Another side of Bacon

Zack Bacon is the Moore executive who this year took public the much-discussed offshore hedge fund reinsurance company Max Re.

So who's Bart Bacon?

The least well known of the trading Bacon brothers, Bart runs a Tampa, Florida- based futures trading operation named Dolphin Capital Management. And this year he's been posting numbers that would make his older brothers proud - and envious.

Through September 30, Bart Bacon has recorded some of the best numbers among managed-futures and hedge funds. One of his funds earned 22.5 percent in September and almost 30 percent for the year, according to a trading report published by a private bank. This year Dolphin is solidly beating Moore Capital, which was up about 2 percent by September.

To be sure, most futures traders have enormous swings in their results, and Dolphin runs only $42.9 million, in two funds tracked by Zurich Capital Markets. Dolphin's capital seems to have shrunk in recent years. Brother Louis's Moore Capital, meanwhile, manages about $5 billion.

Bart founded Dolphin, which specializes in automated futures trading, in 1994, after stints with Tudor Investment, Commodities Corp. and Moore Capital. "He is a very respected professional in this business," says Sol Waksman, president of alternative-investment consulting firm Barclay Group. Dolphin's assets have stayed low, he says, because of high volatility associated with the firm's "long-term trend-following" approach.

Traders who play commodities and futures had mixed results in September.

Macro hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones also produced one of the month's better hedge fund returns, earning slightly more than 5 percent in his flagship BVI Global Fund, thanks mostly to being in government bonds before September 11, according to one person familiar with his results. But other competitors have taken big hits. Sandy Grossman, the University of Pennsylvania finance professor who has in recent years become a very successful hedge fund manager, with billions under management, lost about 9 percent in September in one fund specializing in currency trading, according to a hedge fund source. Executives with Quantitative Financial Services, Grossman's Stamford, Connecticut-based hedge fund organization, did not return a phone call seeking comment.