Peter Kambolin

What the public record shows

Peter Kambolin, founder and CEO of Systematic Alpha Management LLC (SAM), pleaded guilty to commodities fraud and wire fraud and was sentenced in January 2024 to two years in prison, three years of supervised release, $1.63 million in forfeiture, and $1.2 million in restitution. The CFTC obtained a parallel judgment of over $2.8 million. This is a criminal conviction — not an allegation.

The scheme — “cherry-picking”

According to the DOJ and CFTC, between January 2019 and November 2021 Kambolin ran a cherry-picking scheme:

• He allocated profitable futures trades to his own accounts and assigned losing or less-lucrative trades to his clients — after seeing how the trades turned out.
• He misrepresented SAM’s strategy, telling clients it focused on crypto and forex futures when about half his trading was in equity-index futures.

Prosecutors noted it was the first criminal cherry-picking case brought against a commodity-pool trader focused, in part, on digital-asset futures.

Why we rate this 1 / 10 — Avoid

A guilty plea and prison term for a fraud that is invisible from the outside: clients saw “strategy,” not the fact that the wins were being skimmed off the top. Cherry-picking is a pure abuse of the trust in a pooled-money manager.

Verify it yourself

• DOJ press release and case page — linked in Sources.
• NFA BASIC and CFTC — registration and enforcement history for any commodity pool operator or trading adviser.
• Insist on independent, third-party trade allocation and custody — the structural defense against cherry-picking.

Bottom line

Convicted and sentenced. When one manager controls both the trades and how they’re divided up, “trust me” is the only assurance you have — and it isn’t enough.

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