Kristen VanGelder on the Money Life Podcast: “Dispersion is finally back”

Key Takeaways

• Dispersion — the lifeblood of hedge fund returns — has returned, creating a fundamentally different environment than the post-financial-crisis decade.
• Fundamental long/short equity and global macro offer the most compelling opportunity sets, driven by reduced competition among stock pickers and deglobalization’s effect on country-level economic conditions.
• An environment ripe for structural change favors forward-looking human judgment over approaches that assume historical patterns will hold.

“The big headline is that dispersion is finally back. And dispersion is really the lifeblood of hedge fund returns,” Evanston Capital Co-CIO Kristen VanGelder told host Chuck Jaffe on the Money Life podcast, which aired in July 2026.

Money Life with Chuck Jaffe is a daily podcast covering markets and investing for advisors and individual investors. In this interview, VanGelder explained why sentiment among hedge fund investors is excellent right now, how dispersion differs from market direction, and why today’s environment strongly favors active management over passive.

Why dispersion matters

Hedge funds go long securities they expect to rise and sell short securities they expect to fall, VanGelder explained — so it is the spread between securities, not the direction of markets, that matters most to hedge fund opportunity. Dispersion means individual securities are moving meaningfully versus one another, even when headline market volatility remains subdued. That is an environment where security selection really matters.

VanGelder contrasted today’s conditions with the decade after the global financial crisis: low volatility, low dispersion, markets marching steadily up and to the right — an environment that was much less exciting for hedge fund strategies. Today, she said, there is a ton of dispersion, a ton of change, and a much better opportunity set across a variety of hedge fund strategies and styles.

The technology sector offers a vivid illustration. Companies tied to the AI infrastructure buildout have appreciated dramatically, while business models perceived as more vulnerable to AI disruption have underperformed — creating exactly the kind of wide spread that managers with the right skill sets can capture.

Two standout strategies

VanGelder pointed to fundamental long/short equity and global macro as the most compelling opportunity sets today.

In long/short equity, market structure has reduced competition: capital has continued to flow into passive vehicles and shorter-term trading strategies while flowing out of fundamental stock selection strategies with medium-term horizons. That leaves greater opportunity for any stock picker with the luxury of investing beyond one month or one quarter. Managers with a degree of specialization — a region, a sector, or a handful of sectors — are best positioned to capitalize, narrowing the investment universe to allow a manager to become a true expert, mining that universe repeatedly for long and short ideas.

In global macro, VanGelder described deglobalization as a structural trend — driven by geopolitical tensions, national security imperatives, and supply chain vulnerabilities — that is producing more varied macroeconomic conditions across countries and, correspondingly, a much richer set of prospective trades. She noted the unusually complicated inflation picture, with near-term inflationary pressures set against the possibility that AI proves disinflationary over the long term if productivity gains materialize — a fascinating setup for managers skilled at macroeconomic forecasting and navigating competing narratives about the policy path.

Human judgement on the precipice of change

Asked whether AI changes the game for investment managers, VanGelder offered a measured view: AI can complement human judgment, but questions about structural change — which business models AI might disrupt, what deglobalization means for different countries — require real fundamental research rather than assuming historical patterns or correlations will hold. ​“We’re on the precipice of big changes,” she said. ​“And I think that’s what’s made the environment so much better for active management versus passive.”

VanGelder applied the same logic to macro, where she sees the environment favoring discretionary, forward-looking approaches that can think through scenarios and position for potential regime shifts, rather than systematic trend-following strategies that extrapolate the past.

Listen to the full conversation on Money Life with Chuck Jaffe.

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