Risk Management

Founded and ran Markham Rae, a $1.25bn fund management business, from 2009 to 2019, serving as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Risk Officer. Prior to this, he was CRO at BlueCrest Capital Management. Jonathan is a director of SRL Global, the family office analytics firm. He holds a degree from Oxford in PPE.

Trading, financial and legal infrastructure

Julie has 20 years’ experience within the financial services industry. Having started her career at Morgan Stanley in Prime Brokerage Client Services, she moved to the buy side as Partner and COO. In 2019 Julie took the role of COO/CFO Consulting and Co-Head of Compliance Solutions at Throgmorton UK. Julie has also held COO positions with various London-based hedge funds. Julie holds an LLB Hons (Law) from the University of Aberdeen.

Chief Compliance Officer

Melanie has worked in asset management compliance for 22 years, at variety of London-based firms, latterly as Compliance Officer and MLRO. Firms include Man Investments, Aspect Capital, Beach Capital and GSA Capital. Melanie ran an independent compliance consultancy from 2009 - 2020, before taking on the role of Co-Head of Compliance Solutions at Throgmorton UK. Melanie holds an LLB (Hons) from Exeter University.

Firm COO and investment due diligence

Giles was the COO and CCO of Markham Rae LLP from inception. Previously he was responsible for the selection and post-transaction monitoring of a portfolio of early-stage hedge fund managers for Revere Capital. He also worked in the Man Group, initially in the New Manager Initiatives Team, and subsequently as Global Head of Hedge Fund Development for Man Global Strategies. Giles has an MSC in Agricultural Economics from London University.

Discretionary Macro Investment

Ali is a global macro fund manager with more than 30 years of experience. He began his career at Salomon Brothers in 1989 as a quant focused on fixed income and foreign exchange derivatives. Ali served as Global Head of Interest Rate and Foreign Exchange trading and Member of the investment bank’s Executive Committee at Commerzbank. Since 2005, he has been a discretionary global macro fund manager at two major funds, London Diversified Fund Management and Rubicon Fund Management, managing up to $450m. Ali holds a BS in Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

Multi Strategy Investment

Co-founded BlueCrest Capital Management Ltd, and was instrumental in the founding of BlueMountain Capital. Mr Reeves holds a number of corporate directorships and non-executive Board positions. He holds an MA in Philosophy from New York University and a BA in English from Yale University.

Systematic Portfolio Manager

Francesco transitioned from academia to finance over 20 years ago, beginning as a derivatives quant with UBS Warburg and then Bank of America. In 2005 he joined BlueCrest Capital Management where he traded exotic foreign exchange derivatives, and then headed a machine learning quant trading group there until 2018. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Oxford University.

Systematic Portfolio Manager

Bill Speares has been a pioneer in systematic trading for the past three decades, beginning his career at the Man Group as a quantitative analyst and programmer responsible for building some of the first automated trading algorithms in 1995. Since then, Bill has worked in various leadership roles including managing quant teams at Deutsche Bank and Winton Capital Management. Bill joined Bluecrest Capital Management in 2003 where he played a central role in the development of Bluecrest’s systematic business. Most recently, Bill was the Co-CIO of Ashenden Capital Management. Bill holds a BS in Mathematics and Physics from York University, a PhD in Particle Physics from Durham University, and Masters in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Applied Statistics and Operational Research, and Applied Mathematics from Cranfield Institute of Technology, Birkbeck College, and Imperial College respectively.

Systematic Portfolio Manager

Throughout Michael’s career he has served in various research and portfolio management roles, including the Head of Equity Research at Bluecrest Capital Management, and Co-CIO of Ashenden Capital Management and most recently managing a multi strategy and multi asset portfolio at Winton Capital Management. Michael holds a BS in Mathematics and MS in Financial Engineering from The University of Michigan, a PhD in Finance from Cambridge University, and a Masters in Philosophy from the University of London.

Systematic

Harvir is a passionate technologist who has worked as a software engineer at Nomura, Byte Trading and Deutsche Bank. He holds a BSc in Mathematics & Computer Science from King's College London and a MSc in Financial Mathematics & Machine Learning from Queen Mary University of London.

Systematic

With a background in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of York, Geraud started his career as support engineer at Phoenix47 before becoming Head of Support at BHive Technologies. He has a keen focus on system stability, monitoring and security and holds a number of IT qualifications to that effect.