SysCat привлекла новый капитал от инвесторов из альтернативных фондов, сохранив независимость управления

SysCat has built one of the strongest five-year track records in the short-term trading space, delivering an annualized 18% CAGR and a Sharpe ratio above one over five years ending in December 2025. In 2026, the firm attracted fresh capital with several new investors from the alternative investment industry taking a minority stake in the management company and also investing in the fund, while SysCat’s founders retain majority ownership and independence. SysCat Alpha Fund runs at a variable mid-teens volatility target that makes a meaningful contribution to portfolios and has been recognized by The Hedge Fund Journal’s CTA and Discretionary Trader Awards, in both 2025 and 2026. We want to be free to observe our universe and trading costs and consider risk allocation and signals together. This performance is remarkable against a challenging backdrop for many short-term trading strategies. SysCat eked out a small positive return in 2025 when the SG Short Term Traders index was down. The strategy dynamically adapts to the market climate: undershooting its volatility target in 2023 due to a lack of market movement, whereas in 2025 the severe liquidity withdrawal was the main reason why the systems capped their activity. Co-founder, Mahbod Elmi, decomposes how the strategy responded in 2025: “Our models don’t need low trading costs to function properly, but they need reliable estimation of trading costs per market under specific conditions. The actual execution costs during the tariff shock episodes were 3 to 5 times their long-term average and became extremely noisy. Therefore, the strategy feedback loops on expected costs scaled back trading activity in general and cut the allocation to macro-sensitive stocks and futures down to zero for several months. Dispersion in single name equities, especially during the second part of the year, was the main source of performance recovery for the strategy”. Defining “short-term” trading Elmi has no regrets about pivoting from trend following to short-term trading in 2019-2020, in the quest for uncorrelated alpha-driven performance. SysCat’s “short-term” is defined as an average holding period from minutes to hours, while intra-second data including bid/ask spreads and patterns can also inform execution. “Timeframes vary between markets: US equities could be traded in sub-minutes during the most liquid hours, but European grain markets need slower execution,” adds Elmi. The direction of a position could change several times in a day. Some trades can be held overnight, but on average holding periods have been getting faster. “We did not make any conscious choice to trade faster, but our improved understanding of slippage has enabled this,” says Elmi. Futures and a global portfolio of ETFs are traded nearly 24 hours a day, though trading single name equities outside normal market hours is usually too expensive. A happy medium SysCat has carved out a niche in between high frequency trading (HFT) and their previous trend following strategy. “Whereas HFT aims for a high hit rate across a huge volume of thousands of small trades, trend following has a much higher win/loss ratio and a lower hit rate around 30%. Our hit rate is pretty close to 50%,” says Elmi. He freely admits that, “We do not have the speed or infrastructure to compete in the arms race of HFT. But we are disciplined observers monitoring and modelling execution patterns across all markets we trade. We don’t try to be the fastest at trade execution and we don’t need trading costs to be low; we just need them to be predictable. We are also aware that our space is becoming more competitive as HFT firms expand into medium frequency trading and our response has been the same from day one: investing in our portfolio optimization, trading universe and execution capabilities”. Single name cash equities have contributed the larger part of returns, but SysCat has not been riding the bull market. The strategy has traded with a somewhat short bias to capture the speed of market reversals because longer-term trends are less relevant to its holding periods. In contrast to trend followers capturing tails, the SysCat return profile is optimized to avoid fat tails (kurtosis) in either direction and the strategy has rarely touched its 3% daily loss tolerance. 18% Finding needles in haystacks SysCat has a huge universe but is hyper-selective. Most quantitative managers trade between around twenty and tens of thousands of markets. SysCat’s universe is one of the largest, but its portfolio contains one of the shortest numbers of line items. The idiom ‘finding needles in haystacks’ translates directly into Dutch as “een speld in een hooiberg zoeken” and conveys the challenge of identifying several dozen trades from a universe of tens of thousands. SysCat’s number of instruments traded has in recent years tripled to 20,000, mainly comprised of ETFs and single stocks, but at any point in time the strategy may only have exposure to 50 of them – or around 0.25% of the total – that show the most promising risk/reward based on multiple indicators. “To feed our portfolio with high-quality opportunities we need to be highly selective. And to be selective we need enough potential opportunities to choose from. This is why we are continuously focused on expanding our investment universe and multiplying our models and sub-strategies,” says Elmi. Reading market microstructure Correlation, volatility and trade analytics developed when SysCat were trend followers, can now feed into different sorts of quantitative trades. But SysCat’s expertise in intraday execution, based on deep analysis of market microstructure, has become much more important. “In the minutes-to-hours space, how you trade is often as important as what you trade. As trend followers, our liquidity analytics were static and less relevant for medium term trades. Now, we build detailed models of expected execution cost as a function of time, volatility regime, liquidity conditions and market-specific characteristics. In April, May and June 2025 there were lots of trading opportunities, but liquidity became dramatically worse. If we had acted based on static slippage inputs our trades would have lost money. We now know that sometimes instead of finding higher-conviction signals or trading more instruments, the solution is to lower our cost basis so that weaker signals become profitable. This is how we have learned to translate opportunities into actual returns,” explains Elmi. Incidentally, prohibitively high trading costs have led SysCat to temporarily retire their volatility arbitrage strategy. Attracting growth capital while retaining the firm’s independent structure For some years SysCat was among many smaller managers that struggled to raise a critical mass of assets despite strong performance. The Hedge Fund Journal has seen hundreds of managers in this situation simply close their firms and join larger multi-strategy platforms. SysCat had offers from some giant multi-strategy pod shops, but Elmi declined them for important reasons that reflect the differentiated strategy: “The advantages of a larger capital base, operational support and less personal risk were obvious. But their very structured approach to modelling and risk management – including limits on exposures, external risk factors and execution techniques – would cramp our style and value creation. We want to be free to observe our universe and trading costs and consider risk allocation and signals together. Our value added would be lost and the offering would also have become a Black Box for outside investors”. SysCat also wanted to stay independent and found a group of professional investors consisting of former Goldman Sachs executives and seasoned hedge fund and proprietary trading professionals, who acquired a minority stake in the management company and also invested in the fund. The new structure demonstrates considerable alignment of interests. The firm gains gravitas from the advisory board: it includes Jaap Pannevis, formerly research analyst at Goldman Sachs and currently founder of global small and mid-cap manager, Centillion Investment Partners; and serial entrepreneur and private equity investor, Francois Mulkens, who has strong roots in the Dutch investment community Arjaan Ringeling, co-founder and CRO, and I both studied chemistry in Leiden. We both intuitively understand the concept of half-life and its importance in alpha decay. Pannevis had also previously invested in private equity and venture capital but wanted something more liquid with a real edge based on his own investment philosophy: “When picking stocks, I find countries have developed clusters of excellence: the US in software, the Nordics in capital goods and the Netherlands in semiconductor chips. The Netherlands is also a center of excellence for quantitative trading and market making as illustrated by the success of Transtrend and Optiver, which have developed to become leading businesses on a global basis”. This also draws on the careers of Syscat’s co-founders. SysCat’s strategy is not infinitely scalable to tens of billions but could certainly run hundreds of millions and in fact some products could be easier to trade with more than the current level of assets. More importantly, SysCat’s strategy is not optimized to maximise assets under management, rather it focuses on achieving highest risk-adjusted returns as illustrated by its track record. Furthermore, SysCat tends to be negatively correlated with equity markets and thus offers real diversification benefits to traditional portfolios. In that sense, SysCat is a unique proposition as it offers access to strategies which are typically not accessible to external investors as they are employed at proprietary trading firms. Pannevis is not himself a systematic investor. He manages a discretionary fundamental concentrated equity strategy that has just passed a 5-year track record. He was lured by SysCat’s differentiation both versus his own strategy and relative to other quant strategies: “The strategy is unique because they are outsiders. They are based in the middle of nowhere in Leiden and did not come from a prop trading shop or a multi-strategy fund but rather built their own strategy. The strategy has provided good diversification: it did well during risk off in 2022 and has been tested on five sigma events. It was flat in 2025 when risk assets performed well”. Broker and staff searches SysCat is fully focused on one strategy and one fund vehicle. “The breadth of the investment universe, including thousands of equities and ETFs, would not sit easily inside a managed account structure,” argues Elmi. SysCat has worked with Interactive Brokers for more than 5 years, but may soon add a second broker for redundancy and other benefits. “The new shareholders have strong connections with a range of brokers. Additional brokers could lower trading costs, and we can also provide brokers with meaningful flow. Our volume of trading is equivalent to other strategies with five or six times more assets,” says Elmi. Extra brokers may also help with sourcing security borrow. SysCat’s process is entirely systematic, but discretion has been exercised over the cost and availability of stock borrow. SysCat have already hired more researchers and need at least two or three additional researchers. “We are seeking talent in a range of scientific disciplines – non-linear dynamics, complex adaptive systems, turbulence modelling and signal processing – and expect our location near the Science Department of the Netherlands’ oldest university, Leiden University, will be helpful,” says Elmi. “Arjaan Ringeling, co-founder and CRO, and I both studied chemistry in Leiden. We both intuitively understand the concept of half-life and its importance in alpha decay. We like to hire researchers who have developed intuition in handling noisy, non-linear environments. With us they can use their intuition to work on real-world complex dynamics of market microstructure,” explains Elmi. Asset raising Family offices and high net worth individuals are initially being prioritized for asset raising, with a minimum ticket of EUR 100,000, but the advisory board should bring in some institutional investors as well. “The new board have been very helpful at explaining what we do to investors. This is not a sales pitch. They eat their own cooking by investing in the strategy and share the knowledge,” says Elmi. For now, networks rather than cap intro events or conferences are being used. SysCat are also in the process of updating database entries and are in fact debating how different databases may classify the strategy. “It is not a real CTA, or a traditional short-term trader, or a multi-strategy approach,” says Elmi. In The Hedge Fund Journal’s prior profile interview, we dubbed the strategy ‘multi-frequency stat arb’, but in fact it is a broader multi-strategy quant approach, including trend, short-term trend and relative value over different timeframes. It blends directional, relative value and volatility approaches. The regulatory structure is for now the “AIFMD Lite” regime for managers with assets below EUR 100 million, under the Dutch AFM regulator. There is also a Dutch fund structure with a status like a Luxembourg SICAV. This appeals to Benelux region investors who may face tax complications with some offshore domiciles and Dutch wealth managers also prefer onshore vehicles. A parallel offshore fund could possibly be launched in the future. Articles Discover More