The following extract is a Top Traders Unplugged summary of a conversation between the podcast hosts Niels and Alan with Svante Bergström, CEO & Founding Partner of LYNX Asset Management.
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Lynx Asset Management is one of the great Nordic success stories in systematic investment. Co-founded in Stockholm in 1999 by Svante Bergström and two colleagues who had been building quantitative models at Nordea’s proprietary trading desk, the firm grew into one of the largest CTAs in the world, managing over seven billion dollars and running the oldest active hedge fund in Sweden.
What makes Lynx distinctive is the architecture of its approach. The firm is a trend follower at its core, but it layers diversifying models on top of that foundation. These models serve a specific purpose: to reduce drawdowns during non-trending environments without abandoning the crisis alpha characteristics that make trend following valuable in the first place. Bergström describes this as maintaining the trend-following return profile while making it more sustainable for investors to hold.
In this conversation with Niels and Alan, Bergström is candid about the tensions in that design. Adding diversifying strategies smooths the ride, but it also dampens returns in the years when pure trend is genuinely thriving. It is a structural tradeoff with no clean resolution, and his willingness to sit with that ambiguity is part of what makes the discussion worth hearing. Lynx’s 25-year track record, built on incremental improvement and cultural stability, speaks to the value of resisting easy answers.
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