by Carl Norell, NASDAQ OMX

What in your view will be the most important derivatives trends over the next few years? When it comes to products, I think we'll see a trend of more and more commodity related derivatives, in for example shipping, water and fish to name a few examples. On a model level, I think there is an ongoing shift towards gaining a deeper fundamental understanding of the uncertainty in the underlying asset that you are investing in, especially for big moves. This goes for stocks, bonds as well as commodities. If you were investing your own money in derivatives, what would you be looking for now? At the moment I would invest in the increased probability for a market crash. If applying this assumption options are relatively cheap right now. Related to this, there's a really good opportunity right now in commodities. For example if assuming that the oil market could raise dramatically based on the peak oil theory or alternatively crash in the near future, oil options makes for a good strategy to protect your portfolio against such potentially jumps.

What was the best question you got following your presentation?
One good but tricky question that I got was whether the 'fat tail' is caused by inefficiencies in the market and in the distribution of information, or if there are more fundamental reasons. My answer is both yes and no. Some information from governments and corporations are definitely distributed non-optimally. By improving this information sharing process we can impact the stochastic process of assets and their probability distribution, and as a result transform some jumps into smaller ones.

Last but not least, how is your career as cartoonist going, and how did it start?
Well, my 'Collector' series started almost 10 years ago as an idea of how to make what we are talking about here more accessible to a wider audience. It's also a lot of fun, especially as I am working with a great drawing artist. He is however getting more and more busy, but we do have a couple of new Collector series coming up. You can find some of my Collector cartoons on my website www.espenhaug.com