Human Financial

Andrew Sherman is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer, responsible for all portfolio construction and risk-taking decisions. His background includes macro and volatility trading at Citadel. The firm operates with a single decision-maker structure rather than an investment committee, which is consistent with its concentrated mandate in convex hedging and volatility arbitrage.

The firm structures option positions to maximize convexity per unit of premium spent, blending single-stock and index optionality with opportunistic volatility-surface arbitrage. It avoids the static, rolling long-put programs that generate persistent negative carry. Instead, Sherman’s process relies on a systematic signaling overlay that varies net exposure to volatility and tail-risk premia based on market-regime detection, seeking to reduce theta costs during low-volatility environments.

Human Financial is a hedge fund manager that invests exclusively in liquid derivatives markets — primarily equity index options, VIX futures and options, swaptions, and commodity volatility instruments — not in private fund commitments. It does not allocate to third-party managers, private equity, venture capital, or credit funds. The vehicle is a direct investment fund available to external limited partners.

The firm's singular focus on convex tail hedging removes the portfolio-level conflicts that arise when a multi-strategy platform runs a tail-protection book alongside large directional equity or credit exposures. Sherman does not manage long-only assets or competing alpha strategies, which means the tail-hedge mandate is not subordinated to other profit centers. This purity is rare among tail-risk managers, many of whom cross-subsidize their hedging books with premium-collecting strategies.

The strategy is designed to perform during sharp equity drawdowns and volatility-regime transitions — the type of environments witnessed in Q1 2020 and H1 2022. It does not seek returns from benign market beta or credit carry. The firm explicitly avoids constructing a portfolio that depends on a particular macroeconomic outlook, instead calibrating payoffs to the shape of the equity distribution's left tail.

Sherman has historically communicated a preference for managing a constrained asset base relative to the liquidity of the derivatives markets the firm trades. The strategy carries a soft capacity ceiling tied to the depth of listed and OTC option markets. The specific open-or-closed status at any given date requires confirmation from the firm's investor relations team, but the stated philosophy has been to prioritize performance integrity over asset accumulation.

No public record indicates that Human Financial operates a separate philanthropic foundation, donor-advised fund, or impact-investing vehicle associated with the management company. The firm appears structured exclusively as an investment manager for its pooled vehicle and managed accounts, without disclosed non-profit affiliates.