Joe Wilkins
Founder, serves as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Investment Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Compliance Officer. With over 40 years of experience, he has dedicated much of his career to trading his own accounts and developing quantitative trading strategies at R Best, LLC. He began his career at the Chicago Board of Trade, where he was a registered Floor Trader from January 1987 through July 2003. Prior to registering as an Associated Person of R Best, LLC in September 2012, his work focused exclusively on proprietary trading.
Mary Lou Pier
CPA, Founder serves as Chief Financial Officer, responsible for overseeing financial management, regulatory compliance, and reporting. She brings extensive experience from a career that began with national and international accounting firms, later founding and operating a CPA firm in Chicago. Her work has primarily focused on tax and business consulting for small to mid-sized businesses, providing guidance to both companies and their owners, including traders, brokers and CTAs.
Margaret Sweeney
Director of Strategic and Financial Operations. Ms. Sweeney has over 20 years in overseeing operations in various industries. She acts as a key bridge between compliance, finance and executive leadership and plays a central role in maintaining regulatory integrity and supporting strategic growth initiatives.
Zhivko K. Gochev
Director of Research and Systems Development, bringing deep expertise in financial modeling and algorithmic trading. Originally from Bulgaria, he moved to the United States in 1998 and became a U.S. citizen in 2015. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Northeastern Illinois University in 2003 and a Master of Science in Financial Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006. Since 2004, Zhivko has been actively engaged in the financial markets, focusing on the development of automated algorithmic trading systems.
Elson Allmuca
Quantitative Research Assistant and Automated Trading Support Analyst with a background in Computer Science. Elson brings experience in Machine Learning and AI to support both research and live trading operations. In this role, he contributes to the research and development department, is familiar with quantitative Python frameworks and assists in backtesting data. He values precision and adaptability and plays a key role in connecting research insights with real-world trading outcomes. Outside of work, Elson enjoys coding projects and game development, as well as playing the actual games!
