Shiraz Lakhi

Shiraz Lakhi is a Dubai based entrepreneur & investor, specializing in market neutral hedge strategy implementation and long/short equity ‘pairs trading’ analysis. Having developed a comprehensive, self-directed knowledge in equities, fixed-income, energy, currencies, and index futures markets – and more specifically, inter-market co-integration relationship study between markets – Shiraz has gained a continually evolving, wide-ranging field of experience, directly applied to a fully hedged, diversified portfolio of investments, combining both medium and long term positions in undervalued entrepreneurial/innovative businesses exhibiting strong operating & free-cash-flow metrics, fully hedged through ‘market neutral’ pairs-trading positions.

An entrepreneur at heart, Shiraz is also co-founder and CEO of tradepilot.com – a free-to-use portal for traders and investors, designed to identify newly developing equity trading ideas, based on technical analysis ‘cluster’ signals. The signals can be productively combined with core fundamental analysis equity watch lists, to better ‘time’ entries into stocks. Shiraz has also developed the popular and free-to-use ‘trend indicator’ (short term trend measure for individuals stocks), and the ‘xTrend indicator’ (short term trend measure for S&P based, broader market sentiment), both integrated into the tradepilot service. The portal continues to evolve and grow, with current developmental phase expanding the service into a valued social network portal for traders and investors to share real-time ‘fundamental/technical mix’ trade ideas and information.

In 2010 Shiraz launched his holding company Shiraz Lakhi & Co (Dubai), reconciling all subsidiary brands (including the tradepilot service, and – currently in development – clickcharts.com, amongst others) under one umbrella. Based at the Knowledge Village, Dubai, Shiraz Lakhi & Co brings together a small, focused, global network of talented individuals with the single purpose of developing continually evolving, innovative financial metrics (reconciling both fundamental and technical analysis approaches), towards improving the elusive ‘alpha’ in trading and investment. Research and analytics borne from this effort, is directly implemented and applied towards systems developed and targeted to market neutral incubator phase hedge fund clients.

Three years ago, initially as an academic exercise, Shiraz commenced research on hedged pair trading (long & short, dollar-neutral equity pairs trading), to establish whether such fundamental arbitrage analysis could be profitably applied to the modern-day equity market, objectively neutralizing the increasing broader market/volatility risk. The results proved conclusive. Currently in development, the tradepilot portal will expand into deeper fundamental analysis screening based on over 80 key metrics, allow investors to perform real-time filtering for fundamentally superior ‘bullish’ equities, based on core operating-income/margin growth, free-cash-flow-yield, price-to-earnings-growth, price-to-tangible-book-value ratios, and advanced debt/capital ratios, which establish fundamentally solid pre-qualified companies, to be traded ‘against’ the S&P index. The ‘long Stock / short S&P’, dollar neutral ‘pairs trade’ objectively helps investors to neutralize the broader market risk, and makes available valuable real-time hedge strategies and tools to the astute, independent self-directed trader, once reserved only for hedge funds and institutional trading desks.

Shiraz is an active self-directed investor, managing a proportion of capital directly employed into hedged pair trades, based on both fundamental and statistical (mean reversion) strategies. The balance of capital is employed in long term SME capital projects, and investments, based primarily on the core operating-yield and free-cash-flow-yield metrics, coupled with technical entry timing tools. Investors may view latest trading articles written by Shiraz Lakhi at SeekingAlpha. Trade ideas & alerts are also published in real-time at StockTwits, and at Shiraz Lakhi’s personal blog page right here at shirazlakhi.com