Financial Advisor Magazine Interview with Jerry Parker and Jon Robinson

The Blueprint Chesapeake Multi-Asset Trend ETF (ticker: TFPN), which is sub-advised by Blueprint Fund Management and Chesapeake Capital Corporation, was featured in a Financial Advisors Magazine Q&A. The interview between FA Magazine featured columnist Bill Hortz and TFPN’s Portfolio Managers, legendary Turtle Trader Jerry Parker and Jon Robinson, covered trend following, motivations behind launching this next-generation liquid alt, and comparing and contrasting of the ETF versus commodity trading advisors (CTAs).

Below are two excerpts from the full interview.

A ‘Near Fanatical’ Focus on Trend Following

Parker: “To me, trend following is a set of broad rules that make it possible for you to stay alive no matter what the market throws at you. I’ve been at this for 40 years now, enough time to see wild swings in market conditions, sentiment about all sorts of asset classes, and investor preferences. Trend following has been the consistent truth that, when repeated over and over and over, has allowed me to constantly adapt.”

The ‘Secret Sauce’ of Trend Following is Disciplined Execution

Robinson: “With trend following, there is no secret sauce. The rules we follow to make allocation decisions in Blueprint portfolios are not esoteric or complicated, in my view. They only become challenging when a financial advisor or investor must apply those rules in circumstances when every bone in their body is second-guessing the decision. The rules are relatively easy, but unwaveringly following them can be a difficult mental and emotional exercise.”

Motivation Behind Building a Next-Generation Liquid Alt ETF

Parker: “The potential for massive global exposure is an important pillar of what TFPN offers. Our trend following process can be applied to as many as 500 securities, futures, and forward contracts. And it is the equities component that I have found a lot of people are excited about, because how we trend follow individual stocks is unusual. The typical managed futures fund trades in indexes only. Our idea was to go a step further, unwrap the index, and trend follow the individual stocks. A CTA would not trade the dollar index versus all these wonderful currencies, or a commodity index rather than grains, metals, and meats – so why trade stocks at the index level?”

Avoiding Another ‘Lost Decade’

Parker: “With CTAs, you saw that they had this lost decade, a 10-year period of not being long the best-trending sector: stocks. We think we can prevent this from happening again with the single stock component of our strategy. Indexes do not give you much of a chance to find a big outlier in the way that including equities – long and short – can.

Financial Advisor Allocations in Client Portfolios

Robinson: “Accessibility was critically important to us when launching TFPN. It was the main driver behind the decision to offer this strategy in an ETF wrapper, since ETFs can offer tax, liquidity, and cost benefits.
The financial advisors we work with are most often looking to use TFPN as a satellite allocation in an overall portfolio, as well as to complement or mitigate losses in traditional exposure. Since the ETF structure permits tax-friendly treatment, it is appropriate for both their non-taxable and taxable accounts.”