The VS Asset Management team has decades of trading experience in equities, options and futures, and deep technical knowledge of the markets. Our principals include individuals with backgrounds, including PhDs, in theoretical physics, mathematics and software development.

The VS Asset team is driven by awareness that theory alone isn’t enough. There must also be trading logic to turn theory into actionable trading guidance. We believe that this combination of Trader Logic and Theoretical Knowledge enables VS Asset to find and mitigate the hidden risks that others miss.

How We Began

VS Asset was founded by Dr. Samir Varma in 2001 to commercialize strategies for the US Equities markets. Dr. Varma first became involved in trading in 1995 after receiving his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas. He initially created models utilizing chaos theory to trade S&P 500 futures. By 1997, his Commodity Trading Advisor, Chaos Systems, was #5 in Barron’s CTA rankings. He has since extended his trading into equities and options and been a part of multiple proprietary trading ventures.

Throughout this time, Dr. Varma has remained committed to his research in finance and market structure, with a special emphasis on risk. One of the aspects of modern investment methods that bothered him for a very long time was the impermanence of “trading edges”. Every advantage gained would be quickly arbitraged away by other players also discovering the same source of advantage.

After much research he discovered that while traditional sources of advantage (growth, value, fundamental analysis, technical analysis, etc) would disappear when people exploited them, risk remained impervious. This is because risk, particularly catastrophic risk, is caused by herding—when many players do the same thing at the same time. This is what causes panics, crashes, and short squeezes. In all those cases, due to restrictions such as margin calls and redemptions, market players are forced to take actions that they know have a negative value to their portfolios —actions typically avoided but nonetheless forced.

Such behavior cannot be made to go away even when it is “obvious” to everyone. And if that was the case, modeling risk was the best way to create a source of competitive advantage that could not be arbitraged away. This led to a 13 year research effort to find a method of modeling risk that had a consistent edge and, unlike traditional models, did not break during panics, manias and crashes.

This research culminated in the current Risk Timing™ system that went live in 2016 and has been successfully traded since that time.

What is Trader Logic?

Trader Logic creates rules, not formulas, to buy and sell. Formulas fail, sometimes catastrophically, by leaving gaps or market inefficiencies that can be exploited.

Examples of models and formulas that have both failed in times of crisis and consistently left gaps for traders to exploit:

• Black-Scholes - Mathematical model for pricing options

• Almgren-Chriss - Mathematical model for optimal order execution

• Modern Risk Models - Mathematical models for quantifying and controlling risk

VS Asset’s Risk Timing™ rules classify risk and execute trades by taking advantage of the market inefficiencies inherent in modern risk products.