‘Pretty Phenomenal’
The strategy works better in a bear market, lowering the volatility of the returns through the entire market cycles, Charney said in an interview on May 16. Morningstar nominated Aronstein the Alternative Fund Manager of the Year in 2012.
After adjusting for volatility, the fund gained 3.79 percent over the past five years, compared with 1.35 percent for the S&P 500, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Marketfield’s performance is “pretty phenomenal,” Charney said. The managers tend to “be earlier in some of their themes, but they do pay off eventually,” he said. Brendan Moynihan, a contractor and editor-at-large at Bloomberg News, is the managing director of markets and media research at Marketfield.
Aronstein, who was born in New York, wrote his senior thesis at Yale on American poet and insurance company executive Wallace Stevens and started his Wall Street career as a market strategist for Merrill Lynch in 1979, in part because he was interested in “complex systems.”
Best Investor
With two Merrill colleagues, Stan Salvigsen and Charles Minter, he started hedge fund Comstock Partners Inc. in 1987. Five years later, Aronstein left after it underperformed the market.
He spent the next 10 years investing in commodities, as well as running a timber mill and lumber company. In 1995, the Financial Times named Aronstein one of the 10 best investors of the decade in its “Guide to Global Investing.”
London-born Shaoul was buying and renting out apartments in New York, where he’d moved in 1993 after earning his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Manchester in the U.K. He once erected an 18-foot bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin brought from the former Soviet Union on the rooftop of a building called Red Square.
The two men met in 2004. Shaoul, then the CEO of Oscar Gruss & Son Inc., a boutique investment bank with roots dating back to 1918 in Poland, hired Aronstein as chief investment strategist. The two set up the Marketfield fund three years later.