ABOUT US
THE FIRM
Logica Capital Advisers, LLC (“LCA”) is an U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) registered investment adviser founded in late 2011. Research and development (“R&D”) began in early 2012 with a focus on building complementary alpha sources designed to balance varying strategy specific exposures and drawdown characteristics, as well as to design robust processes of optimization that ideally balance differentiated sources of volatility. To this end, the team built discrete modular strategies to target market phenomenon, as well as a Tactical Exposure & Risk Allocation (“TERA”) model for optimization between them. While each sub-strategy is unique, they all exhibit long volatility characteristics alongside counteracting behaviors that aimed to better neutralize overall portfolio volatility, and related exposures, when combined.
From early 2015 through mid-2018, Logica received a mandate to run a long volatility risk overlay against a basket of sub-advised equity market neutral and arbitrage strategies, aiming to be the long volatility risk control for a broader portfolio of diversified, but generally short volatility managers. After successfully mitigating the market behavior that adversely affected the wider equity market neutral universe and arbitrage strategies over several years, Logica recognized the value of what it had built, and decided to spin out stand-alone products.
Initially launching in late 2018 with internal capital, the stand-alone Logica Tail Risk (“LTR”) successfully navigated the meaningful S&P correction in December 2018, and violent recovery in January 2019. This success led to institutional dialogue and eventually the design of a second strategy - Logica Absolute Return (“LAR”), which increased the weighting of the upside of LTR to create more balanced market exposure as opposed to a strong downside focus. In January 2020, Logica formally launched LAR as a Fund, introducing several unique innovations to Logica’s process.
THE TEAM
Wayne Himelsein - Chief Investment Officer
As Chief Investment Officer of Logica, Mr. Himelsein is responsible for leading portfolio management and the overall implementation of the firm’s investment strategies. Mr. Himelsein is a member of the Investment Committee and Risk Committee. Beginning his career as a Proprietary Trader in 1995, and launching his first Hedge Fund in 2000, Mr. Himelsein has over 25 years of industry experience.
Mr. Himelsein founded Logica in 2011. Throughout his career, he has continued to develop, evolve, and refine his quantitative trading, risk, and portfolio management processes. Beginning in 2011, Mr. Himelsein and his team conducted four years of R&D to solve the problem of pervasive negative skewness inherent in hedge fund’s, with a quest to produce absolute returns regardless of market regime or stress, which today serves as the basis of the Logica strategies.
Mr. Himelsein graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. David Wihr Taylor, Ph.D. - Partner, Head of Research
As Head of Research at Logica, Dr. Taylor oversees the R&D efforts, conducting applied research and financial modeling from the early stages of idea generation and development, through testing, to implementation. Dr. Taylor is a member of the Investment Committee.
Dr. Taylor joined Logica in 2014. Dr. Taylor is a mathematician with wide-ranging experience in both the theoretical and applied fields. Furthermore, he specializes in combining applied and computational methods with highly abstract theories to gain insight into new and historical problems. Examples of Dr. Taylor’s work include: Applications of simulated annealing to tomographic image reconstruction of the Earth’s magnetosphere from multi-satellite measurements; explicit computation of invariant polynomials for the action of symmetry groups in both geometric and arithmetic settings. This work has applications in both cryptography and computer vision; development of clustering algorithms with variable metric functions. Applications include image recognition and mathematical finance.
Dr. Taylor completed his B.S. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate in mathematics from University of California, Los Angeles.
Patrick Rentz - Partner, Head of Trading & Risk Management
As Head of Trading and Risk at Logica, Mr. Rentz builds, refines, and improves upon the fund's proprietary models. Additionally, he oversees the day-to-day portfolio analysis, management, and trading of individual strategies. Mr. Rentz is a member of the Investment Committee and Risk Committee.
Mr. Rentz co-founded Logica in 2011. Mr. Rentz has years of experience in equity markets, risk management, and financial modeling and continuously broadens and cultivates his knowledge base through focused education and research in the field. Previously, Patrick worked as a quantitative analyst for Himelsein Mandel Fund Management building models for the evaluation of inefficiencies for investment opportunities, valuation of the fund’s assets, creation of discounted cash flow analyses, and implementation of various risk-related stress tests utilizing Monte Carlo methods and scenario analyses.
Mr. Rentz holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
Tiffany McGuirk - Director of Trade Ops
As Director of Trade Operations at Logica, Mrs. McGuirk is responsible for overseeing middle and back office services liaising with traders, brokers, and other interested parties in order to confirm and settle trades on time, while completing daily deliverables, and fulfilling other trading and operational tasks.
Mrs. McGuirk joined Logica in 2022 from Nuveen Investments. Mrs. McGuirk has over 25 years of client service and operations experience on both the buy-side and sell-side. She was previously the Investor Relations and Operations Manager at a hedge fund Gratia Capital based in Los Angeles and the Director of Account Management at Barclays where she helped start the West Coast Prime Brokerage division. Prior to that Mrs. McGuirk was Vice President of Prime Brokerage Account Management at Pershing, an affiliate of The Bank of New York Mellon and a Senior Relationship Manager for Bear Stearns Prime Services. She began her career as the Operations Manager at Zazove Associates, a $5 billion hedge fund specializing in convertible securities.
Mrs. McGuirk holds a B.A. from the University of Southern California.
Joe Tagliaferro - Partner, Chief Executive Officer & Chief Compliance Officer
As Chief Executive Officer at Logica. Mr. Tagliaferro is responsible for overseeing key business, corporate, and legal activities across the firm.
Mr. Tagliaferro joined Logica in 2020. Mr. Tagliaferro is a seasoned corporate and securities attorney with over two decades of experience focusing on corporate and securities transactional matters, hedge funds, private equity, and regulatory/compliance matters. Throughout his legal career, Mr. Tagliaferro held partner and senior partner positions at domestic and global law firms and most recently was a senior equity partner at Withers Bergman LLP in Los Angeles. He currently maintains an Of Counsel relationship with Withers Bergman LLP.
Mr. Tagliaferro completed his B.S. in Accountancy at Villanova University and earned his J.D. from Southwestern University. He is a member of the State Bar of California and is a Registered Foreign Lawyer in the U.K.
Jam Zovein - Partner, Chief Operating Officer
As Chief Operating Officer and Chief Compliance Officer at Logica, Mr. Zovein leads the business and product development efforts, as well as the compliance functions to help generate new business, service current relationships and develop new products with strategic partners.
Mr. Zovein joined Logica in 2021. Mr. Zovein has over 20 years of investment experience as it relates to distribution, product development, operations, and corporate strategy. He has held senior roles within Nuveen Investments, North Square Investments, and quantitative hedge fund Algert Global. He began his investment career at Wilshire Associates. Throughout his career he has been involved in multiple acquisitions and integrations of investment management firms and teams. He has lead turnarounds of alternative investment management firms and has overseen the development of numerous onshore/offshore, master/feeder fund launches within the U.S., Cayman Islands and Dublin.
Mr. Zovein holds an MBA from Boston University Questrom School of Business and B.S. from Boston University College of Engineering.
CAREERS
Please contact us directly for opportunities.