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Brian Lovern started his career pointing at storm systems on a green screen as a local TV weatherman in western Kentucky. More than two decades later, he was staring at natural-gas price charts, turning forecasts into profits, producing annual returns upwards of 100%.
Lovern, 49, had made the unusual jump from broadcast meteorology to Wall Street, working on weather desks at hedge funds and investment banks. But trading wasn't part of the job.
“On the trade floors, in most cases, that's not going to happen,” he said in an interview. “They kind of frown upon weather guys who trade.”
So in 2016, he started trading his own money. For four years, Lovern ran a strategy that combined his expertise in weather models with fundamentals like daily gas production and export flows. He scored his best year in 2018 with a 140% gain.
“It's one thing to have the data and say, ‘this is what it shows.' But interpreting it, and being able to make a good determination of how that data is going to change—that's really where the money is,” he said.
His success didn't go unnoticed. Lovern was identified as one of the top traders by FundSeeder, a platform founded by “Market Wizards” author Jack Schwager and Emanuel Balarie that searches for under-the-radar trading talent worldwide and provides them with capital to scale.
Finding ‘Wizards'
Schwager, a longtime trader in his own right and market historian best known for his “Market Wizards” book series, which profiled some of the most successful traders of the past half-century, including Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller.
His books are required reading for many aspiring traders, making his endorsement a rare seal of legitimacy for investors outside Wall Street's traditional pipelines.
“There are lots of great traders globally that are completely unknown,” Schwager said in an interview. “They don't know anybody in the finance industry. They have no connections. They may be in an undeveloped or partially developed country, but they've been trading very successfully.”
Among the thousands of accounts FundSeeder has reviewed, Lovern stood out as one of the top performers. Earlier this year, the firm backed him with $3 million to scale his strategy. FundSeeder has also seeded a 35-year-old energy derivatives trader in the U.K., Adam Williams, with $10 million in March, and even funded a dentist in Europe who trades markets on the side.
Global casting call
FundSeeder is now expanding with the launch of the FundSeeder Accelerator, which aims to do for traders what Y Combinator did for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: provide infrastructure, mentorship, and, crucially, capital to scale.
“It's a global casting call for the next top fund manager,” Balarie, senior vice president of business development at RQSI, which bought FundSeeder last year. “We don't believe that Wall Street as a monopoly on the best traders. The problem is not the lack of trading talent, but it's really the barriers to entry that prohibits these traders.”
The financial backing could be critical for emerging managers who are trying to raise funds.
“There's kind of a chicken and egg problem in hedge funds — you need money to raise money,” Williams said. “If we were to approach investors, let's say we just started with $4 million, it will be significantly more difficult for people to write larger checks because they don't want to be a certain percentage of the fund.”
Traders selected for FundSeeder Accelerator will present their strategies at an industry conference in Miami early 2026.
