Three investment professionals have joined forces to launch Princeton, NJ-based Witherspoon Asset Management, and the firm has unveiled its first fund offering.

The Witherspoon team are: Lee Gladden as chief executive, Thomas Kuntz as chief operating officer, and Tyler Vernon as managing director. Gladden and Kuntz share a background from Commodities Corporation.

The firm’s first launch is the Witherspoon Managed Futures Strategy Fund, a multi-advisor portfolio with a tactical weighting of 75 per cent to discretionary managers and a 25 per cent weighting towards systematic trend followers.

Within the discretionary sector, the fund will look for specialists with niche trading skills, low correlation to each other, and especially discretionary commodity trading advisors in the futures market.

The fund is available to registered investment advisors and retail investors through various platforms.

Witherspoon’s advisory board consists of: F Helmut Weymar, a founder and former chairman and CEO of Commodities Corporation; M Roch Hillenbrand, former president of Commodities Corporation (and later of Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Strategies Group, which bought Commodities Corporation in 1997); and Scott Sipprelle, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley and an investor in the alternatives space.