Writing
Peer-reviewed papers, books, and essays by VS Asset Management's principals. Hand-curated.
Peer-reviewed papers
- Samir Varma, Dead-band Monetary Policy: A Practitioner's Case against Point-targeting, Business Economics (Palgrave/NABE) 2026, online-first. A 50-bp Fed rate move sustained a year moves inflation by less than the real-time measurement noise band — an "inaction band" for the target rate that quantifies the practitioner objection to point-targeting. Read: Springer (subscribers) · Free view (publisher) · Download PDF (SSRN) · FT letter (Sep 2026).
- Samir Varma, From Model Output to Portfolio Authority, Journal of Portfolio Management (forthcoming) special issue on Communicating with Clients, Boards, and Regulators in the Age of Complexity. A one-page Portfolio Authority Record for investment committees deciding whether a model should manage real capital. Turns model-generated weights into a bounded decision — how much capital the model may manage, for how long, under what conditions, and what replaces it if those conditions fail. Accepted 2026-09-06 by editor Frank J. Fabozzi; DOI and Version of Record pending. Publisher policy does not permit a public preprint; subscriber-only link will follow at publication.
- Samir Varma, Within-Venue Monitoring of BTC/USDT Liquidity and Resiliency on Binance: A Queueing-Theoretic Framework, Journal of Risk and Financial Management 19(5), 2026, art. 372. [Zenodo (code, current snapshot)] [Zenodo (code, earlier snapshot)] [Zenodo (replication pipeline)] A queueing-theoretic framework for tracking BTC/USDT liquidity, directional pressure, and recovery within a single venue on Binance.
- Samir Varma, The False Promise of Drawdown Rules: New Evidence and a Better Framework, Journal of Portfolio Management 52(1), 2025, pp. 145–161. Why "if you're down X%, you're out" rules are statistically invalid and reliably increase losses, and what to do instead.
Working papers
- Samir Varma, Destruction as Commitment: Burning Unsold Luxury Inventory and the Economics of a Ban, SSRN Working Paper (2026). Working paper on the economics of a luxury-destruction ban.
Books and chapters
- Samir Varma, The Science of Free Will, Iff Books (Collective Ink) (2025). Determinism, agency, and what 'free will' could coherently mean. Foreword by Tyler Cowen. ISBN 978-1-80341-731-8. Buy on Amazon.
- Samir Varma, From Investor Psychology to Strategy Design: Evidence, Mechanisms, and Implementation, IntechOpen (2026). Editor and chapter contributor to the volume Investor Behavior and Investment Strategies. My chapter is published online-first; further chapter submissions to the volume are open.
Essays
- The Emperor Has No (Prime) Factors, Substack (2026). Fourth in the series auditing the stories quantitative finance tells itself.
- Your Thermostat Knows Something the Fed Doesn't, Substack (2026). The plain-language companion to the dead-band paper above — the Fed fine-tunes at a scale its tools cannot resolve, and slept through the loudest alarm in forty-five years.
- Scrooge McDuck Goes to Stockholm, Substack (2026). Part 2 of two. The real case for capital taxes exists, and is far narrower than the proposals pretend.
- You Can't Tax Scrooge McDuck, Substack (2026). Part 1 of two. A flat rate on capital hides a bite that grows with the holding horizon, under every design on the table.
- Trading 000: Your Thesis Cannot Post Margin, Substack (2026). How a -67% month separated AI foresight from risk management.
- The Emperor Has No Benchmark, Substack (2026). On why alpha depends on two things, not one.
- Big If True, Substack (2026). Can a government roll its debt forever? — a forgotten French perpetual bond is a strange piece of evidence.
- The Emperor Has No Identification, Substack (2026). Why asset demand elasticity estimates don't mean what you think.
- I Won't Show You Mine, Substack (2026). Why a pod-shop's standard IP contract was a walk-away in 2005 — and why the same form is landing on other researchers' desks today.
- Bitcoin Doesn't Bounce Back, It Slouches, Substack (2026). Plain-language companion to the JRFM Bitcoin liquidity paper — what queueing theory says about how BTC recovers from stress.
- The Conservation Law of Tax Alpha, Substack (2026). On the structural limits of tax-alpha strategies.
- The Simplicity Tax, Substack (2026). Why retail investors pay more for simpler products, and what that reveals about behavioral finance.
- The Emperor Has No Alpha, Substack (2026). Why specific trades depreciate and the firm-building implications.
- The Stop-Loss That Stops Gains, Substack (2026). Plain-language version of the JPM drawdown-rules paper.
- So You Want to Be a Quant, Substack (2026). Source of the Risk Manager koan adapted on principles.
- The $50 Trillion Question, Substack (2025). On whether Wall Street's favorite recession predictor still works.
- A Perfectly Efficient Market, Substack (2025). Why a perfectly efficient market is incompatible with meritocracy.
Physics
Personal scholarly work by the firm's principals in theoretical physics. It is unrelated to the funds, to Risk Timing®, and to anything the firm manages, and is listed here only for completeness.
- Samir Varma, Leading four-Goldstone inelasticity in custodial partial waves, Physics Letters B 2026, art. 140915. [Zenodo (code and numerical results)]
- Samir Varma, Quantum Theory meets Gravity, IntechOpen (2026).
More publications
Full publication list, including physics, AI, and patents, at samirvarma.com/publications.