Monthly Performance

Period Returns

Strategy Description

Bradford Paskewitz has been developing and trading quantitative trading strategies since 1987, with a primary focus on the futures and equity markets. He has done this work at such firms as Banque Indosuez, Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse, Schonfeld Securities and Bear Wagner. He now runs Paskewitz Asset Management (PAM) where strategy R&D is on-going focus. Over the entire course of a twenty year career in finance, he has focused on the problem of market price forecasting and has continually kept abreast of technological forecasting methods and techniques as they emerge, with the goal of remaining at the frontier of forecasting technology and implementation. His proprietary quantitative research infrastructure enables his strategy development process so that it can be leveraged to both U.S. and foreign futures and equity markets. PAM has been a registered CTA since January 2007 and Bradford Paskewitz is an Associated Person and Principal of PAM. Since 2003 he has also been CEO of Qualsolutions Inc., and later Quant Financial Consulting Inc. (QFC), which provide R&D and technical consulting services to PAM and outside clients. QFC has foreign teams located in Beijing and Zhengzhou China, and provides financial market consulting services using their select team of Chinese quants and programmers. From 1982-87, he worked as Director of R&D, at Electro-Catheter Corporation on an artificial heart project. He began his career at General Electric, with the Re-entry Systems Division conducting missile radar signal processing R&D (1980-82). His education includes a BS Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from Princeton University and an MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

The manager invests exclusively in S&P 500 futures with the objective of achieving consistent capital growth, which is uncorrelated or negatively correlated with the CTA Index, the S&P 500 index, the U.S. Government Bond index, as well as all other major hedge fund indices. The goal is to achieve consistent absolute returns in all likely future market scenarios, and provide added-value as a diversification to portfolios that have other assets. More...The fully-systematic contrarian program employs multiple models to forecast short and intermediate term tops and bottoms in the S&P 500 index, and then simultaneously generate trades, buying identified bottoms, and selling identified tops. The trading portfolio represents the net outcomes of the predictive sub-models. For example, if 2 of the sub-models wanted to buy, and 1 wanted to short, then the portfolio trade would be to “buy 1 unit”, since the other buy and simultaneous short signals would be cancelled out.This trading program targets net performance of 20% annually with volatility of 9%. It has an average holding period of about 7 trading days. It has extremely high liquidity due to the high daily trading volume of the S&P 500 futures, and estimated capacity of $1 billion.

Risk control is both pro-active and reactive. Pro-active risk controls include limits on leverage and scaling of positions appropriate to investor volatility and return objectives. Typical exposure is approximately 1/3 of maximum exposure, and at times, the strategy can be completely out of the market. Pro-active risk control is further provided by strategy diversification. Reactive risk controls include a stop loss on positions to assure that catastrophic losses are limited. The worst case scenario for this strategy is that an adverse large price gap occurs subsequent to the portfolio putting on a maximum exposure position.