Argon Capital Management, a commodity multi-strategy alternative asset management firm founded in 2015, has appointed Jeffrey Halpern as Partner and Chief Risk Officer, and John Curran, Andrew Suckling and Pasha Bahadori as Partners and Senior Portfolio Managers.
They will be joined by newly appointed Portfolio Managers Hugo Picca, Glen Eisenberg and Andrew Greenberg.
With on average 20 years of experience across multiple market cycles at leading alternative investment firms, the new appointments reflect Argon’s culture of commitment to the highest standards of human capital and business practices. The highly experienced team is designed to achieve Argon’s goal of providing institutional investors with scalable capacity and high quality risk adjusted returns in the commodity hedge fund space.
“Having some of the most talented individuals in the commodity space join Argon means that the firm is well positioned to capitalise on the once-in-a-generation opportunity that the commodities cycle is currently providing,” says Marcos Bueno (pictured), Chief Investment Officer of Argon. “It gets us closer to our vision of becoming one of the best commodities funds, with limited key man risk and underpinned by multiple uncorrelated sources of alpha.”
Chief Risk Officer Halpern previously held the same role at Moore Capital and at Credit Suisse’s USD20 billionn CTA fund of funds. Curran, former Partner at Caxton Associates and CIO of multi-billion Tigris Financial will look after Argon’s Macro Commodity strategy. Suckling worked at Tudor Investment, co-founded Ospraie Management and was CIO of Verulam. He will be responsible for the Discretionary Metals strategy. Bahadori, also from Tudor, former Partner at Ospraie, CIO of Luxen Capital Management, and Senior PM at Blenheim and Visium Asset Management will manage Argon’s Energy Multi-Asset portfolio. Picca, co-creator of the UBS Commodity Index, will be responsible for the Index/Systematic strategy while Eisenberg and Greenberg will manage the Agriculture Volatility portfolio.
Argon is introducing an innovative approach to commodity hedge funds that has proven successful with other asset classes. Under Argon’s multi-strategy approach, investment strategies are subject to a systematic, rule-based risk management framework that is drawdown based. Strategies that go through pre-determined drawdown limits see their capital allocation reduced, and potentially removed. Investors that invest in Argon receive the blended return of the portfolio of strategies, with Argon bearing the netting risk among its strategies on behalf of investors.
“Over USD100 billion left the commodity space in the last few years. We want to provide an investable solution for this capital to return. The opportunity for our investors is tremendous,” adds Bueno.
