Colm O'Shea
Colm O’Shea is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of COMAC Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in London. He is a global macro trader aiming to gain profit from forecasting trends in currency, interest rate, equity, and commodity markets. His usual time range for trades is one to three months and his portfolio will typically have 10 or 15 trades at one time. O’Shea doesn’t believe in trading rules; he thinks that successful traders adapt.
Colm O'Shea Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Founder and Chief Investment Officer
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FX Trader
Academic History
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BA in Economics
- O’Shea became interested in the market when he read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator aged 17.
- He was featured in Jack Schwager’s Hedge Fund Wizards. His chapter is called “Knowing When It’s Raining”.
- He doesn’t trade single equities, though he does trade equity indices.
- He uses stop losses, but relatively wide ones.
- He uses a return/risk measure he calls “Gain to Pain Ratio,” the sum of all monthly returns divided by the absolute value of the sum of all monthly losses.
- He says that the genius of Soros was his timing – knowing when to put on the “obvious” trade.
- He won’t take a position until he can see the trend.
- He believes that 90% of macro investing is implementation and flexibility.
- He says that Soros has the least regret of anyone he has met – he has no emotional attachment to his trades.
- He uses the controversial Value at Risk as a risk measure, an amount of loss within a specified time period to a given level of confidence (usually 95% or 99%).
- During the 2008 crisis, he used option straddles and strangles to “buy” FX volatility. He also bought short-term bonds and shorted long-term bonds, expecting the flat yield curve to steepen. In addition, he bought credit default swaps, expecting the yield on corporate bonds to increase more than that on Treasuries.