About Us - CERTEZA

We are tucked away in a small mountain town in Northern Utah, thousands of miles from the noise and dogma of Wall Street.

Our mindset, motivation, and methods are materially different:

We thrive in a rigorously academic environment where every assumption and every convention is challenged

We continuously test and validate our strategies in pursuit of the absolute best possible outcomes for our investors

We apply innovative mathematical, statistical, and visualization techniques to deliver these outcomes

The Team

The solution was always there – it just needed the right team, in the right environment, to discover it and implement it

Chief Investment Officer

Brett Nelson, CFA

Brett is a talented mathematician whose ability was recognised and nurtured from an early age. He was one of the first people to trade volatility directly and eliminate the difficulties inherent in utilizing traditional equity derivatives for volatility trading.

Chief Technology Officer

Patrick Sharp

Patrick was instrumental in the development of Certeza’s purpose-built software systems designed to analyse option & volatility markets.

Chief Executive Officer

Jim Macfarlane, CFA

Jim joined the leadership team at Certeza in 2019 to focus on the day-to-day operations, compliance, business development and marketing. He is a member of the investment committee.

Our evolution

Early ‘90s

A gifted mathematician

With a precocious ability in mathematics, Brett was placed in a gifted program where he excelled in problem solving tournaments before competing in national math competitions

Mid ‘90s

Early entrepreneurship

A series of successful entrepreneurial moves in his early teenage years led to him seeking additional practical applications for his problem solving abilities

1996-1997

Trading beginnings

He began studying trading literature, but most books were sensational and he quickly uncovered their weaknesses, gravitating towards those featuring more rigorous mathematical approaches

Late ‘90s

Options forums

With the growth of the internet, he joined trading and quant forums, discovering that the options trading strategies he was building were far more sophisticated than those typically being discussed

2003 – 2004

Focus on volatility

He discovered that the primary source of alpha was best described by the volatility component of options, investigating this further in a private forum with a group of like-minded professors and traders

2004 – 2006

Advent of VIX derivatives

When VIX derivatives were launched shortly after, as the first entrants, the group were only able to trade their theories against each other, but as the market became more liquid it became possible to build practical volatility trading models

2007 – 2010

Volatility arbitrage

Again, Brett used sophisticated mathematical analyses to uncover new trading strategies focused on volatility arbitrage, when most of the rest of the group were fixated on harvesting volatility risk premia

Mid 2010

Macro Vega Strategy

Brett completes his core trading model and launches the Macro Vega Strategy (one of the longest-standing and consistently profitable volatility strategies)

2011

Software hire

Brett begins search for software engineer to help develop analysis platform but finds corporate computer scientists too set in their ways. Brett meets Patrick, a computer science and physics student, and discusses volatility structures: “Patrick was the first to actually ask deeply intelligent questions and offer novel insight in real-time”

2012

Visualization platform

Patrick leads the design and build of a new platform to allow Certeza to visualize interactions of derivatives, finding weak points and strong points across time and in multiple dimensions

2015

A gap in the market discovered

Investors and prospects begin asking Certeza to apply their expertise to the problem of the high cost of downside protection in large cap hedged equity funds

2017

The perfect combination

Brett’s previous options research in conjunction Patrick’s computational analytics capabilities prove to be the perfect combination to develop such a strategy

2020

Analytics optimized

Certeza’s ground-breaking proprietary platform is completed, enabling exhaustive exploration of strategy variants across the universe of conditions. Certeza Strategy parameters are optimized.

2021

Certeza strategy launched

The first fund featuring the Certeza Strategy opens to external investors and begins trading in the markets

We don’t talk, think or act like Wall Street because we want to deliver better outcomes for our investors than those offered by Wall Street.