Principals
Tim Pickering
President, Lead Portfolio Manager, CIO
Tim Pickering, Founder and President of Auspice Capital Advisors (Auspice), is the lead portfolio manager and CIO with over 15 years of commodity and financial trading experience. Prior to forming Auspice, Tim was Vice President of Options Trading at Shell Trading Gas and Power in the Houston and Calgary offices. Tim began his career at TD Securities in Toronto in their elite trading development program. He gained experience in a wide expanse of capital market products including foreign exchange, bonds, money markets and derivatives. Ultimately, Tim held the Senior Trader position for the energy derivatives portfolio. Tim has extensive experience trading OTC and exchange traded options, futures, swaps and quantitative trend following systems.
With partner Ken Corner, Tim Pickering has built Auspice Capital Advisors as a next generation CTA, offering strategies in active managed futures (Diversified and Energy), passive ETFs, enhanced indices and custom commodity strategies. Auspice was selected as one of Alberta’s 50 fastest growing companies by Alberta Venture Magazine and KPMG for both 2010 and 2011. Auspice is also the winner of the 2011 Silver medal from Morningstar in the category of Best Opportunistic Hedge Fund in Canada.
In 2010, Auspice launched the third generation Auspice eBeta™ indices: the Auspice Broad Commodity and Managed Futures Indices are NYSE published. The first was licensed by Claymore and is sub-advised by Auspice as an ETF, CBR:TSX. Both indices have been licensed by Direxion Funds and launched in February 2012 as mutual funds in the U.S. Most recently, Horizons ETFs (member of the Mirae Asset Financial Group) has licensed the Managed Futures index for an ETF in Canada launching March 2012. Additionally, Auspice is funding the Pulse Auspice Energy Fund, a multi-strategy, multi-time period quantitative approach to investing in the global energy futures markets in partnership with Pulse Capital of New York.
Ken Corner
Portfolio Manager, Director of Research and Operations
Ken Corner is a founding partner of Auspice and a limited partner. Ken's professional career began as a design engineer (Mechanical) for the ATCO group of companies and then evolved into financial modeling and commodity trading. Following his time with ATCO, Ken traded natural gas derivatives for Shell, and then went on to become the Vice President of Options Trading for TD Securities in Calgary. Ken leads the research effort at Auspice, and oversees the trading operation.
Team
Michael Lee Hing
Director of Risk and Compliance
Michael has over 12 years of experience in enterprise risk management, financial reporting and analysis, and corporate due diligence. He spent the previous four years working in risk management at Bell Canada Enterprise where he developed expertise in implementing enterprise risk management platforms. He is now responsible for risk management and compliance at Auspice.
Laurie Kelly
Director of Finance
Laurie has over 15 years of experience in accounting, financial reporting and analysis and internal controls. Prior to joining Auspice, she was a finance manager at Enbridge Inc. Laurie started her career with KPMG LLP, specializing in audit and advisory services to companies in the oil and gas industry before transferring to KPMG’s Silicon Valley, CA office in 1999, where she managed several public company audit engagements and assisted in initial public offerings of companies in the high-tech industry. From 2002 to 2007, Laurie worked in the U.S. in a variety of finance related management positions, including two years as the Corporate Controller of a NASDAQ-listed biotechnology company. She has experience managing accounting and treasury functions, including processes and controls, and internal and external reporting. She is a Chartered Accountant and a graduate from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Commerce degree.
Basil D’Souza
Director of Business Development
Basil leads Auspices institutional and retail sales initiatives. He has over 10 years of industry experience with Claymore ETFs and TD Asset Management. Through his career, Basil has worked with structured products, hedge funds and complex derivatives. Basil is a graduate of Concordia University from Montreal and he has been awarded the CFA charter.
Kevin Malenfant
Quantitative Analyst
Kevin has a Bachelor's of Science degree in Pure and Applied mathematics from the University of Calgary and is currently pursuing a Master's of Science degree. Kevin first joined Auspice through MITACS-Accelerate, a national internship program.
Jason Ewasuik
Trader
Jason graduated in 2009 from the J.R. Shaw School of Business at The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology with a Bachelors of Applied Business and a major in Finance. Before joining Auspice, Jason traded for National Bank Financial.