While gold has long been regarded as the quintessential safe-haven asset, the art of timing when to buy or sell remains one of investing’s enduring challenges. For investors seeking to harness powerful market trends more effectively, a systematic and diversified approach may offer a clearer path forward.
“Trend following across a broad range of global assets provides investors with access to powerful moves they might not otherwise capture in a traditional portfolio,” says Simone Haslinger, CEO of East Coast Capital Management (ECCM).
Haslinger notes that this style of investing has been operating for decades and is grounded in over a century of market data. “This isn’t a new trading style. Trend following has persisted across market cycles: inflationary shocks, rate hiking regimes, booms, busts and everything in between,” she says. “It’s one of the few strategies that has consistently delivered over the long run, regardless of the prevailing macro narrative.”
Recent years have offered vivid examples of the approach in action. Cocoa prices surged through 2023 and 2024 amid severe weather and supply shortages in West Africa, while in 2025, gold and silver have rallied to record highs and platinum prices also surged as investors rotated toward real assets.
Haslinger adds, “Another example for much of this year was the strong performance of feeder and live cattle futures – markets that are often overlooked. That’s the advantage of a rules-based approach across a wide pool of international instruments: you capture opportunity wherever it arises, not just where consensus expects it. We trade almost 100 international futures markets. We deliberately cast a ‘wide net’ to be positioned to take advantage of moves across uncorrelated but highly liquid asset classes.”
ECCM’s Systematic Trend Fund is built to identify and capture directional opportunities across major global futures markets, ranging from commodities and currencies to equities and fixed income, through a diversified, data-driven process.
The rally in precious metals has dominated headlines recently, driven by a softer US dollar and persistent geopolitical uncertainty. Yet, Haslinger says that many investors were slow to participate.
“Most portfolios had little to no exposure to those moves over the past couple of years, outside of perhaps gold more recently,” she explains. “Our systems picked these themes up much earlier. We’ve held gold in the portfolio for most of the past two years. But we’ll dispassionately exit the trade once gold stops trending and pivot to the ‘next gold trade.’ The style is designed to work investor capital harder and smarter.”
That discipline has recently been on display. “From holding gold, we expanded into silver and platinum as the precious metals thematic broadened. But with recent retracements, the question for investors is whether this is a buying opportunity or a signal to sell.”
“We have a rules-based system that tells us when to exit, and if the trend reignites, we’ll get back in,” she adds.
“Markets change. Chaos comes and goes. But one thing stays constant: the discipline of systematic trend following.”
In the video below, “Exploiting Market Inefficiencies through Trend Following”, ECCM’s Founder and CIO, Adam Havryliv, and Strategy Ambassador, Richard Brennan, talk more about how trend following adapts to market movements across diverse asset classes, and incorporates stop-loss orders to time exits – all with a disciplined and systematic approach.