The following extract is a Top Traders Unplugged summary of a conversation between the podcast hosts Niels and Alan with Harold De Boer, Head of R&D and Managing Director at Transtrend.
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Transtrend began in 1989 as a research project inside a Rotterdam commodity trading house. Harold De Boer, raised on a dairy farm in Drenthe and drawn early to the intersection of mathematics and the real world, became the architect of what would eventually become one of the world’s most distinctive trend-following programmes. The Diversified Trend Program is his life’s work, and his conviction in it runs deep.
What separates De Boer’s thinking from the mainstream is a willingness to question foundational assumptions. Early in Transtrend’s development, the conventional wisdom held three rules: always use stops, always be in the market, and always trade the same size. De Boer looked at the logic and concluded all three were wrong. The philosophy of trend following was sound, he argued, but the implementation rules were not. That contrarian rigour has defined the firm’s research culture ever since.
In this conversation, De Boer reflects on why trend-following CTAs performed so well for forty years in near-complete obscurity, and why recognition, paradoxically, has coincided with mediocre performance. His answer connects to the deeper problem of herding in the industry itself: when all CTAs converge on similar approaches, the dispersion that generated genuine returns disappears. Transtrend’s deliberate commitment to being different is not marketing. It is a considered response to that dynamic.
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