Richard Bornhoft has almost 30 years experience as an investment manager specializing in the development and management of managed futures investment portfolios for institutional investors. As Founder, President and Chief Investment Officer, he designed, developed and implemented its asset allocation, valuation and risk management systems, is ultimately responsible for their continued evolution to meet client expectations, and has overseen the allocation of client assets into various alternative investment products and strategies.
Widely known as a pioneer in managed futures investing, he was responsible for the first index-linked managed futures product — the MAR Trading Advisor Index Fund, launched in 1999 — and was later a founding principal of Morningstar Hedge. Bornhoft is also Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Equinox Fund Management, the sponsor of The Frontier Fund, the first US managed futures fund offered in a mutual fund structure with daily liquidity.
He has served on the advisory committees of several industry and regulatory organizations, and is a frequent guest speaker at international conferences and symposiums on the topic of alternative investment strategies.
Bornhoft was a contributing author of The Handbook of Managed Futures – Performance, Evaluation and Analysis (McGraw-Hill, 1997) and Searching for Alpha – The Quest for Exceptional Investment Performance (Wiley, 2000).
Tom O’Donnell has been involved in the alternative investment industry since the late 1980’s as a former institutional investor (i.e. a Director at the Virginia Retirement System), and in the managed futures industry since 1990. His responsibilities include sharing his many years of investment experience as well as helping institutional investors build better risk adjusted portfolios. He is a member of The Bornhoft Group’s Investment Committee and also directs The Bornhoft Group Corporation’s institutional marketing campaign and client correspondence activities.
He is one of the only persons in the Managed Futures industry who has been an institutional investor who invested in managed futures; an institutional marketing person who has sold managed futures; and who has worked for one of the largest Futures Commission Merchants (FCMs) in the world. While at the VRS, he was Program Director, heavily involved in the strategic investment policies and asset allocation decisions, and he gained extensive experience in traditional and alternative investments. In addition to overseeing their External Global Equity Program, he also was responsible for particular alternative investment programs including the Market Neutral Program and the Managed Futures Program. He helped research and launch the VRS Managed Futures Program in May 1991. The VRS was among the first public pension funds to invest in managed futures. The Bornhoft Group Corporation was one of the multi-advisor managed futures firms that the VRS hired at the inception of the VRS Managed Futures Program.
Mr. O’Donnell is a frequent speaker at investment conferences on a variety of topics including alternative investments. His educational presentation titled, “A Former Institutional Investor’s Perspective on Managed Futures” is currently featured on the CME Group website. As Managed Futures have become even more popular with the professional investor, the archive of his presentation has become one of the most watched videos on cmegroup.com.
Brian Bell has been involved in the futures industry since 1987. As director of research, he manages the research department, which include tasks such as quantitative analysis, advisor due diligence and daily monitoring and risk management of current accounts.
Before joining The Bornhoft Group in 2005, he was a senior software engineer at CQG Inc, from 1987 to 2000, and the founder of Custom Trading Solutions, a company that developed and marketed technical indicators to customers throughout the world. In those roles, he developed and tested thousands of technical trading systems, provided consulting services on the design and evaluation of technical indicators and trading systems to many private and professional traders, and developed and led training seminars on designing and evaluating mechanical trading systems for several leading Wall Street firms, including Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, SAC Capital, RBS-Greenwich and FX Concepts.
Bell earned both a BS in Engineering Physics and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado. He has also written for both Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities and Working Money magazines.