Eric Olson

Eric Olson is the CIO of Olson Capital Management LLC. He runs a total return macro strategy that combines the shorter-term directional, longer-term analytical and financial modeling skills he acquired in his 28-year career on Wall Street. As an early participant in Emerging Markets investing, Eric had to develop new tools to assess the country-specific business, financial, market, tax, legal, other non-linear risks. He developed a method which balanced highly quantitative modeling with in-dept cultural understanding which successfully guided his asset allocations and financial product engineering through both good years and numerous periods of financial crisis.

Eric began his career as a Corporate Analyst for middle-market cap companies before shifting into Global Markets where began as a Foreign Exchange trader. His focus shifted in the mid-1990’s to the Emerging Markets where he began trading FX and local interest rates products. Eric was one of the early developers and participants in the Non-deliverable FX Forwards and he opened a local Russian entity that allowed him to start Deutsche Bank’s local Russian Bond book in 1996.

Eric became the Deputy Head of Deutsche Bank’s Eastern European, Middle East and Africa trading desk in London in December 1996 and was duly based in Moscow for six months in 1997. He developed a suite of new derivative products around the Russian local financial markets that allowed external investors local access and swap products to hedge both market and non-linear credit and convertibility issues. By 1998 Eric was the top producer in DB’s fastest growing Global Markets division. Eric accepted an invitation to replicate DB’s successes in EEMEA in Latin America as the Head of Local Markets Fixed Income in mid-1998, but instead became part of a São Paulo based “Crisis-management Team” during the “Latin American Financial Crisis”. This team’s head reported directly to DB’s Vorstand in FFT and successfully implement a structure that would have exported DB’s substantial restricted capital position had the Republic of Brazil defaulted in 1999. Eric continued in DB LatAm structured products group after the crisis.

Eric joined HSBC in 2001 where he ran their LatAm group in New York. He helped start HSBC’s EM FX Options trading group which traded both liquid linear and illiquid non-linear currencies. In 2007 Eric was hired by RBC to build and run a cross-product sales and trading business from the ground up. He developed teams in NY and Toronto and integrated RBC’s separate product-specific IT systems by layering a risk aggregation system that consolidated FX, IRS, and Credit trading platforms. This system allowed Eric to track and position heavily in low cost “basis” trades that made him RBC’s top producer and the EM group one of the only profitable divisions for RBC in the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. Eric finished his career in banking where he started, in credit, as the Head of Latin American Credit Trading & Sales for BBVA.