Team

The co-founders of dormouse have all worked together previously and have significant experience in building fault-tolerant trading systems capable of transacting hundreds of thousands of trades daily.

Dr. Martin Coward has over three decades of experience in trading, execution and risk management. After gaining a first class mathematics degree and Ph.D. from Cambridge University, he initially worked on projects for the UK Government as a statistical and mathematical risk analyst. He then moved into finance, working as a Foreign Exchange strategist with Goldman Sachs for 3 years. Prior to setting up IKOS, he worked for Investcorp Bahrain for 3 years, establishing its proprietary trading of equity derivatives. Martin is recognised for being one of the pioneers of quantitative systematic electronic trading in the hedge fund industry. Martin has selected and mentored teams of quantitative analysts who have created some of the most successful programmes including Managed Futures, Currencies, Equity Statistical Arbitrage and Multi-Strategy. Martin continues to actively innovate, design and create investment strategies. He is licensed as a portfolio manager under MiFID.

George Dowdye has been working as a financial services professional for nearly three decades. He started in investment banking with Barclays de ZoeteWedd Limited in the UK in 1990 and traded futures and options on behalf of the bank in Japan. George specialised in listed and OTC derivatives throughout his career in roles for Morgan Stanley, SBC Warburg, and UBS. He has also held directorships for UBS, SBC Warburg and Barclays. After investment banking he became a hedge fund consultant with Albourne Partners. George was appointed as Global Sales Manager of IKOS in 2004.  He is licensed as an investment adviser under MiFID.

Dr. Hans-Joachim Drescher has a decade of experience in financial research, systems development and portfolio management.  After earning a Ph.D. in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the University of Nantes in France, he worked in several post-doc positions doing research in Particle and Cosmic Ray Physics at New York University, the University of Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. Research topics amongst others were the simulation of particle interactions in accelerators and in the atmosphere. Later, he worked for 2 years at IKOS as a researcher in finance working on risk management and algorithmic trading before moving on to help found dormouse. Hans' research is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and presented at numerous international conferences.

Dr. Eric Westphal has been working in finance for two decades. Upon leaving academia with a Ph.D. in Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology from Caltech in 1998, he went to work for various groups within Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in the world. Here he carried out a wide variety of projects including rating and hedging crop insurance policies, structuring arbitrage trades based on weather derivatives, providing risk management for trading groups, and selecting and managing a portfolio of hedge funds. Ultimately, Eric served as senior researcher and as portfolio manager, creating and trading systematic strategies in a variety of markets including equities, currencies, interest rates, options, and futures. After leaving Koch Industries he served as portfolio manager at IKOS for their systematic futures and currencies products. In January 2016, Eric moved to the USA to provide marketing and research services to dormouse Limited.  Eric is licensed as a portfolio manager under MiFID.