Our Founders

AMANDA HOWARD

Founder & Chief Investment Officer

Amanda Howard is Founder & Chief Investment Officer of Bastiat Capital, a registered CTA with the CFTC, and Founder & CEO of Bastiat’s holding company, Bastiat Capital Management.  Amanda leads the core team at Bastiat with the goal of helping investors hedge portfolio exposure to business cycle downturns, bear markets, inflationary conditions, and black swan events.  She is a member of the National Futures Association and is featured in Bloomberg’s Women-Owned Hedge Funds, 100WF Female Fund Managers, and in the book, The Corona Fighters Collection: A Handbook for Investors.  Opalesque writes, “Amanda Howard’s Bastiat Capital is part of a small group of CTAs that still act as effective hedges in a downturn.”

A graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School and Oxford University, Amanda began her career studying the formation and implosion of financial asset bubbles and their underlying basis in loose monetary policy.  Prior to Bastiat she held proprietary research, portfolio management, and trading positions for three San Francisco Bay Area hedge funds with global macro, energy, and diversified equities and options specializations, and directed special projects for an economic forecasting consultancy founded by U.C. Berkeley Fisher Professor, Ken Rosen.  Her early work on macroeconomic trends was featured in leading financial publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, California Management Review, Wharton Review, and Pensions & Investments Magazine.  Amanda continued her research at Oxford, where she began developing the core model for the Divergence Program.  Her view of market behavior was influenced by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek; Chaos math pioneer Benoit Mandelbrot; options trader turned skeptical philosopher Nassim Taleb; the MIT financial engineering professor Andrew Lo; and distinguished decision scientist Philip Tetlock.

Amanda founded her first company at age 13, loves art and expeditionary travel, rode a dirt bike through the Western Sahara Desert, and is the mother of Zeus, a retired IED detection dog who operated in Afghanistan.  She serves on the Advisory Board of the Charity Angels, a Los Angeles based fundraising consulting firm that has raised more than $150M for non-profits.

SEBASTIAN PRITCHARD

Co-Founder

As Co-founder, Sebastian Pritchard focuses on special projects and business development for Bastiat.  He was born in Florida and spent much of his childhood living in austere sea turtle research camps in Mexico, Guyana, and the Galapagos Islands.  He was a D-1 athlete at Florida State University and is also a graduate of Oxford University, Rollins College, and the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) Class 195.

His background combines military special warfare training, academia, corporate finance, and Red Team threat analysis programs.  Prior to Bastiat, Sebastian worked on real estate and infrastructure development projects for the Brooksville Group, a privately-held, international land development and real estate finance company with ties to Kajima, one of the largest general contractors in Japan.

Sebastian is an Advisor to the Chelonian Reserach Institute and serves on the International Affairs faculty of Rollins College, where he teaches courses in grand strategy, classical geopolitics, and strategic social dynamics.  Students rated him one of the top 25 professors in the U.S. in 2015 and 2017.  Sebastian is based in Florida and has been a mixed martial artist for more than 20 years.