January 2026 performance and newsletter

Head of Digital Asset Trading

Tristan has been a leader of trading teams and strategy development in global derivatives trading for over seventeen years. He studied Law and Economics at the Australian National University then worked at a top tier law firm and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission before reinventing himself as a derivatives trader.

Tristan began his trading career with Tibra in 2007 as an options market maker and went on to  become head of the Japan desk before departing in 2010. After a brief period at KCMA where he delivered the trading team’s most profitable year, Tristan joined Ark International Group in 2012. Together with the development team, he helped design, build and continue to improve the proprietary strategies and trading technologies driving the company’s success trading global equity derivatives.

Since the launch of DAFM in 2021 Tristan has applied his expertise to building new trading strategies and technologies for the expanding world of digital assets. The next chapter of his remarkable professional journey will see him focus on generating wealth for DAFM’s growing investor base.

Head of Engineering

Jason has extensive experience building software and leading teams to solve complex problems in competitive market environments. He has worked in numerous problem spaces, with a strong focus on financial markets, where he has developed exchange software, low-latency trading engines with FPGA hardware execution, index-based pricing and derived options pricing, data platforms, ML (AI) pipelines with live tick-by-tick inferencing, as well as long-term macro strategies and much more. Jason has experience at many top technology companies, with recent tenures at the ASX and other top trading companies. Jason now brings his vision and experience to the development of a world-leading cryptocurrency trading system.

Head of Technology

Adam has more than 17 years experience working with complex software systems. He started his career developing embedded hypervisors at Open Kernel Labs, a start-up spawned from research at the University of New South Wales and later acquired by General Dynamics. After a sabbatical year travelling through Latin America, he returned to Sydney and moved into the high pressure, high reward world of algorithmic trading. Adam has now spent a decade developing robust, high performance trading systems and gaining insight into financial markets, and leads a team of highly skilled and motivated software engineers in bringing new trading strategies to market.

Chief Operating & Financial Officer

Lissete is a qualified chartered accountant with over 10 years experience in the finance industry both domestic and international. Starting her career at Westpac in Sydney, Lissete worked in various finance functions before moving to London where she worked at Credit Suisse.  Here Lissete worked in the Global Risk Management group where she managed the relationship with numerous international banking regulators including the regulatory and risk reporting function.

Head of Digital Asset Strategy

Richard founded macro research firm PinPoint Macro Analytics in June 2020 and joins DAFM on a part-time basis as the Head of Digital Asset Strategy. Richard previously worked as the Chief Currency Strategist and Head of International Economics at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) for 15 years. Prior to working at CBA, Richard worked in various roles in both Sydney and London as an International economist and currency strategist, at National Australia Bank, WestDeutsche Landesbank (WestLB), Colonial State Bank, and Dominguez Barry (now UBS).

Richard holds a Bachelor of Economics and a Masters of Economics from Macquarie University. In addition to some occasional Economics tutoring at Macquarie University, Richard worked at Macquarie University’s Asia Pacific Research Institute, and more recently, spent three years as an Honorary Associate at the University of Technology (UTS) Sydney.

Trading

After completing a BSc (1st Class honours in Applied Mathematics) at Monash University, Dan moved to London beginning his career at Credit Suisse in the early 2000s. His first role was in product control, focused on the valuation, booking, accounting treatment and P&L reporting of the exotic derivative business. He gained 5 years of experience in that role before moving to Hong Kong in 2006. In Hong Kong, he worked on Credit Suisse’s hybrid derivatives desk until moving to Royal Bank of Canada in 2009 as a swaps trader, and then in 2010 to Zurich to start a long-dated FX option business for UBS. He remained in Zurich until 2016, trading various complex derivative portfolios including running the European emerging markets FX options business.

Upon his return to Australia in 2019 Dan immersed himself in the rapidly emerging cryptocurrency derivative markets. With his extensive background across numerous derivative markets he quickly identified opportunities in this space, particularly in the funding/futures markets that were, and to a large extent still are, nascent. While seeing the opportunity he didn’t have the technical skills to create the kind of systems that could effectively monetise these opportunities. The team at DAFM, with their extensive background in trading traditional financial markets using sophisticated algorithms developed in-house and proprietary trading systems provided a perfect matching of skills to create a business.

Founder and Director

Mike Gilbert is a New Zealand national with 30 years’ experience spanning derivatives trading & broking, high-frequency trading and Clearing in the London, Hong Kong and Sydney financial markets.

In London Mike headed up the equity derivatives broking team for OMX London for three years before moving into trading Scandinavian equities derivatives for 7 years for a London based market-making firm. From 2004 to 2012 Mike worked for Newedge Bank (owned by Societe Generale) in Australia and Hong Kong where he held the position of Managing Director responsible for the High-Frequency Trading (HFT) and Clearing divisions for Asia Pacific. Over these 8 years, Mike significantly grew the business for the bank in terms of both the revenue and customer base.

Mike co-founded Ark International Group (AIG) in 2012 where he is responsible for business development, compliance and managing day to day operations. With experience in building strong frameworks around new products to ensure their success, Mike’s expertise fits in well with the other members of the DAFM team.

Founder and Director

Clint is an Australian national with over 18 years of experience trading complex derivative products. He studied Aerospace Engineering at the Australian Defence Force Academy before transferring to the University of New South Wales to complete a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering (First Class Honours).

He started his career at IMC in Sydney, an international derivatives trading house, while completing a Master of Commerce specialising in Funds Management. In 2006 he went on to co-found Tibra, where he started and managed the Japanese and Korean trading desks that regularly traded up to 10% of the daily derivatives volume as well as holding the role of Director of Tibra’s emerging investment management business.

Clint co-founded Ark International Group (AIG) in 2012. Over the course of his career Clint has successfully navigated several major financial disruptions and continues to build AIG’s presence in the global markets during a volatile period in the world’s history. With the launch of Digital Asset Funds Management (DAFM) and the pivot into digital assets, Clint’s vast experience will ensure a sensible and risk averse approach is taken by the experienced team at DAFM.