Kulshan Capital Management, LLC

Team

Nick Waltner and Johnny Hom first met in 1990 while working at Salomon Brothers in Tokyo. After several other international postings, they came together again in 2002 in Seattle to establish Kulshan Capital Management, in order to further Johnny's research into market sentiment and Nick's work in volatility trading.

Nicholas Waltner
Nick’s finance career began at in the Municipal Finance Department at PaineWebber in 1986 following undergraduate studies and then continued at Salomon Brothers following graduate work. His career lasted over 16 years with postings in New York, Chicago, Tokyo and Zurich. While at Salomon, Nick worked in a variety of areas including bond market research, bond and equity portfolio analysis groups, equity derivatives sales, equity derivative product development and finally equity derivative trading. After overseeing and managing the integration in Tokyo of Salomon Brothers', Smith Barney’s, Citibank’s and Nikko Securities’ equity derivatives teams into the newly created Salomon Smith Barney platform, he went on to establish an equity derivatives financial products team at Bank of America both in Japan and in Asia. Mr. Waltner was named Derivatives Week “Asian Derivatives Innovator of the Year” in 2000.

Nick received a bachelor’s degree in physics and German language and literature from Wesleyan University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago with concentrations in finance and statistics. He is fluent in German and Japanese and continues to study Latin, French and Spanish. His interest in estimating market volatility grew out of his studies with Professor Daniel Nelson at the University of Chicago.

Johnny Hom
Johnny's career in finance began in 1989 when he joined Salomon Brothers in Tokyo, Japan. He was a risk management systems developer working in the Fixed Income and Equity Arbitrage Trading group in Tokyo. Later he was a trader in government bond trading in Tokyo and then in London. He has been a trader, risk manager, systems developer, and software programmer working in Tokyo, London, and New York working with Salomon Brothers, the Helios Group, and most recently at Kulshan Capital Management in Seattle. Additionally, Mr. Hom has served as a business technology consultant to ALPS/Price Meadows, Inc., a leading hedge fund administrator.

Mr. Hom received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics with Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988. After graduating he pursued studies in Japan under the MIT-Japan Program in 1988. He was a Monbusho (Ministry of Education) Scholar at the University of Tokyo in 1989 where he studied in the Graduate Department of Electrical Engineering. He also studied intensive Japanese language at Harvard University in 1988. His interest in market sentiment developed from his studies of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence when he was a student at MIT.