Michael Vranos, founder and CEO of Ellington Management Group, has been known as “the most powerful man on Wall Street” and, over the course of his almost 30 years running Ellington, has been able to adapt his firm, generating exceptional risk-adjusted returns through the LTCM crisis in 1998, the GFC in 2008, and most recently the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. In this interview with Raoul Pal, Vranos will share his personal journey; the early lessons he learned from LTCM and how he structured his firm accordingly; his views on leverage, tail risk hedging, and the costs and benefits of illiquid investments; and the current opportunities he is eyeing in financial equities like REITs, structured credit, and loan securitization. Viewers should be aware that this is an interview for pros by pros, and although not inherently actionable for most individual investors, it should be viewed as an unbelievable look behind the curtain of how one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time thinks about markets and the business of running a hedge fund.