Takahe Capital was founded by Moritz Seibert, who began trading derivatives at HSBC in the 1990s, later served as CEO and CIO of Munich Re Investment Partners, and co-founded Takahe with head of quantitative research Moritz Heiden, who holds a PhD in statistics from the University of Augsburg. The firm runs pure systematic trend following with a particular emphasis on commodities, including many markets that ESG mandates had forced institutional managers to abandon. That institutional pressure was, in fact, part of what prompted the firm’s founding.
Part 1 of this two-episode conversation introduces both partners and establishes the core principles that govern Takahe’s approach. Markets are complex adaptive systems. Models should be kept simple, not as an aesthetic preference, but because simple models are more robust to the overfitting that destroys real-world performance. The firm’s commitment to positive skew in trade distributions reflects a clear-eyed acceptance that most trades will lose money, and that the strategy’s viability depends entirely on the occasional large winner running as far as the market allows.
The episode covers volatility targeting, position sizing mechanics, and why the two Moritzs are sceptical of approaches that mechanically adjust risk in response to drawdowns. It is part one of a conversation that continues with equal depth in Episode 4.
Related reading: Read: Predator and Prey: The Evolutionary Arms Race in Markets