Moreton Capital Partners (MCP) recently launched its global commodity futures fund with a targeted initial investment of $1 billion by Q2 2027. Led by Chief Investment Officer Les Finemore and co-founder Alistair Fullerton, the firm fuses agentic AI, LLMs and machine learning with deep quant research to redefine alpha generation across the global energy, metals and agriculture markets.
In an interview with Hedge Fund Alpha, Finemore shared more on their technology, process and the current opportunities he sees in those markets.
Background on Les Finemore
Growing up in Australia in a small farming town called Wagga Wagga, Finemore always knew he wanted to be involved in agriculture in one way or another. His family’s background is in farming, and he spent lots of time working on the farm when he was young.
“I guess that really instilled a really strong work ethic from a young age, working summer jobs, working during holidays on the farm,” Finemore said. “And I guess trading really appealed to me. I really fell in love with it during my undergrad, trading FX markets overnight. I would trade 8 p.m. ‘til 2 a.m., European hours, and then go to class the next day. So I knew I wanted to get into trading, and I’ve always loved that. And what I really love about it is the jigsaw that you’re constantly trying to solve is a difficult problem. And I think with this man-plus-machine approach, you’re getting the best of both worlds.”
Finemore traded currencies through the Eurozone crisis, finding it exciting to be doing that while Mario Draghi steered the ship at the European Central Bank.
“As someone new to the space, trying to get a handle on all the drivers that make up the macroeconomic machine, that was really fascinating,” he added. “And that was a really turbulent time in FX markets.”
At Merricks Capital
After his brief stint as a junior physical trader for Gavilon, he spent two or three years working as a research agronomist before returning to university to complete a master’s in finance. That role involved researching trials for companies like Bayer, Monsanto and other seed technology companies that were doing trials in agriculture.
“Then I was lucky enough to work as a junior trader and analyst at Merricks Capital,” Finemore said “… At the time, we were one of the larger agricultural commodity hedge funds globally backed by some large U.S. institutional money. So we’re north of A$500 million and a very small investment team of four. So I really cut my teeth there and did essentially an apprenticeship trading all agricultural commodity products globally, futures and options. And that was fundamental relative value. So doing a lot of supply and demand balance sheet work.”
Ahead of the curve
From there, he began to think about taking that domain expertise as a commodity and combining it with Big Data and machine learning. That was around 2016 and 2017, when Big Data and machine learning were just getting going and beginning to go mainstream.
Then Finemore left Merricks Capital to start his own fund, Imbue Capital, at around age 26.
“We went on a journey that was super interesting,” he recalled. “We started out trading water markets in Australia, and we hit it really big. We returned over the next two years more than 120% for investors using sophisticated forecast models and weather data. And that was really a folklore kind of story in that market. It was not really a traders’ market, and it still gets talked about, but we knew the main game was futures and options globally.”
On operating Imbue Capital and founding Farrer Capital
Finemore and his partners brought the fund to the U.S. via a couple of large seed deals and ended up taking a deal with a large family office that’s well-known in Chicago Board of Trade circles in Chicago. They did very well trading these commodities for multiple years again, putting up high absolute returns, and they wanted to take their fund public, thinking it could be a multi-billion-dollar fund. However, they ended up parting ways with the family office.
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