Be prepared for what you wish for

摘要

After developing and testing the actual trading program, the most important factor for a new commodity trading advisor (CTA) is to manage growth. Rob Friedl, principal at Fall River Capital, faced capacity issues as a principal at his former CTA, Webster Management Group. He learned a valuable lesson. Friedl and partner Charlie Wright, designed Fall River's strategies in 2000, to handle up to $1 billion, both in terms of the markets traded and their ability to handle multiple customers. "We invested money and time up front in setting up back office software and hardware and systems that would allow us to handle managing a lot of managed accounts," Friedl says. Too often new CTAs believe they are ready to start once they complete designing and backtesting their strategies. Launching a CTA business, like other start-ups, is fraught with risk, but once successful ― assuming that a brilliant strategy performs brilliantly and people take notice ― a plan for handling that growth needs to be in place.