Christopher L. Cruden, Chief Executive Officer
Upon leaving University, Christopher attended The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and was commissioned into The Gordon Highlanders in 1975.
In 1980, he began his business career as a gold analyst with an investment bank in South Africa. In 1983 he joined Dean Witter, Reynolds Inc. as a securities salesman based in the U.S. and it was during this period that he became involved with the Alternative Investment Industry.
In early 1988 he returned to the U.K. and became a Director of Adam, Harding and Lueck Asset Management Ltd (AHL). After the sale of this firm to E D & F Man in 1990, he became Head of Managed Futures and Options for a major U.S. investment bank in London and with the ASH Group of Prudential Securities in New York.
Christopher joined Tamiso & Co. LLC in 1993 with responsibility for product development and client liaison. During this period he built the firm’s interbank currency management activities and co-developed the Currency Overlay Program.
From early 2002, as part of an agreement between IFX Markets Ltd, in London, and Tamiso, he was Head of Managed Investment Products for IFX. He left in June 2003 to establish Insch Capital Ltd, Insch Management Ltd and Insch Capital Management AG in Switzerland.
He holds the Certificate in Derivatives from the Financial Services Authority in the UK which authorizes him to conduct customer business, investment advisory, and investment management and other controlling functions.
In all, Mr. Cruden has been actively and continually involved in the alternative investment industry for nearly two decades.
David M. Anderson, Non-Executive Chairman
David Anderson has had a long and distinguished career in the City of London, and brings to Insch an exceptional and broad experience of financial and derivatives markets and the Alternative Investment Industry.
In the early 1970's he founded one of the first independent privately owned futures brokers in London, and developed the concept of investment management in futures and options. He subsequently sold his interest in that company and established, with ED&F Man, the futures broking, stock broking and investment management company now called Man International, of which he was Chairman.
In 1974, Mr. Anderson launched one of the first futures and options funds in the world. He was responsible for the development of the alternative investment management business within ED&F Man and also played a leading role in the development of the structured / guaranteed wrapper for derivative investment products.
He has been closely involved in the development of the futures trading industry in London. He was founder Chairman of the Association for Futures Investment and is a Member of the Securities Institute. A past Chairman of the formation committee of the International Petroleum Exchange, he was also vice-chairman of the London Commodity Exchange and a council member of the Association of Futures Brokers and Dealers, which became the Securities and Futures Association (SFA) which subsequently amalgamated into the Financial Services Authority (FSA). As a director of the Securities and Investments Board (SIB) he played a key role in implementing the Financial Services Act 1986.
Ranbir Kandola
Ranbir Kandola, has been the primary independent market and IT consultant with Insch since October 2003.
During that time he has evaluated various electronic market makers and prime brokers for FX trading systems including Deutsche Bank, FIX, Currenex, UBS and others. This work led to the development and launch of the Insch PerfectFX trading platform in 2006.
Working with Christopher Cruden, Ranbir defined, researched, developed and tested the many mathematical algorithms that are now employed in the automated strategies in the Kintillo system. Kintillo is java based and employs a SQL database that is used to keep track of order for risk management and compliance.
He also designed, developed, tested and released J2EE (Swing, EJB, JMS MQ, and JDBC) applications for the front-office and back-office e-trading FX system (Kintillo) with real-time steaming quotes and real-time buy/sell signals that may be integrated with Insch Perfect, Currenex or any other electronic trading platform through an API or FIX.
In 1994 Ranbir earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering (Honors) with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA. He is expert in the following programming languages: Java, VB, VBA, C/C++, Tcl/tk, Perl, HTML, UNIX shell scripts (ksh, csh, sh), SQL and the following systems: Windows, UNIX (Sun, Linux (RedHat & SUSE)), VxWorks. Amongst the tools he uses are: MS Project, Tornado Windriver, Visio, UML, Visual Studio, NetBeans, MS VisualSource Save, Clearcase, Continus, RCS, CVS, Vi, Emac, Cygwin, Apache, Ant, Tomcat, Weblogic, Eclipse.
Ranbir also holds an Msc in Mathematical Trading and Finance from London City Business School. His specializations included Risk Analysis (VaR and Monte Carlo simulation) and advanced option theory along with fixed income, credit risk and structured product evaluation and development.
His dissertation was: “Binominal Pricing and Static Hedging for Single Barrier Options”.
Geoffrey Baker - Director
Geoff manages the Active Advisory activity at Insch and has full responsibility for all matters pertaining to trading and trade execution at the firm. He is the originator and manager of the Insch Currency Overlay Program and also the Insch Premium Plus strategies. Each of these of these strategies are primarily option based and may be tailored to meet specific client requirements in a wide range of currencies or commodities. He is also responsible for the ongoing evaluation of trading platforms and related trade processing and research tools.
He began his trading career in1993 as a commodity and currency trader with Refco Futures Canada Ltd. There he developed an active book of traders comprised of large speculators, commercial hedgers, and commodity funds. He has continued in the field of alternative investment and derivatives trading continually since.
Geoff attended the University of Windsor, Ontario Canada and the Centre for creative studies in Detroit Michigan. He became a Director of Insch in 2008.
Rossana Locher – Office Manager
Upon joining Insch in 2007, Rossana became responsible for all administrative and back-office functions in the firm.
In the seven years prior to joining Insch, Rossana worked for a Swiss based fund sales and distribution company with over Chf 1 Billion under management. The company employed 10 internal salesmen and 100 external marketers. Overseeing an administration team of five, she had direct responsibility for client documentation, investment valuation, employee training, audit and sales-agent payments.
A native of Lugano, Switzerland, Rosanna graduated from the Professional School of Commerce where she attained a diploma for all aspects of her studies.
Ken Zhang – Associate Director
Ken is a citizen of China .
He graduated with a Bsc(hons) in Electronic Engineering and a Msc in Mobile radio communication from Lancaster University. His dissertation was '' Complex computations using crypto-processor in FPGA''
Following graduation, Ken returned to China and established Sente Securities Ltd in ShenZhen China in 2007 and an FX brokerage company, Asian Chance Ltd, in Hong Kong, during 2008.
Ken joined Insch Capital Management SA, Switzerland, as an Associate Director in 2010 and is responsible for the company’s project development in the Asia pacific region; He has extensive contacts and broad knowledge of marketing strategies in Asia.
He has extensive expertise in the trading of FX, NASDAQ stocks and gold. He also has considerable experience in the establishment of trading arcades and the arcade environment.
Ken is also a Senior Partner in Silver Grand Capital Partnership Ltd.
Robert Aleksovski – Research Analyst
Robert joined Insch Capital Management SA as a Research Analyst in June 2010.
He is a graduate from the American University in Bulgaria with a BA Degree in Business Administration and minors in Computer Science and Management Information Systems. During his bachelor studies he was managing the family business, gaining insights in the world of business and developing his interest in finance.
Upon graduation he moved to Lugano, Switzerland to pursue his Masters degree in Banking and Finance, where he acquired great knowledge of capital markets and research interest in International Finance and Credit Derivatives. Meanwhile he attended the ISUP program at the Copenhagen Business School where he studied International Monetary Economics, becoming familiar with macro models of exchange rate determination.
Robert comes from Macedonia; he is fluent in English and has intermediate knowledge of the Italian language.