About Us

Hercules Investments is a World Class portfolio manager for growth-seeking individual investors.

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KEY STRENGTHS

Key Strengths

Differentiated Strategies

Market Neutral Performance
High Liquidity & Transparency
Index Options & ETFs

We specialize in actively managed and systematic investment strategies to monetize investment performance - alpha - from equity market volatility. We apply this expertise to additionally offer highly liquid, growth focused equity strategies that are market-hedged to effectively generate all-weather performance. The Hercules Investments product set offers individuals, advisors & intermediaries with access to differentiated standalone strategies, as well as unique components to their overall investment allocation.

Key Strengths

All-Weather Performance

Low Market-Correlation
Low Portfolio Drawdown
Versatile Risk Management

Our active management and risk hedging of every portfolio strategy ensures, the investment performance has low correlation to broad equity markets and can sustain market down-cycles with little portfolio drawdown.

Key Strengths

Models-Based Idea Generation

Increased Scalability
Optimized Efficiencies
Broad Market Coverage

We take a systematic, data and model driven approach to investing. It allows us to multiply the purview of our markets with greater ease and precision, and significantly cut down decision-making time.

Key Strengths

Rules-Based Process and Execution

Emotion or Bias-Free
Error Minimization
Consistent Transparency

We budget our trade exposures to different risk factors and periodically conduct a post-hoc analysis of realized portfolio performance. Our rules-based trading takes the subjectivity and individual behavior out of the process, minimizing the scope for errors and performance inconsistency.

Key Strengths

Cutting Edge Research and Systems

In-House R&D;
Best-In-Class Adoption
Periodic Revisions

Hercules’ research and analytics reflects the decades of experience and skill-set of our R&D; members. We take a regular and methodical approach to challenge and incrementally improve upon our investment and research platforms, to ensure the most current best-practices are applied.

Key Strengths

Personalized Client Attention

High-Touch Service
Full & Easy Accessibility
Open Communication

Our Portfolio Solutions are customized to each client’s needs after the client has understood the Investment Factors influencing future portfolio performance and is comfortable with his/her risk exposure. Our client onboarding process guides the investor to make a customized and disciplined investment plan. The tool incorporates criteria such as the investor's objective, contributions, risk appetite and liquidity needs to calculate a client risk score and retirement glidepath which translates supplied criteria to a constructed portfolio.

OUR EXECUTIVE TEAM

THE HERCULES EXECUTIVE TEAM

James McDonald - CEO & Chief Investment Officer

James McDonald is a 25 year veteran of the investment industry and was named one of America's top 10 investment advisors by ETF.com in 2012. A frequent lecturer and conference speaker, he is a nationally recognized expert on the topics of Macroeconomics, Event Driven Investing, Growth Investing, Portfolio Construction, Index Investing, Exchange Traded Funds, Digital Currencies, and Index Linked Derivatives. Having directly traded over $10 billion in US Equity Index Options volume over his career, James' deep expertise in Options trading differentiates him from virtually all other financial advisors. James has held senior roles with Fortune 500 investment firms in brokerage, wealth management, portfolio management, and trading. Prior to founding Hercules Investments, LLC in 2019, he was CIO of Vishnu Wealth Management and CEO and founder of Index Strategy Advisors, Inc. (ISA) where he led the firm for 9 years. Prior to ISA, he was Director of Strategy for the $12 Billion Wealth Management group at BBVA Compass. Mr. McDonald is the co-author of the book "How to Invest in Bitcoin by two Harvard Minds", and graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor's degree in Economics.

David Tran - EVP, Business Development, Sales & Marketing

David Tran has 14 years of sales and marketing experience and has launched, managed, and successfully exited several multi-million dollar companies. As Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development for Hercules Investments, David is responsible for maintaining business relationships, marketing, and sales. Prior to joining Hercules Investments in 2019, he was CEO of a private money mortgage company, director of marketing at top 100 technology company DynaPass Inc., CEO of Contact Ratio Inc. marketing agency, director of sales & marketing at Tustin law firm, and owned an Ebay.com e-commerce business as a top 1% rated Platinum PowerSeller while pursuing his bachelor’s degree full time. He graduated from the California State University of Fullerton with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance in 2007.