The following extract is a Top Traders Unplugged summary of a conversation between the podcast hosts Niels and Alan with Marty Bergin, Owner and President of DUNN Capital Management.
Click on this link to read the Summary
Click on this link to hear the Podcast
DUNN Capital Management was founded by Bill Dunn in 1974, making it one of the oldest trend following firms in the world. Marty Bergin joined as Accounting Systems Manager in 1997, rose to President and CFO, and eventually took full ownership in 2015. He has since led a significant reinvigoration of the firm’s research culture, assembling a dedicated R and D team and rebuilding the firm’s simulation platform from scratch.
DUNN’s flagship World Monetary and Agriculture programme is 100 percent systematic and runs a pure long-term trend following approach across financials, energies, metals, and agricultural markets. What makes DUNN philosophically distinctive is its commitment to pure trend without the diversification into non-trend strategies that many of its peers have pursued. Bergin defends this conviction in his conversation with Niels and Alan, arguing that the integrity of the trend following signal is best preserved when it is not diluted by uncorrelated strategies that behave differently in the environments where trend needs to perform.
Also notable is DUNN’s fee structure: the firm charges no management fee, only an incentive fee, and trades 50 percent of its own capital alongside client money in exactly the same programme. For a firm that has survived and adapted across five decades of markets, this alignment of interests is not a marketing position. It is a structural commitment.
Related reading: Read: When Markets Breathe: Efficiency, Compression, and the Geometry of Fragility