; we need to be able to read the past by finding and focusing on leading indicators, leaving others to fret about lagging indicators. As long as we focus on these leading relationships, we feel confident in our forecasts.

There are a few things that we know do not change:

> Yield Curve - The yield curve is by far the best predictor of economic growth in most economies of the world.

> Volatility - Volatility follows the credit cycle. High credit growth precedes defaults and higher volatility.

> Policy Effects - Monetary and fiscal policies have lagged effects on economic growth and inflation.

> Credit and Bubbles - Negative real interest rates precede excess credit creation and bubbles.

Additionally, we draw on hundreds of economic charts and data-sets, as well as valuable proprietary indices and market-timing models, to inform and justify our analysis.