Interviewer: I’m here with Boris Marjanovic, managing director of New York-based hedge fund, A North Investments. Boris, thanks for joining us.

Boris Marjanovic: My pleasure. It’s great to be here.

Interviewer: How did you first get into the investment business?

Boris Marjanovic: In many ways, investing was ingrained in my DNA from a very early age. I opened up my first bank account when I was six years old, saving up my birthday/holiday money and building up a whopping $150 nest egg not long afterwards. When I was around ten years old, I saved up enough money to open up my first brokerage account and bought my first stock. Although I made mistakes and suffered some losses during these early formative years, I learned a lot and gained an enormous amount of experience. By the time I entered college to study finance, I already had nearly a decade of investment experience under my belt, more than many of my professors. However, for the most part, college was more of a hindrance than anything else. Most of the things I was forced to learn were just flimsy theories with no real world application. This is why I spent the majority of my time inside and outside of class researching new investment ideas and reading various books about investing, behavioral economics, financial engineering, and other similar topics. After my graduation, I knew that I didn’t want to work a boring 9-to-5 corporate job. I wanted to invest, but this time on a much larger scale than before. That’s when I decided to start A North Investments with my friend and business partner Adam Shalit – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Interviewer: Please tell us a little about A North Investments. What’s the fund’s investment strategy?

Boris Marjanovic: The fund uses a unique barbell investment allocation strategy that combines stock-market exposure with dynamic hedging. The dynamic hedging strategy generates profits when the overall market or individual stocks experience a severe correction or unexpected crash. In other words, the fund is set up in such a way that it’s able to be profitable regardless of market conditions.

Interviewer: It seems like the fund must generate incredible returns using this strategy.

Boris Marjanovic: The fund’s main goal is downside protection. If you protect the downside, the upside will take care of itself. The market does quite well over the long run; however, every decade there’s one or two really bad years which can wipe out a lot of those gains. That’s why, as I already mentioned, we use a dynamic hedging strategy at all times. It’s impossible to predict when the market will crash, but we’ll always be there to profit when it does occur. This enables the fund to generate healthy profits year after year with very low risk.

Interviewer: How do you make investment decisions?

Boris Marjanovic: That’s a great question. The fund’s incredible success can be attributed to the fact that there is very little human involvement when it comes to making investment decisions. The reason why over 80% of actively managed funds underperform passive index funds is because our human biases and emotions tend hamper our decision-making abilities. That’s why we’ve developed a sophisticated trading algorithm that removes flawed human decision making from the process and relies instead on smart, empirically proven systematic strategies. In a way, our fund is simply the best passive index fund with built-in crash protection.

Interviewer: Where would you like to take your business in terms of organization and assets under management?

Boris Marjanovic: A North Investments is one of the most technologically advanced hedge funds in the world. However, we must continue innovating in order to stay ahead of the competition and drive growth. Our goal is to break the $1 billion barrier in terms of assets under management by 2020. I know we can do it. We want to win. We want to be the best hedge fund in the world!

Interviewer: Boris Marjanovic, managing director of A North Investments, thanks again for joining us today.

Boris Marjanovic: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.