Blair Hull

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Blair Hull founded Hull Investments, LLC in 1999 and currently serves as the firm's chairman. Hull Investments was created to serve as a family office for three generations of the Hull family and acts as parent company to a number of financial entities.
Blair Hull created Hull Tactical Asset Allocation, LLC in 2013. HTAA operates an actively managed Exchange-Traded Fund and uses advanced algorithms as well as macro and technical indicators to anticipate future market returns.
Hull also founded Ketchum Trading, LLC and served as its chairman. Ketchum Trading, which was operational from 2009-2018, was a privately held, proprietary trading firm, based in Chicago that made markets and traded in futures, options, cash equities and exchange-traded funds.
Before launching Ketchum Trading, LLC, Hull was the founder of Hull Trading Company and served as that firm’s chairman and chief executive officer.
Hull Trading helped to pioneer the application of computer technology to listed derivatives trading and used technological innovations and quantitative models to become one of the world’s top market-making firms, trading on 28 exchanges in nine countries. At its peak, Hull Trading Company moved nearly a quarter of the entire daily market volume on some markets, executed over 7 percent of the index options traded in the United States, 3 percent of the equity options, and 1 percent of all shares traded daily on the New York Stock Exchange. It employed more than 250 people.
Hull has worked in the trading industry for nearly 40 years. He is known for having made millions buying stock market index option contacts in the Chicago trading pits during Black Monday, for which Trader Monthly magazine recognized him as having executed one of “The 40 Greatest Trades of All Time,” and Worth Magazine named him one of “Wall Street’s 25 Smartest Players.” In 2014, Hull was awarded the Joseph W. Sullivan Options Industry Achievement Award from the Options Industry Council in recognition of his outstanding lifetime contributions to the growth and integrity of the U.S. options market.
In June of 2015, Hull launched an exchange-traded fund, the Hull Tactical U.S. ETF.
== Background ==
Hull founded Hull Trading Company in 1985 as one of the earliest computerized trading firms in the derivatives arena and served as the firm’s chief executive officer until he sold the company to Goldman Sachs in 1999 for $531 million. 
In late 1976, Hull started his career as a market maker on the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. In 1980, he moved to Chicago and became a market maker on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), and he was named one of the CBOE's first Designated Primary Market Makers.
 
He has also served on the board of directors for the Chicago Board Options Exchange from 1988 to 1990, and The Options Clearing Corporation from 1992 to 1998.
Hull ran for for the U.S. Senate in 2004, but lost the Democratic primary to a then little-known state senator named Barack Obama.
== Education ==
Hull earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MBA from Santa Clara University. He also graduated from the Harvard OPM Program.
==Videos, Interviews & Speeches==
*Cancel Crash Documentary - Blair Hull and the 1987 Stock Market Crash - Tastytrade.com
* Blair Hull Receives Joseph Sullivan Award - Options Insider Radio Network
== Academic Publications==
White Paper
*A Practitioner's Defense of Return Predictability, by Blair Hull and Xiao Qiao, March 23, 2015
Abstract: 
"We revisit the issue of return predictability and show there is substantial predictive power in combining forecasting variables. Drawing from twenty variables that have been proposed in the return predictability literature, we use correlation screening to combine the variables and demonstrate forecasting power at the six-month horizon. We illustrate the economic significance of return predictability through a walk forward simulation in which positions in SPY are taken proportional to the model forecast equity risk premium. Our simulated strategy yields annual returns more than twice that of the buy-and-hold strategy, and a Sharpe ratio four times as large. To eliminate look-ahead bias, we further perform the simulation including variables as they are discovered in the literature, and find similar annual returns and Sharpe ratios. Although a market-timing strategy outperforms the market, it is difficult to implement. We include a detailed discussion on the various difficulties in implementing such a market-timing strategy."
==External Links==
*Hull Investments, LLC
*Hull Tactical Funds, LLC
*Hull Tactical Asset Allocation, LLC
*Hull Family Foundation
== References ==	
Category:Hull Trading
Category:John Lothian Profiles