Background
My name is Charles Maley and here is some background of how I became involved in futures trading- I was born in Philadelphia in 1954. I attended high school at The Malvern Preparatory School and college at The Drexel University Business School.
I first became interested in the investment field in 1977 when my brother Jim became a stock broker for Butcher & Singer in downtown Philadelphia. Soon after in 1980 he joined Paine Webber, Jackson Curtis and was able to convince them to hire me as well.
Almost immediately I was drawn to the trading side of the business. Jack Schwager (Author of Market Wizards) was the director of commodity research at the time and was nice enough to guide me in the right direction. He and his partner Norm Strom were pioneers in the field of system driven funds and were currently running a fund for Paine Webber when I joined. It was there that I was first introduced to the concept of trend following. They also introduced me to quantified mechanical trading models as a way to exploit trends.
I left Paine Webber in 1983 and joined Oppenheimer & Company to further my education and of course make a living. At Oppenheimer, I was fortunate to work with Michael Metz (Head Strategist at the time) on a few projects. Mike was instrumental in helping me look at markets in an entirely different way than Jack and Norm. Mike was simply a great thinker and taught me to use both sides of my brain (left and right) when looking at markets and their potential risks. The two worlds of quantified trading models and Michael’s whole brained approach stuck with me forever. The concepts of employing reliable quantified models but accepting their limitations in “real world” trading became my foundation.
I left Oppenheimer in 1993 to take a position as a derivative trader with Bank Julius Baer in New York. Over the next handful of years I realized I was not learning any more from the major firms and decided it was time to get involved in my own boutique operation.
I first met Martin Bedick in 1980 when I joined Paine Webber and we stayed friends ever since. We seem to have identical viewpoints on trading and often joke that we have been having the same conversation about futures trading for thirty years. I teamed up with Martin in 1998 at Angus Jackson Futures, Inc.
