Our Story.
Mike Trounce started Trounceflow in 2016 with a simple but powerful idea: positioning is 'a thing' and can be measured and monetised.
Let's take a step back. Most foreign (developed market) participants in the bond markets of emerging market sovereign and corporate issuers are "benchmark-aware" (they report their performance relative to a benchmark, such as the JPMorgan GBI-EM Global Diversified index) and as such, they "take a position" (they try and beat their benchmark by allocating more or less (than benchmark) to different issuers, currencies, and other kinds of risks). This can give rise to situations in which the aggregate foreign investor is "overweight" or "underweight". Because there are bounds (constraints) on these tracking errors / deviations from benchmark, it is more likely than not that, in the end, extreme positions will revert back to normal, and probably in a disorderly fashion, giving rise to trading opportunities.
The big idea at Trounceflow is that, if you could know what this positioning looks like ahead of time, you can be well prepared for the potential disorderly situations, and that, with Trounceflow, you can! We capture data on the positioning of all the market participants to try and infer what positioning looks like. It's a big job, but we have written software and have retained analysts to do exactly that. We have been serving some of the world's most demanding and sophisticated buy-side and sell-side investors since 2016, and would love to hear more from you if you are interested in flows, positions, market structure and the bond markets of emerging economies.