Fortune Asset Management » About us

Chief Executive Fortune Group

Simon Hopkins has over 20 years' experience in the European investment business. He started his investment banking career with SG Warburg & Co in 1986, joining UBS in 1988 as a European equity specialist. From 1990 to 1996 he spent over six years as a French equity market specialist in Paris, first with HSBC James Capel, then the Japanese giant Nomura in France, where as director of French equities he built a highly-rated equity sales and research business. Simon established Fortune, a diversified hedge fund management and advisory firm, and its research affiliate Global Fund Analysis in 1996. In 2006, Close Brothers Group plc, a leading UK merchant bank, acquired a controlling interest in the firm. Today Fortune manages proprietary hedge funds including the Market Wizards Fund and the Fortune family of funds overseeing 7.5 billion USD in total for a wide range of institutional clients including insurance companies, private banks, family offices and endowments. The firm has also seeded over 20 single strategy funds over the last decade through its unique emerging manager program. Simon brings to the Fortune team a deep understanding of global investors and the driving forces of fund investing. He is a regular commentator on fund industry topics in the financial media and has addressed numerous conferences, the OECD and the London School of Economics on hedge fund investing. He graduated with honours from the University of Bristol's Faculty of Law.

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Executive Director of Research

Richard Tarvin is a co-founder of the firm and serves as Fortune’s Executive Director of Research with a special focus on risk management. He led the research effort at Global Fund Analysis from its creation. Richard was educated at the University of New South Wales, where he received a Bachelor of Science with first class honours in Neurophysiology and consequently received a Commonwealth Post Graduate Doctoral Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D in Neurophysiology. Subsequently spending 5 years in medical research, Richard had numerous papers published in British and American medical journals. Richard went on to earn an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management in 1990, the foremost MBA School in the Southern Hemisphere. Richard brings to Fortune an unparalleled background in quantitative and analytical skills as well as an excellent statistics and computer programming background. He has extensive experience in the development of trading systems having managed a hedge fund from 1994 to 1996. Prior to joining Fortune, Richard undertook numerous project assignments for Bank of New York, Bank of & Mellon Bank. He is an FSA registered representative.

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Principal - Senior Portfolio Manager

Jack Schwager is an executive director of the board of Fortune Group and senior portfolio manager within the Global Fund Analysis team at Fortune. He is also principal investment manager of the Market Wizards Funds, the flagship fund of hedge funds series of the Fortune Group. His prior experience includes over 30 years on Wall Street including 22 years as director of futures research for some of Wall Street’s leading firms, where he also spent ten years as the co-principal of a commodity trading advisory business. Mr Schwager began his career with Reynolds Securities as a research analyst (1971 to 1973), and then moved to Loeb Rhoades Hornblower where he became director of futures research (1973 to 1979). From 1979 to 1983 he was director of futures research at Smith Barney, and from 1983 to 1984 he was director of research (for one trading group) at Commodities Corporation. He was director of futures research at Paine Webber from 1984 to 1988, and director of futures research at Prudential Securities from 1988 to 1996. Between 1996 and 1999 he continued to work for Prudential as a consultant. Mr. Schwager has written extensively on the futures industry and great traders (in all financial markets). His first book, “A Complete Guide to the Futures Markets”, which was published in 1984, is considered to be one of the classic reference works in the field. More than a decade later he revised and expanded this original work into the three-volume series, “Schwager on Futures”, consisting of “Fundamental Analysis” (1995), “Technical Analysis” (1996), and “Managed Trading: Myths and Truths”(1996). He is also the author of “Getting Started in Technical Analysis” (1999), which is part of John Wiley’s popular “Getting Started” series. Mr Schwager is perhaps best known for his best-selling series of interviews with the greatest hedge fund managers of the last two decades, which includes “Market Wizards” (1989), “The New Market Wizards” (1992), and “Stock Market Wizards” (2001). Mr. Schwager is a frequent seminar speaker and has lectured on a range of analytical topics with particular focus on the characteristics of great traders, technical analysis, and trading system evaluation. He holds a BA in Economics from Brooklyn College (1970) and an MA in Economics from Brown University (1971).

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Click here to see a video of Jack Schwager speaking at last year's Excellence in Absolute Returns conference.

Chief Investment Officer

Nancy Curtin has over 20 years' experience encompassing senior roles in asset management, private equity and hedge fund investing. Having started her career as a Financial Analyst for Morgan Stanley in Mergers and Acquisitions, between 1979-1981 she became Vice President-Corporate Finance at Credit Suisse First Boston between 1983-1987. She subsequently became a senior portfolio manager at Rho Asset Management, where she managed the firm’s assets across a range of strategies including global and European equity long/short, relative value, fixed income and macro. She also developed Rho's private equity businesses in in Berlin, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between 1993-1999 Nancy held a number of positions at Baring Asset Management including Head of Emerging Markets, Member of European Investment and Asset Allocation Team as well as Member of the Board of Baring Asset Management and Baring Venture Partners. In 1999 Nancy was appointed as Managing Director of Schroders Investment Management NA and Head of Global Investments for its $20bn Global Mutual Fund Businesses. She was also CEO of Internet Finance Partners, a venture capital business of Schroders Plc which invests in leading edge technologies for the financial services industry. Nancy holds a BA in political science, summa cum laude, from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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President, Fortune Group

Charles Gave has been researching tactical asset allocation for nearly thirty years. Charles created a research firm called Cecogest in 1974. In 1986, Charles co-founded Cursitor-Eaton Asset Management where he was Chief Investment Officer until the firm was sold in 1995 to Alliance Capital. At Cursitor, Charles managed over US$10bn of institutional money on a global asset allocation mandate. In 1999, Charles left Alliance Capital and created GaveKal Research. Charles also sits on the board of numerous other European companies including Global Fund Analysis and Ecowin in which he also holds equity participations.
Charles Gave was awarded Order of Merit by the French Government in 2004.

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Chairman, Fortune Group

Mark Ebert has over 20 years of M&A and investment banking experience. He is currently Chairman of the Fortune Group (since 2006) and a director of Lombard Odier Darrier Hentsch's private equity funds (since 2001). From 2004-2006, Mr Ebert was chairman of Quadrum Partners, a corporate finance advisory firm based in Zurich. From 2001-2004, he was a Member of the Executive Committee of Lombard Odier Darrier Hentsch, Geneva/Zurich, responsible for Equity Brokerage, M&A, Sales & Trading and Private Equity. From 1998-2001 he was joint CEO of WestLB Panmure, an investment banking / institutional brokerage firm in London and Dusseldorf, when he also served as a Director of West Private Equity and founded two of WestLB's private equity funds. From 1990-1998, Mr Ebert was employed by UBS in London and Zurich where he was the Chairman of its Investment Banking Management Board, Head of European M&A and Global Co-ordinator of M&A. From 1985-1990 he was Director of trans-Atlantic M&A at Citicorp Scrimgeour Vickers in London. Prior to that he was an auditor at Price Waterhouse in London. Mr Ebert is a Certified Public Accountant, resides in Switzerland and is a dual US and British national. His advisory experience has been focused on financial institutions and the private equity sectors.

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Finance Director

Gary Thornton qualified as a chartered accountant in 1993 with Moore Stephens, an international firm of accountants. After spending a further two years working in their training department, he moved to H W Fisher & Company to become head of Training and Development. He also managed a select portfolio of clients, with particular interest in the pensions and financial services sectors. Gary has been involved with Fortune Asset Management since the first year, and brings this knowledge, together with more than ten years business experience to his role as Finance Director.

Gary graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge with a degree in Modern Languages (French and German) and History of Art.

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President

Frank Casey has garnered broad capital markets knowledge and alternatives investment experience over his long career. Frank has always enjoyed being on "the leading edge" of alternative investments. Upon leaving the US Army as an Airborne-Ranger Qualified Infantry Captain in 1974, he joined Merrill Lynch to serve corporations as risk-manager specializing in equity, oil and metals derivatives hedging until 1982. He then joined Prudential Securities to advise banks on hedging interest rate exposures, specializing in the nascent mortgage-origination/MBS-pipeline risks arena until 1994. He then formed his own risk and portfolio management firms and later marketed option-based portfolio management strategies for a specialized institutional manager. He has raised assets for alternative investment managers since 1992. Joining the firm as President-USA, he primarily serves in a business development and client service capacity; however, his capital markets experience, honed within 34-years of alternatives investment exposure, also serves the firm when he qualitatively vets hedge fund managers to discern real alpha talent.
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Managing Director – Investment Advisory

Max Schmid started his investment banking career with UBS in 1978 on the floor of the exchange in Switzerland. From 1982 to 1988 he spent over six years in London as new issue trader/market maker and syndicate manager for UBS Sec., BoA and CSFB, where he was in charge of all new issue trading including straight equities, convertible and cum warrant bonds as well as fixed income credits across all major currencies.

In 1988 Max returned to Switzerland and joined Bank Leu as VP in charge of secondary CHF fixed income and convertible bond trading. Subsequent to Bank Leu Max joined Tradition in London as a broker in asset swaps and illiquid fixed income credits. In 1994 Max left the markets and moved to the U.S. as an investment and corporate advisor for a group of wealthy Swiss investors who owned a majority interest a music cable TV network, MOR Music TV, which not only promoted upcoming performing artists but also was the first network sell music and related merchandise on-air. He assisted in the successful turn around of the company and subsequent sale to one of the co-founders of the Home Shopping Network.

In 1998, Max rejoined the international capital markets at ABN Amro in London as a director and senior credit trader. Ahead of the introduction of the €uro in January 1999, Max was seconded back to the U.S. and joined ABN Amro’s trading floor in New York where he was responsible for trading the €uro-denominated credit books, cross border arbitrage as well as $-Yankee-bonds. Max was part of a team of a dedicated fixed income professionals who built a successful trading and sales franchise in €uro-denominated fixed income credits and European government bonds on behalf of ABN Amro.

After almost 10-years in the U.S., in 2003 he joined City-Capital Corporation (3C), a London based boutique investment bank, as a managing director of its Bermuda based alternative assets subsidiary. At 3C he was responsible for identifying new niche managers and the distribution of alternative assets ranging from single hedge fund managers, FoHFs and structured, private equity-style products to institutional and private clients alike.

Max is a dual Swiss and Italian citizen and speaks several European languages including German, English, Italian and French. At different times, max held a series of securities licenses in various markets and is currently licensed with the FSA.
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