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"The CTA Challenge is an opportunity for all managers, large and small, emerging and established, to get viewed and evaluated on a level playing field," said Maxwell Eagye, managing director at Coquest, Inc. "Coquest has created a research evaluation engine that provides additional data on managers. Our proprietary metrics help us source and evaluate managers more efficiently over time. Although Sector Arc is relatively new to the scene, they have shown very well versus other established managers that participated in the contest this past year. Our purpose is to spotlight top CTA performance not only against each other, but against other asset classes."

Ben Johnson and Cory Brandt jointly founded Chicago-based Sector Arc in 2015, after developing a proprietary fundamental model to predict price movements in the agricultural meat markets, drawing off 17 years of collective experience. The Global Lean Hog Ag Program pursues a discretionary trading strategy that incorporates supply and demand information from the cash markets. Subsequently, Sector Arc uses technical analysis to instill risk parameters and optimize trading of the futures markets utilized in their strategy. Sector Arc currently has more than $5 million in assets under management.

The CTA Challenge is a year-long competition that allows commodity trading advisors to match their trading prowess on a level playing field against other CTAs. It is ranked based on a proprietary blend of risk and return metrics, and a winner is selected based upon both quantitative ranking as well as qualitative strategy considerations, therefore the winner isn't always the strategy with the highest absolute return.

Thirty-six CTA programs entered the 2017 competition. Detailed information on the participants' monthly performance statistics and strategy descriptions are available at www.ctachallenge.com. At the close of the 2017 competition, the top five participants based upon their quantitative rank were:

1. Sector Arc Advisors, LLC [Global Lean Hog Ag Program]
2. Opus Futures, LLC [Advanced Ag Trading Program]
3. Valia Capital Management, LLC [Global Tactical Program]
4. M&R Capital, LLC [Discretionary Trading Program]
5. Typhon Capital Management, LLC [Vulcan Metals Program *QEP*]