History

The firm was founded in 1992 by Toby Crabel, who is the chief executive officer and president of Crabel Capital Management, LLC. Toby devotes most of his time researching trading ideas and leading our worldwide research team.

After studying finance at Florida Technological University, Toby joined Chicago-based RB&H Financial Services in 1980, one of the most well-regarded brokerage firms on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. There, he traded customer accounts using a discretionary approach. RB&H was followed by four years of publishing a commodity advisory letter, The Active Trader, devoted to explaining his observations of price behavior.  In 1989, he authored the book Day Trading with Short Term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakouts.

Early in the 1990’s, Toby made his most significant strides as a researcher and trader. The volatility that seemed to accompany his discretionary trading during the 1985-1990 period was disquieting. Toby began looking for an approach that was more consistent with his risk-averse nature towards managing customer funds. The defining period occurred from 1991 to mid-1993. Toby temporarily gave up the autonomy of his own shop to work in research and trading under Victor Niederhoffer at Niederhoffer Investments in New York, where Victor had a significant influence on Toby’s research directions. In this intellectual and challenging environment, Toby began to shape and refine his approaches to risk and trading. During this time, he became convinced of the need to systematize his trading and risk control methods. Toby found this approach to be a better psychological fit for him, and also a cure for the high volatility that had accompanied his discretionary trading. It also allowed him to focus more on research. In January 1992, he began a strict application of systematic, short-term strategies in futures markets.

Toby Crabel left Niederhoffer Investments in April 1993. At this point, Toby was confident that he had conceived of an approach to trading and risk management on which he could build a world-class investment management business. Starting in 1993, Toby invested all available resources in building the infrastructure necessary to implement his ideas. During this time, he created unique research and signal generation systems that are still a central part of research and trading today. Over the subsequent years, the strategies employed at Crabel Capital have expanded from 14 to over 1,000.