Martin Fund Management (“the Fund Advisor”) is a Registered Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) with a core focus on exchange-listed derivatives of global softs commodities (i.e. futures and futures options on coffee, cocoa, sugar, and cotton), using a Separately Managed Account (SMA) structure. The Fund Advisor seeks to generate outsized annual returns of 15%-20%, in excess of the S&P Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (S&P GSCI), employing short- to medium-term trading programs with low macro correlation and disciplined risk management. The Fund Advisor was founded by David Stephen Martin, who has over 22 years of commodity derivatives investment experience. The Fund Advisor currently offers a retail and institutional program in a separately managed account structure. The retail offering has a minimum investment of $250,000 while the institutional program is being offered at $1M.
The Advisor’s proprietary trading program encompasses three Quantitative (statistically-based) and Systematic (rule-based) trading strategies:
- STRATEGY 1: Use of options spreads to express the Advisor’s opinion on major market trends. Buy or sell to benefit from major market trends based on predetermined and limited risk parameters. Confirm trends using preset fundamental statistics related to certified stocks and crop forecasts
- STRATEGY 2: Arbitrage of futures spreads and spread butterflies. Buy one futures spread and sell another related futures spread, grounded in predetermined risk parameters, to benefit from both seasonal and time-to-expiration based price ranges. Exit the position before expiration of the front month futures contract
- STRATEGY 3: Systematic event trading of S&P GSCI futures roll. Massive flows of capital move through the market, trading out of the expiring front month futures contract and into the next contract. Entry and exit from this trade incorporates key quantitative data
Other criteria we deploy in our strategy consists of: CFTC-reported Non-commercial Fund position, Open Interest, Current-spread-price to full-carry-price ratios, Days to First Notice Day / Expiration, Stop losses, Fixed dollar value stops to limit losses, and Trailing stops to benefit from larger profitable moves.