Blackworks Capital manages the BWC Founders Fund, a systematic hedge fund where every decision is made by rule and the founder invests on the same terms as every partner.
Before the fund launched in March 2025, I ran similar strategies on my own money. The idea underneath them is keeping emotion out of investment decisions: the fund runs on thousands of rules, so nothing waits on my judgement on a bad day.
Prior to starting Blackworks Capital, I co-founded ARB Midstream, a private-equity-backed midstream energy company serving crude oil markets across North America, and was its first employee. I spent ten years as its Chief Financial Officer and a board member. I raised equity and debt from institutional investors and lenders, and answered their diligence from the other side of the table. Audit, tax and treasury reported to me. I established the risk management policy for our crude marketing and trading business, kept the trading group within it, and reported our risk and positions to the banks that financed it.
So I set the fund up the way a CFO would. An independent administrator calculates the fund’s NAV and issues investor financial statements every month. Outside firms audit the fund every year and prepare its taxes. My own money is in the fund on the same terms as every partner, and the management company pays the fund’s operating expenses.
My own money is in the fund on the same terms as every partner, paying the same fees.
When the rules’ conditions are met, the program buys or sells on its own. No committee approves it. We don’t trade intraday, because I think it’s mostly noise, and not less often, because I don’t want the fund’s decisions lagging the market’s changes.
Five forces it reads
Three factors express those forces in the fund's positioning: momentum, mean reversion and cross-asset correlation. Thousands of rules, each tested against decades of data. The fund holds exchange-traded funds, including leveraged ETFs, and borrows nothing at the fund level.
Each month, investors receive financial statements from the independent fund administrator, and an Investor Letter from me on what drove the result, with a factsheet of performance metrics. The fund is audited every year, and its taxes are prepared by outside firms.
A rules-based fund is supposed to do one thing when its readings turn: reduce exposure, without waiting for a person to decide it. The figure compares the fund with the index in the months the index fell.
It’s one stretch of one market and a short record, so take it for what it is. It shows how the rules behaved in the falls the index has had, and it won’t always work the same.
Down-Market Months
+11.0%
S&P 500 Total Return in the same months: -12.0%
Net monthly returns after all fees and expenses, compounded from inception. S&P 500 Total Return figures are index returns and bear no fees. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Net returns since inception (March 2025 – October 2026).
Net monthly returns after all fees and expenses, compounded from inception. S&P 500 Total Return figures are index returns and bear no fees. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
See every month and the full risk metrics on the fund page →
Each one covers what the fund returned, what the markets did, what it held and which strategies drove the result, with a one-page factsheet.
BWC Founders Fund, LLC. Net monthly returns after the 2% management fee, the 15% incentive allocation and fund expenses, compounded from inception. An individual investor’s return depends on subscription date and will differ.
S&P 500 Total Return is the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested; it is unmanaged, bears no fees, cannot be invested in directly, and the fund is not managed to track it. Down-market months chains the months in which the index fell; no investor held the fund for only those months. Max drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough fall in month-end net values to date; a later fall can be larger. Sharpe ratio and alpha are calculated from net returns; the methods are on the fund page.
The fund holds exchange-traded funds, including leveraged ETFs, and borrows nothing at the fund level; exits follow rules that can act slowly, and no single holding is exited at a set loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investments involve risk, including the possible loss of principal.
