“Psychology highlighted the importance of removing emotion from decisions”

The Hedge Funds Club’s Stefan Nilsson had a chat with Adam Havryliv, Founder and CIO of East Coast Capital Management in Australia. They talked about what sets the firm apart, the advantages of being a boutique manager, lessons learnt from sailing, removing emotions from investment decisions and much more.

Established in 2008, East Coast Capital Management (ECCM) is a Sydney-based systematic fund manager that develops and implements quantitative trading strategies. Adam Havryliv is the firm’s Founder and Chief Investment Officer. Previously, Adam worked with Citi from 2007 to 2008 in the Investment Banking division, where he was responsible for corporate derivatives and structured solutions. From 2005 to 2007, Adam was a Trader at Shell Cove Capital Management, executing global macro trading strategies. From 2004 to 2005, Adam worked at Goldman Sachs JBWere in the Equities Trading division.

What’s the story behind the company name? Is there a deeper meaning than being a capital management firm on the east coast of Australia?

Our name, East Coast Capital Management, or ECCM, is certainly a nod to where we are headquartered in Sydney, on Australia’s east coast.

It also points to a deeper influence: our philosophy is shaped by the discipline and patience required to navigate uncertainty. Sailing is a helpful analogy, reflected in our company name and brand imagery. When done well, it’s an enjoyable, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes peaceful experience that appears simple and elegant to onlookers. But underneath that simplicity lies a foundation of systems, preparation, and the skill to respond to shifting conditions and obstacles.

That framework underpins our investment philosophy. So, while the name reflects our physical roots, it also captures the mindset that defines how we approach markets: navigating uncertainty with discipline.

Quant trading strategies have gone mainstream in recent years. In a crowded, noisy field, what sets ECCM apart from other managers running systematic strategies?

We operate our flagship ECCM Systematic Trend Fund, built on our time-tested trend-following program. With nearly six years of live performance, our results place us among the top-performing trend followers globally, both in absolute and risk-adjusted terms.

A few elements set us apart:

• We adopt a classic approach to trend following: focusing on return maximisation through what we call outlier hunting. That is, we allow our strongest trades to run, without adaptively cutting them short.
• We maintain a highly diversified, liquid universe of over 90 international futures markets, giving us the breadth to capture trends across uncorrelated asset classes and geographies as they emerge.
• As a boutique manager, we can be more granular in our exposures: weighting our investable universe towards commodities and currencies, as well as geographically diverse equity indices and fixed-income instruments – areas that large institutional managers often underweight due to capacity constraints.
• We are independent and deeply aligned with our investors, with a strong focus on cost efficiency and risk management.

These elements together give us a distinctive profile in the systematic landscape.

Trend following requires an unusual blend of discipline, patience, and unemotional decision-making. How has your life experience influenced your trading philosophy?

My career has spanned technology, financial markets and psychology – and each discipline has influenced how I trade.

Technology taught me the value of building repeatable, testable systems. Psychology highlighted the impact of behavioural biases and the importance of removing emotion from the decision loop. And sailing, which I’ve enjoyed for 25 years, reinforced the mindset of responding skillfully to whatever conditions you find yourself in.

Trend following is ultimately a structured application of those lessons: build robust systems, manage behaviour, and respond with discipline rather than prediction.

What type of investors are you managing money for? Are they mainly Australian investors? Or have you attracted international investors too?

We manage capital primarily for high-net-worth investors and family offices who understand the value of diversification and the role of low-correlation strategies in a portfolio. We are also receiving interest from institutional allocators.

While our core investor base is Australian, we continue to see reverse enquiries from overseas, particularly from investors looking for strategies with genuine crisis-alpha characteristics and a consistent, rule-based process.

Quite recently, you have recruited the well-known Australian industry veterans Kim Ivey and Nina Dunn as advisers. Why did you decide on this now? What do you hope they will bring to the table?

We were very pleased to welcome Kim Ivey and Nina Dunn to our Advisory Council as the business continues to expand. Both bring decades of experience across trading, governance, and asset management.

Bringing on advisers of their calibre at this stage helps ensure that as we scale, we do so with the benefit of seasoned guidance: practical expertise, strong governance oversight, and an external perspective that keeps us sharp and focused.

You are also behind the “Aussie Turtles” brand alongside ECCM’s Strategy Ambassador, Richard Brennan, which has a playful tone in a dry industry. Why did you form the Aussie Turtles, and what does it represent?”

The Aussie Turtles began as a way to make systematic investing more approachable. Trend following can seem technical or intimidating, so we created a brand with a lighter, more human tone. Richard and I wanted to show that you can be disciplined and data-driven without taking yourself too seriously. The turtle metaphor embodies the qualities that make trend following work: patience, persistence, and staying the course.

The name also pays homage to the famous Turtle Experiment of the 1980s, when Richard Dennis and Bill Eckhardt demonstrated that a disciplined, rules-based framework could generate exceptional results when applied with consistency and rigour. The real lesson wasn’t that anyone could do it, but that a systematic process, executed precisely without emotion or deviation, is a powerful edge. That philosophy is at the heart of our approach: clear rules, strong risk management, and discipline.

Most recently, we published our first book, “The Aussie Turtles Trend Following Guide”, now available on Amazon. It’s designed as a field manual (not a list of rules) to help readers understand the philosophy behind trend following. We hope readers enjoy it.