Philip & Allan Maymin – Compounding Through Risk, Not Return (S7E35)

In this episode, I speak with Philip and Allan Maymin, co-Heads of Global Asset Allocation at Janus Henderson.

Philip and Allan run the asset allocation group founded at Janus Henderson by Nobel laureate Myron Scholes more than a decade ago, and they've arrived there by wonderfully different routes — Philip through LTCM, academia, and behavioral analytics; Allan through high-frequency trading, derivatives, and prop desks.

At the heart of their process is a simple but subversive idea. As Philip put it in our pre-call, "people live in an average return world, and they ought not." What matters to investors is compound growth — and they believe that the surest way to improve compounding isn't chasing higher returns, it's managing risk. Drawdowns destroy compounding and avoiding them is the more tractable lever.

They connect theory to practice through the options market. Calls and puts embed the market's collective, forward-looking view of risk, making them one of the richest sources of information available to an asset allocator. We discuss how they extract those signals and propagate them across more than 4,000 assets to build portfolios around client objectives rather than benchmarks.

Please enjoy my conversation with Philip and Allan Maymin.