John Hensel, Senior Vice President, Middle East Markets at Demeter, joined Rachel Pether at FINTECH.TV’s studio at the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange for an interview broadcast on September 3, 2026, as part of the Capital Markets: Wall Street to MENA program.
The conversation centered on the principle behind Demeter’s investment process. Price, Hensel explained, is the point at which all available market information comes together, and it is therefore the signal the firm relies on. Each trading day at 3:59 p.m. New York time, one minute before the close, the process assesses the day’s price signals and determines whether the following session warrants exposure to S&P 500 or NASDAQ-100 futures or no equity exposure at all. The assessment is completed in seconds, applied without manual intervention, and repeated at the same time the next day. The approach draws on the academic research of Eugene Fama at the University of Chicago, where Demeter’s Founder and Chief Investment Officer, Jeff Sexton, studied and conducted research some 20 years ago.
Hensel also discussed the firm’s decision to establish its Middle East base in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). Having first encountered the jurisdiction in 2017, he described consistency as its defining quality: a regulatory framework built to institutional standards, a financial center designed to be accessible, and a message that has held steady over the years. For a firm whose process depends on rules that do not change with market sentiment, that consistency was an important consideration.
The interview closed on the relevance of systematic strategies for investors across the GCC. Portfolios in the region have traditionally held significant allocations to real estate, private equity and other familiar asset classes, and recent events have reinforced the value of diversification. Where investors seek exposure to public equities, the common route is a passive fund that holds the market indefinitely. Demeter’s strategy takes exposure to the same major US indices and reassesses that exposure every trading day according to prevailing conditions, which Hensel believes gives systematic strategies an increasingly relevant place in regional portfolios.
The full interview is available below.
Demeter’s John Hensel on Abu Dhabi, ADGM and a Systematic Approach to US Equities
John Hensel is Senior Vice President, Middle East Markets at Demeter.
