The following extract is a Top Traders Unplugged summary of a conversation between the podcast hosts Niels and Alan with Douglas Greenig, CEO of Florin Court.
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Florin Court Capital occupies one of the most distinctive positions in the CTA landscape. Founded by Douglas Greenig in 2015 and seeded by Swedish platform firm Brummer and Partners, the firm applies systematic trend-following exclusively to alternative and exotic markets. French electricity futures, Chinese methanol, Colombian interest rates, California carbon emissions: over five hundred markets in total, the overwhelming majority of them not traded by any traditional CTA.
The logic is grounded in diversification mathematics. Greenig estimates that Florin Court’s portfolio contains four to five times more independent bets than a standard CTA universe. That additional breadth, combined with better trending properties in markets with fewer systematic participants, produces a Sharpe ratio that has historically been approximately double the standard trend-following benchmarks. The barriers to entry that make these markets operationally difficult are also what protect the edge.
Greenig came to this approach via Man AHL, where he served as Chief Risk Officer and helped develop one of the first alternative markets programmes in the industry. In this conversation with Niels and Alan, he discusses how Florin Court builds positions in markets that most firms have never heard of, why skew matters more than Sharpe when evaluating systematic strategies, and what it means to be a diversifier for the diversifiers. It is one of the most original conversations in the entire TTU Miniseries.
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