Bill Dreiss is a CTA (a systematic long-term trend-follower), and he had a great 2008 (+102 percent), but he’s hardly part of the CTA and hedge-fund explosion of the past dozen years. He’s been around longer than pretty much any other CTA you’ll bump into — in fact, he was a CTA before the designation even existed. He’s seen the good and the bad, including recent years in which his type of trading supposedly had been consigned to the dustbin of history, because as everybody knew, trend following was dead.

His current trading program — Dreiss Research Corp.’s Global Diversified Fund — dates back to 1991, and he’s posted a compound annual return of nearly 19 percent during that period, with only five losing years and no back-to-back losers. His career as a CTA dates back even further than this lengthy run, though.