ABOUT US
Our Experience
The WoodedPark team has over 50 years of combined experience in the commodities business, with a strong concentration in energy. We have traded various physical and financial commodities including energy, agricultural, metals, and FX; we have managed risk portfolios measured in the billions of dollars; we have led sales and origination groups focusing on deal generation; we have built and managed trading teams ranging from 5 to over 100 people, and we have created profitable teams and global businesses using our processes.
We understand managing P&L and VaR against a company’s daily, quarterly, annual and long-term goals. We have seen companies lose a multiple of their expected VaR, and we can help prevent this from happening to your team. Our experience and expertise provides for a unique perspective on complicated and volatile markets because we have actually traded them for decades. We extract as much risk-adjusted value as possible, and we will strengthen your business as one of your partners.
Our Team
Adam Hoffman, Team Leader
Michael Halem, Advisor
Adam Hoffman is a trading and risk management professional with over 20 years of market and business experience. His consulting team at Wooded Park Strategies, LLC has over 50 years of combined experience in the commodity and energy business. We have profitably traded various physical and financial commodities; managed risk portfolios; led sales and origination groups; built and managed trading groups, created and enhanced back and mid-office systems, designed and implemented proprietary software, and expanded global businesses for some of the largest financial institutions in the world that trade almost every asset class.
Mr. Hoffman founded The Mada Group, LLC, a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) which traded energy, metals and agricultural futures and options. Prior to the Mada Group, LLC, Mr. Hoffman built and led a team at Falconwood Corp. which focused on trading commodity derivatives using both high and medium frequency methodologies. His team was one of the largest traders in NGX Canadian Natural Gas futures and ICE Henry Hub and electricity products. Prior to Falconwood, Adam ran the energy commodities and foreign exchange high-frequency trading team for Millennium Partners.
Prior to Millennium, he ran the Algorithmic Platform Trading desk at Royal Bank of Canada. Prior to RBC, Mr. Hoffman redirected Northwind Resources from an isolated proprietary trading firm into a collaborative investment company focused on arbitrage trading across various asset classes. Mr. Hoffman founded and managed Zenith Capital & Trading, LLC a commodity hedge fund with emphasis on trading volatility of natural gas and crude oil products. Mr. Hoffman co-managed the natural gas and crude oil trading desk at Pacific Gas and Electric Trading (“PGET”), turning around a business which was losing over $100MM/yr. into a profitable $1B business. Mr. Hoffman helped manage the PGET bankruptcy by arranging DIP financing, cash management and portfolio liquidations, and wound down staff and office operations.
Adam graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 with a Bachelors of Business Administration, majoring in Finance.
Kevin Paley, Partner
Kevin Paley was the head of Trading and Managing Director at RBC Commodities from 2006-2017, leading a global and profitable team of over 50 traders, marketers, risk managers, and back, mid and front office team members in over 4 offices in 3 countries.
Mr. Paley also served as the Head of Power, Coal and Emissions Trading at Lehman Brothers from 2004-2005, and the Head of Power Trading at Cinergy from 2000-2004.
Mr. Paley earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989 from Vanderbilt University.
Mr. Halem was a quantitative trader and manager and has 30 years of experience in financial services. He was Vice President in Equity Derivatives at Salomon Brothers and the co-head of the Equity Derivatives Department at Nomura Securities International. He also founded hedge fund manager Rocket Partners. Mr. Halem was a portfolio manager for 13 years at Millennium Partners, running a team of four professionals who engaged in options, futures, and trading strategies in equity, fixed income, and commodities markets.
Mr. Halem currently is the CEO of LENR-Invest, an energy venture capital firm and the principal of Rocket Power LLC, an emerging technology consultancy. Earlier in his career, Mr. Halem designed real-time computer monitoring systems for Pan American World Airways at Cape Canaveral. The systems were used by the Range Safety group to monitor the launch of unmanned rockets and NASA's Space Shuttle Program.
Mr. Halem earned his BA in Physics from Harvard (1981) and his MBA in Finance and Management from Columbia (1984).
Robert Moeller, Advisor
Mr. Robert “Bud” Moeller’s broad expertise helps the team at Wooded Park Strategies, LLC consider the implication of each business decision from a macro prospective, and how it will impact our clients, our team members, our investors, and our partners.
Mr. Moeller is a management consultant with over 25 years of experience with global companies on issues of strategy, post-merger integration, and broad scale transformation. His consulting career includes over 100 clients in the U.S, Europe and Asia. Mr. Moeller spent over 19 years at Booz Allen & Hamilton, where he was the managing partner of the Asia/Pacific Energy & Chemicals Practice. Mr. Moeller spent over five years at Accenture, where he helped build and lead the Organization and Change Strategy practice for North America. Within Accenture, Mr. Moeller participated in the Institute for Strategic Change, developing leading edge solutions for issues of global businesses. Mr. Moeller is a well-recognized expert in business combinations and has authored articles on M&A as well as Strategic Alliances.
Mr. Moeller earned his Bachelors Degree in chemical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his Master of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School.
Michael Patterson, Lead Technologist
Mike Patterson has been a technologist and analyst in energy/financial markets for 15 years. His career began with Williams Company, where he led a team that custom built a 660-CPU massively parallel supercomputer to perform stochastic simulations of power generation and natural gas storage. The size of the computer ranked it in the top 50 of the world's most powerful computers at the time. From there Mike went to one of the world's most successful hedge funds, Citadel, in Chicago to work as both a technologist and an analyst on the fund's natural gas desk.
Following Citadel, Mike spent several years developing a fundamental supply/demand model for the U.S. natural gas market. Mike then spent six years as a lead technologist for the international firm Munich Re. It was at Munich that he met Adam Hoffman, where they partnered to create a front-to-back risk management solution for the entire commodity trading division.
Mike has a Bachelor of Science degree from Boston University and a Master of Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He has published papers in peer-reviewed journals, spoken at conferences, and has published four articles with RBN Energy. Mike's responsibilities at Wooded Park Strategies, LLC include guiding the evolution of the firm's products through the ever-changing technology landscape, and assisting clients with expert implementation processes.