“You could publish trading rules in the newspaper and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline.”
Richard Dennis
Not many portfolio managers can claim a track record compounding at roughly 20% per year over more than 26 years of trading.
Paul Mulvaney is one of them.
He is the CEO and CIO of Mulvaney Capital Management, the London-based CTA he founded in March 1999. According to the firm’s own materials, the program has run unchanged since inception, entirely systematic, long-term, and built around a single idea: markets adjust gradually to changes in fundamentals, and those gradual adjustments are the driving force behind trends.
Today, Mulvaney is regarded as one of the most respected names in the CTA industry, with what may be the most impressive long-term record in the field. For context, a $100,000 investment made at inception would be worth almost $10 million today, net of fees. After +89% in 2022, +51% in 2023 and +83% in 2024, the momentum has continued into 2026: as of the end of March, performance is already up approximately +65% year-to-date.
This track record has clearly propelled Mulvaney from a niche name admired by CTA connoisseurs to a household name among trend-following practitioners.
Michael Covel, author of Trend Following, has repeatedly pointed to Mulvaney as an example of how classical trend-following principles (applied with conviction and consistency) can produce outstanding long-term results. On several occasions, he has suggested that reverse-engineering the rules of successful trend managers is one of the most instructive exercises a systematic trader can undertake.
Today, we take on that challenge.
By leveraging a replication framework built around thousands of synthetic CTAs, we attempt to reverse-engineer Mulvaney’s trading rules: if you are curious to see what this exercise tells us about his style, we think this piece will be well worth your time.