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Swiss Seagull AG – Best Macro Manager

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Swiss Seagull AG runs the Crossfire Fund, which follows what it refers to as a trend breakout strategy. Rather than take a trend following or countertrend trading approach, Swiss Seagull uses a multi-directional hybrid trading strategy. As such, it is composed of one core strategy and two sub-strategies, which provide more of discretionary element to how the fund is managed.

“Our trading strategy is more tactical as opposed to necessarily being based on fundamental data or using indicators. Rather we look at market levels: which levels are broken, by how much? What is the volume in the market? That’s our approach and as such we position ourselves tactically based on those factors,” explains Alex Douedari, Chief Sales Officer at Swiss Seagull, who refers to Crossfire as more of a semi-automatic trading strategy, as opposed to being purely systemic.

The fund itself primarily trades spot currencies, in particular the EUR/USD, which “often sets the tone for the rest of the market. We also look at GBP/USD, AUD/USD, CAD/USD: basically several dollar crosses with the largest developed economies.

In today’s markets, traders typically have to deal with trend phases that are too short or lack enough of a correction phase, says Douedari. Consequently, the core philosophy underpinning Crossfire is to use all timeframes from M1 to monthly charts in order to trade strategically, and as a result independently, of timeframes.

By positioning prepared pending orders, which are placed strategically at resistance-levels, support-levels, pivot points and other psychologically relevant levels within the currently developed top and bottom range, the Crossfire fund is able to filter and discern between short-term and long-term movements of the market.

Douedari says that one of the characteristics of currency markets this year has been an increasing number of periods where the market has been completely still, followed by sudden breakouts.

“We’ve also seen “fake breakouts”, where markets break out to a certain extent followed by a more pronounced move in the opposite direction.”

Crossfire has the ability to detect these fake breakouts at an early stage and reacts by closing out the active orders with a small loss so that those open losses are not carried further into potentially larger and more costly ones.

“The trend is determined by market retracement from the prior move. After retracement the system puts pending orders on both sides: buy and sell. Using this method system will make profit in either scenario the trend continuation or reverse market,” adds Douedari.

At the beginning of 2013, Crossfire made returns by going short the euro. By the end of March, early April, it had switched to a long position in keeping with the tactical nature of how Crossfire trades.

“The fund switches between long and short positions on a regular basis. We trade based on what the market tells us. We try to be in rhythm with the market,” says Douedari.

On winning the award this year, Swiss Seagull’s CEO, Heinz Gschwend (pictured), comments: “We are very honoured to receive recognition for our work. We always try to improve every day so we are very proud to win this award from Hedgeweek’s readers and we look forward to continuing our good work this year and beyond.”

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