Alan Brazil

In 2007, Alan Brazil started a strategy group at Goldman that offered both internal and external investors a perspective on macro themes. Clients thought his views added value because they were unique versus their current sources of macro thinking.  They thought that Alan combined the perspectives of an economist, a trader, a trading desk risk manager and a researcher to create a single consistent view of macro themes and provided asymmetric trade ideas to position for those themes. Over the years many of those views and recommended positioning have been successful. One such example became public in November 2011 when the Wall Street Journal published a piece on my negative views on European Banks, which was the opposite of the house research view at the time.  Part of the success of Alan's ideas can be attributed to his learning about the art of investing from many of the top investors in the world from long/short equity hedge funds to large real money asset managers. One of those painful but crucial lessons was adding probably the most important part of any trade: identifying a catalyst that would drive the realization of a trade.