From soft-commodity market maker to hedge fund manager David Martin

Martin Fund Management LLC (MFM), founded in January 2013 by David Martin, runs a discretionary trading strategy based on proprietary quantitative and systematic models with a focus on soft commodities (coffee, cocoa and sugar).

David Martin came to New York in 1990 to work on the commodity trading floor at Cooper, Neff & Associates, an options market making firm. "And I was a rugby playing in school. I came to the trading floor. I saw the environment. I loved it. I wanted to work there," he told Greg de Spoelberch in a recent Opalesque TV interview. "We were mostly a group of quantitative options traders, but we had our own mock trading sessions, where we trained each other and it was fantastic. So each day we were ready for the markets. We had extreme risk management training, and every day we attacked the trading floor and did really well for a number of years."

Then he started trading for the firm's account and noticed some correlations between different markets, especially in soft commodities. He developed a trading system and programs based on the correlations and spread trading he had observed. Years went by, and as he went through several cycles, he developed his trading model accordingly.

"My data, from my career, is not back tested."

"My data, from my career, is not back tested; it's something that I have lived and have actually traded in," he added. He went out on his own in 1994, "a crazy year, particularly in coffee," used his program and made his first million dollars. He started lo......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.