The Derivative · Sep 24, 2026 · 1h 24m · 1h 4m saved
With Adam Butler, Chief Investment Officer at ReSolve Asset Management Global and a member of the Return Stacked ETFs leadership team
Adam Butler expects US stocks to deliver a negative return over the next decade, and said that if it were up to him he would own nothing but trend following.
Most market talk about AI risk asks whether the doom forecasts are true. Butler's point is about who they serve: the warnings that frighten the public also advertise how capable the models are, at a time when Anthropic and OpenAI are each preparing a multi-trillion-dollar IPO.
"And so a lot of the same narratives that serve to cause panic and fear are the same as those that demonstrate just how incredibly powerful these models are getting and can be."
Adam Butler, Chief Investment Officer at ReSolve Asset Management Global, spoke on The Derivative, RCM Alternatives' podcast, on his first visit since May 2023, when GPT-4 had just come out. The Return Stacked ETF family he helps run launched its first fund shortly before that interview and passed $1.6 billion the day before this one.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 84 minutes of audio, 19 minutes of reading.
Here are the 11 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Butler expects a negative return on stocks over the next decade, possibly deeply negative
He already holds all the equity exposure he wants through the firms he owns
Doom stories help the labs, which are preparing multi-trillion-dollar IPOs and could use the fear to win rules against Chinese open models
The real near-term risk is cyberattacks, run from a private machine with open models whose safeguards have been removed
Sandboxed agents coordinated to escape, passing messages through directory names until one gained admin rights at Hugging Face
AGI arrived a while ago, in his view; the new question is recursive self-improvement
Markets are the original paperclip maximizer, chasing one objective unless a competent state constrains them
No frontier lab has a moat, because switching between models costs him nothing
The only case for owning them is a bet that one reaches recursive self-improvement first
Mass job loss is a failure of imagination, not an inevitability, and he pointed to China's 2030 and 2035 goals as the contrast
1. Return Stacked At $1.6B
The host opened by congratulating Butler on the fund business. Butler said the first ETF launched just before his 2023 appearance and the family now has six or seven funds.
Return Stacked ETFs passed $1.6 billion the day before the recording
"Yeah, it was just before that we had launched our first ETF and so now I think we've got six or seven in the family and yeah we went over 1.6 billion yesterday." — Adam Butler
Asked whether AI deserved the credit, Butler said the design keeps investors in core market exposures. He described the largest fund's structure.
The biggest fund pairs full equity exposure with full trend exposure
"So, you've got this core US equity our biggest fund has 100% in core US equities and then 100% managed futures trend stacked on top." — Adam Butler
US stocks have had a strong run, which he said owes a lot to AI and hyperscaler spending. Over the past year commodities have picked up too: energy surged after Iran, copper is breaking out to new highs and grains are running. He read it as the start of a general inflationary cycle and a competition for resources, partly driven by the AI build-out and partly by geopolitics. The host added misallocated investment to the list and pointed listeners to the show's earlier episode on copper.
