SysCat Capital: A Positively Skewed Short-Term Trader

SysCat Capital has established itself as a differentiated player in the short-term trading space through consistent outperformance and a carefully constructed return profile emphasizing positive skewness. The fund's recognition as The Hedge Fund Journal's Best Performing Fund in 2022 and over the two-year period through December 2022 reflects this distinction. Over that two-year span, SysCat annualized returns in excess of 30%, a substantial achievement in a competitive category for smaller funds under $50 million in assets.

The fund's defining characteristic lies in its positively skewed return distribution. Between November 2019 and April 2023, SysCat posted a skewness coefficient of 0.8, meaningfully outpacing the SG Short Term Trader index at minus 0.2. This skew profile is evident in the distribution of monthly results: the strongest performance months saw gains of 12.02% in October 2021 and 10.11% in January 2022, while the worst monthly losses were confined to 3.84% in March 2021 and 2.49% in August 2022. This asymmetry—larger upside moves offset by smaller downside moves—creates a convex return profile attractive to institutional investors seeking exposure to tail risk management.

The investment approach represents a hybrid of discretionary and systematic methodologies. While strategy conception is discretionary, the execution framework relies entirely on systematic processes: signal generation, portfolio construction, risk management, and trade execution all operate within algorithmic parameters. The strategy targets short-term intraday opportunities across liquid markets including ETFs, single stocks, and futures contracts, supplemented by long-biased volatility arbitrage positions. This focus on liquid, transparent instruments in the short-term space provides operational efficiency and scalability.

SysCat's three co-founders bring complementary expertise cultivated over more than 15 years of joint collaboration. Mahbod Elmi, the quantitative researcher and head of the firm, spent considerable time at the systematic CTA space, having previously established and managed KenTyde (2007), a venture between Transtrend (the largest CTA in the Netherlands and a Robeco subsidiary) and Robeco Alternative Investments. KenTyde itself was a multi-award-winning fund that delivered a Sharpe ratio exceeding 0.4 and maintained correlation to the SG CTA benchmark below 0.60 during the post-2008 recovery period from October 2009 through September 2015. Arjaan Ringeling brings market-making expertise from volatility and options trading, while Max Waaijers provides programming infrastructure. The team's experience spans volatility arbitrage, medium-term trend following, and relative value spread trading across commodity, frontier, and niche markets—a foundation that now supports their focus on higher-frequency short-term trading strategies.