Senior Forteus Team

Gideon Berger

Chairman (non-executive), Forteus

Gideon joined Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM) in 2002 and worked there until his departure in 2021. He was co-Chief Investment Officer for the business, Chairman of BAAM’s Investment Committee and sat on BAAM’s Management Committee.

During his tenure he oversaw the management of client asset growth from ~$1bn to ~$80bn. Gideon conceived and led several strategic initiatives that contributed to BAAM’s evolution from a traditional fund of funds to a hedge fund solutions provider, with a variety of strategies for both institutional and individual investors and a combination of both direct and fund investments.

Prior to joining BAAM, Gideon co-founded a technology startup Ez-Ways.com focused on logistics. Gideon holds a BA in Mathematics and Physics from Vassar College, an MS in Applied Physics from Columbia University and a PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute at NYU. He is currently a Trustee at The Brearley School and on the Board of Directors of Deltec International Group.

Nicolas Vanhoutteghem

President, Forteus

Nicolas brings over twenty years of professional experience in a career spanning both investment management and consulting industries. Nicolas was previously a founding partner of Argentière Capital, a volatility-focused multi-strategy hedge fund where he was a Senior Portfolio Manager focusing on volatility strategies across equities and FX. He was a member of the firm’s Risk Management Committee and was instrumental in building many of the tools and processes employed by the firm across investment and risk management functions.

Prior to launching Argentière, Nicolas was a Portfolio Manager in JPMorgan Chase’s Equity Proprietary Trading Group in London. He previously spent nine years at Bain & Company, where he was a Manager running consulting projects in the areas of corporate strategy, M&A, private equity and operational improvements for clients in Europe, US and Japan.

Nicolas obtained his BA / MA in Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Barry Thomas

Managing Director

Barry brings twenty years of experience in building and growing alternative asset management businesses. He started his career in finance in 2003 at FRM, a leading hedge fund of funds where he co-founded and served on the Investment Committee for the firm’s hedge fund seeding business until 2012.

From 2013, Barry was a founding partner and Global Head of Marketing & Investor Relations at Argentière Capital, a volatility-focused multi-strategy hedge fund. Under Barry’s leadership, Argentière launched multiple products and grew to over $2.5bnn assets under management, serving a global institutional client base.

Barry was formerly a lecturer in Economics at the University of London, and obtained a PhD in Economics and a BSc in Mathematical Economics from the University of Birmingham. Barry was previously British champion in the decathlon, and today enjoys coaching rugby and athletics.

Christophe de la Celle

Managing Director

Christophe has close to twenty years of experience in the financial and blockchain industries. He started his career in traditional finance in the derivatives teams of Société Générale and Deutsche Bank in London, was the co-founder of a quantitative hedge fund and subsequently ran a trading team at Millennium.

Christophe has been working in the crypto industry since 2016, and was most recently head of the institutional business for EMEA and LATAM at Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

Originally from Toronto, Canada, Christophe holds a Masters degree in Finance from the University of Paris Dauphine. He is also an avid tennis player and passionate about film and abstract art.

Thomas Chladek

MD, Head of Research

Thomas joined Numeus in 2022 and brings over 20 years experience in hedge fund selection and allocation, covering all strategies and asset classes including both traditional assets and cryptocurrencies.

Thomas began focusing on crypto strategies in 2018, and in 2019 led the establishment and management of one of the first ever crypto fund of hedge funds for a publicly listed digital asset firm. Prior to starting his career in digital assets, Thomas spent over 10 years at Lombard Odier, where he was Co-Head of the Open Architecture and Head of Alternative Solutions Group. In these roles, he oversaw fund selection, and was the portfolio manager for fund of hedge funds products and customized mandates. Thomas previously worked at Calibria Financial Services and began his career at Bucephale in 2001 as a research analyst and portfolio manager.

He graduated from Geneva University with a MS in Economics and is a CAIA and FRM charterholder. He is also an avid horse rider and breeds horses in France.

Admire Chatiza

MD, Head of Operational Due Diligence

Admire was a Senior Operational Due Diligence Officer at UBS Hedge Fund Solutions for over ten years. During his time at UBS, he focused on ODD on hedge funds before more recently setting up and leading ODD for crypto funds.

Before joining UBS, Admire was a Senior Audit Manager at KPMG in the Channel Islands, where he managed the audits of alternative investment fund clients, including hedge funds. Previously, he also worked at Deloitte within the audit department in Botswana.

Admire is a qualified Chartered Accountant following his training with Deloitte Harare, Zimbabwe (2000-2003), is a member of the Institutes of Chartered Accountants in both Zimbabwe and England & Wales, and holds an MBA from Warwick Business School (UK).

Ryan Ebner

Portfolio Manager

Ryan joins the Forteus team with over fourteen years experience within investment management and private equity. Previously he has worked as a senior investment analyst at Brit Insurance, an Apollo portfolio company where he was on the investment committee and responsible for restructuring and implementing the investment strategy. More recently he established digital asset research at Schroders within the firm’s equities and multi asset divisions. Ryan holds a Masters in Management from Audencia Business School (France) and is a CFA charterholder.

Senior Numeus Team

Nobel Gulati

Chairman and CEO

Over the past three decades, Nobel has proven to be an entrepreneurial executive with a demonstrated history of building and managing investment and trading businesses, leveraging the power of data science and technology. He spent twelve years at Two Sigma where he led the growth of the company across various dimensions, most notably scaling the investment management business as CEO of Two Sigma Advisers, LP, which encompasses Two Sigma’s asset management division that provides solutions for institutional investors. Under his leadership the company’s assets grew from $3.7B in 2007 to $60B in 2019.

Prior to Two Sigma, Nobel worked at various investment banks, including NatWest Markets, ABN Amro and Citigroup in Equity Research and Global Equities. Nobel began his career with Raymond James, where he established the firm’s first Asian office in India. He graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as a Joseph Wharton Scholar, with a bachelor’s degree in international finance.

Nobel is a non-executive director on the board of Pictet Asset Management. Nobel is a guest lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and also serves on the Executive Board of the Undergraduate Wharton School. Nobel is an avid skier and lives in New York with his wife and two children.

Deepak Gulati

Chief Investment Officer

Deepak’s career as a trader and risk manager spans more than twenty years across hedge funds, investment banks and market making firms. He is the former founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Argentière Capital, a volatility-focused multi-strategy hedge fund that he established in 2013. Argentière was headquartered in Zug, Switzerland with peak assets in excess of $2.5bn.

Prior to founding Argentière, Deepak spent ten years at JPMorgan Chase where he was Global Head of Equity Proprietary Trading, managing a large team of traders and overseeing risk across the business. Prior to leading the global proprietary trading team, Deepak was Head of Derivative Trading Strategies for JPMorgan and was responsible for risk management for the firm’s European Proprietary Trading Group.

Deepak began his career in equity derivatives, holding positions as a senior equity derivatives trader at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in London and as an equity derivatives market maker at Archelon. He graduated from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia with a B.S. in Finance.

Mike Niblock

Head of Quantitative Research

Mike joins Numeus after a career spanning twenty years at G-Research, one of the most successful global Quant Hedge Funds. During that time Mike was responsible for building, managing and leading research teams, with a particular focus on high-frequency statistical arbitrage. He also has a broad experience of other major strands of Quantitative Research against a wide variety of asset classes. Mike became a Partner at G-Research in 2014.

Before Finance Mike studied Physics at Imperial College London with a research focus in Computational Physics and self-organized criticality.

Owain Lloyd

Chief Technology Officer

Owain brings twenty years of deep experience in both traditional high frequency trading and the application of HFT research and technology to crypto.

In 2019, he co-founded Mercury Trading, a crypto HFT firm that is one of the larger providers of centralised liquidity. Prior to this, he was head of Electronic Market Making technology for JP Morgan, and built and ran the highly successful Automated Market Making technology group at Morgan Stanley. Owain was one of the first programmers on what was, and remains, the dominant listed options market maker at Citadel Investment Group.

Owain obtained his BA / MA from the University of Cambridge, England in Theoretical Computer Science. He enjoys a variety of amateur sports including skeleton, rallying and tennis.

Mitchell Ulman

Head of Corporate, Business Strategy

Mitch brings over twenty years of deep expertise across hedge funds, data and technology.

Most recently at Millennium, Mitch was COO of the technology and data platform that supported quantitative portfolio managers. He was previously at Two Sigma Investments for over a decade, serving as global head of business strategy, global head of investor relations, and COO of the systematic alternative data research team. Mitch started his career in traditional finance, focused on corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions with FleetBoston Financial, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.

Mitch earned his BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and is a CFA charterholder.

Cyrill Trondle

President, Numeus Labs

After running his first Bitcoin node in school in 2013, Cyrill became fascinated with the power of blockchain and, shortly thereafter, discovered a pre-sale for a new cryptocurrency called Ethereum.

After his first transaction on Ethereum, Cyrill decided to embrace this technology. As a serial entrepreneur in the space, he is now building the bridge between traditional finance and Web3.0, which has an important role in creating a government-independent, robust new financial system and transaction layer.

He is a trained systems engineer who started his career in the financial services industry at Swiss Re and Bank Vontobel before turning crypto enthusiast almost a decade ago.

To balance his days in Web3.0, Cyrill enjoys the occasional rush of adrenaline by skydiving, snowboarding, and participating in a variety of other sports.

Ahmad Zeitouni

Numeus Labs

Ahmad was an early adopter of blockchain technology, having witnessed its transformative potential and having discovered Ethereum whilst at university.

He was one of the original investors and traders in decentralised financial instruments and protocols and has been deeply involved in the digital asset space for over seven years as a Trader, Venture Partner and Technical Advisor to a number of crypto-funds and protocols.

Ahmad is a firm believer in the power of composable programmatic finance and is committed to bridging traditional systems to this new frontier.

When away from his desk, Ahmad enjoys carpentry and can often be found in the woodshop.

Karsten Schroder

Senior Advisor

Karsten began his professional career in consulting, working at McKinsey & Company for three years before founding quantitative hedge fund Amplitude Capital in 2004, a firm he ran in London and Switzerland for fifteen years. Amplitude developed globally diversified, fully systematic short-term trading programs, and later expanded into the medium-term quantitative equity fields. The firm managed $2bn of institutional assets and employed 32 professionals at peak.

More recently, Karsten has become an active angel investor and is now employing his extensive knowledge of quantitative investing in crypto markets at Numeus.

Originally from Rostock, Germany, Karsten studied Business at both HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management and at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney.

We draw on our extensive experience spanning both traditional finance and digital assets to design, build and manage digital asset management strategies.

Forteus leverages the research, technology and operational platform of Numeus. To find out more about our team please click here.

 

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