Aaron, Does your fund mix equity and futures? I read the your program description and it states "The International Equity portion of the program is a core position in the MSCI Europe Australasia and Far East (EAFE) index. The managed futures "plus" is the addition of short term futures trades in the global markets using Schindler Trading's proprietary and uncorrelated short term trading strategies. With a single investment investors can take advantage of both these asset classes." From a CTA, perspective you have to have both Series 3, and Serries 6, 7 for stocks? just trying to understand your program. Thanks.
The International Equity Plus program invests in the EAFE index via the CME's EAFE futures. In the same way you could invest in the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, the DJIA, or many other equity indexes using futures. I was required to pass the Series 3 to become an Associated Person of a CTA but have not needed to take the Series 6 (for mutual fund and insurance sales) or the Series 7 (for general securities reps). Are you forming a fund or CTA, Supervolatility? Good Trading, Aaron Schindler Schindler Trading
Thanks Aaron, I never traded it, did not know. I briefly looked at the chart of it but can't see the volume on it. Why MSCI EAFE? I am interested in starting a CTA and have lots of questions. I saw some posts where you refer to FfastTrade which I don't hink is still around. What platform would you recommend for best "back-office" operations such as generating monthly statements, P/L, etc. Thanks!
I chose the EAFE index to invest in because it was an international index, denominated in international currencies and I wanted more exposure in my portfolio to international equities and wanted to diversify out of US dollars. I figured if I wanted these things, other people might also. Yes, I switched from Ffastrade to Interactive Brokers several years ago when I automated my trading through IB's programming interface. CTA's don't have to generate statements. The client will get their statement from their broker. They just need to compute thier management fee and bill the client. CPO's, on the other hand, are commodity pool operators. A pool is a managed futures fund. A registered CPO will have to prepare monthly financial statements for its investors. They'll also have to prepare an annual report and have it audited and then submit it to the NFA. I use Quickbooks and Excel for this accounting.
Most CTA's have an accountant calculate fees. At my old shop we only had an offshore fund so there was a Cayman based guy. For managed accounts there are guys that can do it cheap where you just email them all the client statements every month. I know one CPA who charges $35 per statement. There's an extra fee for calculating composite performance. Once you get more than a handful of managed accounts it's not a good idea to do it yourself - especially because they're tightening up regulations every day.