Para Bellum Advisors was invited to speak at EQD Asia 2025 in Hong Kong, joining a standing-room audience for a grounded, practitioner-focused session on option markets across the US macro and micro landscape.
Mike Duncan spoke alongside Wilson Er and Reggie Xu, with Nicholas Smith from Nasdaq moderating the session.
Session Highlights
The discussion focused on several areas where institutional portfolios are feeling pressure:
- Macro noise vs micro signals: Why high-level narratives mask the real drivers of positioning, earnings dispersion, and flow-dominated market structure.
- US valuations – grounded vs delusional: Where valuations still make sense and where they rely on heroic assumptions.
- Portable alpha in practice: How it works when implemented properly and why most implementations fail quietly from structural drag.
- Tail hedges and monetisation discipline: Why tail hedges don’t fail because of the market, but because teams lack a pre-agreed monetisation plan.
- Passive flows and reflexivity: How index flows create predictable dislocations that can be used or avoided.
Practitioner Papers Prepared for the Event
As part of the preparation, Para Bellum Advisors produced three research papers that shaped the panel’s direction:
- Turning Convexity into Cash: The discipline of active tail-hedge management and why convexity only creates value when the team knows how to monetise it.
- The Tail Hedge Playbook: How CIOs secure liquidity during market stress when everyone else is selling into a void.
- Reclaim Performance: Portable alpha as a capital-efficiency tool and how to eliminate the structural drag that sinks most overlays.
Links for download here:
The audience engagement was strong, with detailed questions on execution, monetisation strategy, and the operational realities of hedge programmes.
For organisations reviewing their hedge efficiency, liquidity strategy, or alpha overlay design, Para Bellum Advisors provides hands-on advisory support grounded in real market experience.
Event Link
For more details on EQD Asia 2025, visit the official event page:
https://eqderivatives.com/event/asia-eqd-2025