Commodities Corporation - History

History

The company was founded by Helmut Weymar and Amos Hostetter (d. 1977) and with $2.5 million of capital in 1969. Weymar, who was a childhood friend of Hostetter's son Amos Jr., had studied commodities at MIT. As a result of his PhD thesis work on cocoa, Weymar took a job, working for Nabisco in 1965. Hostetter, who had been Weymar's mentor, had begun trading stocks and commodities in the 1930s working for Hayden Stone. Hostetter's, whose simple principles for trading are still widely circulated, joined the firm at the age of 67 trading part time and working to create trading systems to be used by the entire firm.

Among CC's other co-founders were Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson, who was also Weymar's thesis advisor, Paul Cootner, an MIT professor, and Frank Vannerson, a colleague of Weymar's from Nabisco. CC would bring a large number of PhDs onto its payroll through the 1970s. CC was originally founded to take advantages of trading opportunities in tradable physical commodities but would later branch out into trading other futures such as currency.

After betting very successfully against the market in 1980, the firm began to receive significant attention. The firm partnered with Paine Webber Jackson & Curtis to launch the Princeton Futures Fund, a $23 million investment fund for US investors in 1981. The company was profiled in Fortune magazine in 1981. The firm was also later featured prominently in the book, "Market Wizards", a series of interviews with the worlds top traders of the 1980s. The book was written by Jack Schwager of Commodities Corporation. The firm also completed construction of a new headquarters building in Princeton, NJ in 1980.

In 1989, CC sold a 30% interest in the company to ORIX Corporation for $80 million. In 1995, CC acquired an 80% interest in a unit of Crédit Commercial de France.

Commodities Corporation was acquired by Goldman Sachs in 1997 for an undisclosed amount, estimated to be in excess of $100 million. At the time of its acquisition, CC had approximately $2 billion in assets under management. The firm was subsequently renamed Goldman Sachs Princeton LLC and served primarily as a fund of funds. Today, the business is known as Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Strategies and is part of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.