Taking a glance at the headlines in Europe, all I see is the world’s “woes” cropping up. Either we’re dealing with cowboys, or the market sentiment is decidedly bearish. I’ll let you be the judge…

• Bloomberg: “Worst Earnings Letdown Since Crisis Adding To Europe Stock Woes”
• Channel NewsAsia: “European Stocks Hammered By Finance Sector Woes”
• MarketWatch: “European Stocks Slump To 3 Month Low As China Woes Deepen”

Certainly, if we were to look for positive news on European equities, we’d be looking for a needle in a haystack.

This is a fertile playground for my good friend and fund manager Brad McFadden. Brad has been in the trenches of the financial markets for over 18 years, spending 10 of those years managing a US$100 million portfolio and earning a 20% annual return on capital during his tenure.

More recently his global macro portfolio more than doubled in value between 2009 and 2015, outperforming the Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index, which tracks the average performance of hedge fund managers around the world, by 16.42 percentage points.

Today Brad manages the Asymmetric Opportunities Fund that is focused on profiting from asymmetric opportunities in the currency, bond and public equity markets.

Brad and I recently discussed Europe, currencies and the current market environment. Among other things, Brad shared with me his investment idea to profit from the large scale pessimism in European stocks today. At the same time, his strategy can be employed to synthetically short the euro so you’re killing two birds with one stone.

You can listen to the entire conversation with Brad McFadden here (or alternatively on iTunes here):

To find out more about the Asymmetric Opportunities Fund please email Chris

– Chris

“See the investment world as an ocean and buy where you get the most value for your money.” – Sir John Templeton