EMC Capital Management

EMC Capital Management

Elizabeth Cheval launched EMC Capital Management in 1988, at a time when systematic macro trading was still defined by a handful of male-led pioneers like Paul Tudor Jones and Louis Bacon. Cheval brought a quantitative discipline honed under early mentors, including time spent at Commodities Corporation, the Princeton-based trading incubator. From the outset, EMC structured itself around programmed trading rules rather than discretionary bets — a stance that placed it outside the prevailing discretionary macro orthodoxy. The firm deploys capital through four distinct global macro programs designed to fit institutional risk budgets, ranging from a lower-volatility diversified program to more aggressive pure trend-following offerings. Strategies trade across a liquid universe of foreign exchange, global sovereign bonds, equity index futures, and agricultural, energy, and metals commodity markets. These systematic models use long-term momentum, short-term counter-trend, and carry signals. Execution spans developed and emerging markets, with notable activity historically in G10 currencies, the Nikkei 225, and UK Gilts — a breadth that mirrors major CTA peers. EMC has historically kept its headcount lean and its AUM modest relative to large multi-strategy platforms, a choice that preserved its flag in a consolidating industry. In recent years the firm has focused on managed account structures over commingled funds, a shift that gives institutional clients — pension funds and sovereign entities — direct transparency into positions and independent custody. This preference for separately managed accounts distinguishes it from many smaller systematic managers still reliant on pooled fund vehicles. Cheval's sustained leadership offers the firm a genuine differentiator: over 35 years of uninterrupted founder oversight in a style — systematic global macro — that frequently burns through managers during regime shifts. No external parent owns the business, and no star portfolio-manager lift-outs define its culture. That governance structure means model revisions reflect the founder's own drawdown experience across the 1998 LTCM crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 pandemic, embedding institutional memory directly into the trading code.