IKEN Capital: Engineering A Hedge Fund

 But it did offer the future IKEN Capital chief investment officer a chance to pursue something that might be.

“During that time, I started doing a little bit of trading for my own accounts, so I decided to transfer, when I finished up, to a master of finance,” Hutson told FINalternatives. And he not only continued to trade while he studied—he made enough to pay for his degree.

Chennai Engineering Colleges

Freshly graduated, with a thesis on grey-box trading strategies, Hutson went to work for Schneider Trading, where he and James Brueton, a former Deloitte business consultant, ran a commodities and fixed-income book. The two also worked with Christophe de la Celle, an alumnus of both Société Générale and Deutsche Bank, who ran his own derivatives trading book at Schneider, and quantitative analyst Tobias Tofari.

Engineering Graduation

In January, the quartet left Schneider to launch their own hedge fund. Its maiden offering, the IKEN Commodity Alpha Fund, is a “market neutral long/short oil strategy, with multi-layered hedging for uncorrelated low-risk returns," the firm said.

The strategy is “quite unique,” according to Hutson, with a relative-value core, a trend-following component and a “long-gamma, long-volatility options overlay” that “allows us to sleep well at night and adds an extra layer of protection.”