Salem Abraham

The Abraham Trading Company is based in the Moody Building, a former hotel in Canadian, Texas.

Salem Andrew Abraham (born 1966) is the president and owner of Abraham Trading Company, a futures firm of more than two decades in his native city of Canadian, Texas. Located in the northeastern Panhandle adjacent to Oklahoma, Canadian is the county seat and the only community in Hemphill County. It has been described as "an oasis on the High Plains".

Background

Four generations

A member of a fourth-generation Hemphill County family, Abraham is the second of three sons born to the retired physician and patron of the arts, Malouf Abraham, Jr., and the former Therese Browne (born 1936), a native of Mount Airy, North Carolina. Both Abrahm's mother and grandfather, Malouf Abraham, Sr., known as "Oofie" Abraham, served as mayor of Canadian; she from 1981^[1] to 1991, and he from 1953 to 1957. The grandfather, an oil and natural gas entrepreneur, was also a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives from 1967 to 1971.^[2]

His great-grandfather, Nahim Abraham, and great-uncle, Tom Abraham, were merchants and community builders of Canadian. Nahim arrived in the city in 1913, five years after it was incorporated, and launched The Fair Store, a department store known regionally for its high-quality dry goods merchandise, particularly clothing.^[3]After Nahim's retirement in 1955, Tom Abraham and his wife, the former Helen Ferguson, became the owners of the store.^[4]

Life in Canadian

Nestled in an area of hills and mesas near the Canadian River unlike the flat expanses of the overall region, Canadian has never had more than a few thousand residents. But it has been home to the Abrahams for more than a century.^[5]Salem Abraham graduated in 1984 from Canadian High School and in 1987 from the Roman Catholic-affiliated University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. It was in college that he developed an interest in investments, fueled by a 1987 meeting with Jerry Parker, the founder of the Chesapeake Capital Corporation hedge fund in Richmond, Virginia, but he wanted to live in Canadian as had his earlier family members. The Abrahams live near the center of town in a mansion that was once the home of his grandparents, Malouf and Iris Lewis Abraham. A mural with writing in Arabic shows the family roots in Lebanon.^[5]

Abraham established an office in the former Moody Hotel, which his great-grandfather had purchased in 1950. He has two brothers, Eddie (born 1965) and Jason (born 1969), who are engaged in cattle and horse ranching, respectively in the family's large ranch operation in Hemphill County. Eddie Abraham previously competed in shooting contests and was the winner of the 2004 world derringer championship.^[6]

Political activities

Like Malouf Abraham, Sr., the other Abrahams became Republicans and have been generous donors to the party. In recent years, Salem Abraham has been a large donor to U.S. Senator John Cornyn and his home congressman, U.S. Representative, Mac Thornberry of Texas's 13th congressional district. He contributed to John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. He and family members also gave generously to former State Senator Florence Shapiro of Plano, who earlier considered but then declined to run for the U.S. Senate from Texas later vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison.^[7]

Abraham is married to his former childhood sweetheart, the former Ruth Ann Dennis, also a Canadian native. Their eight children^[8] are the fifth generation of Abrahams in Hemphill County. Salem Abraham began service in 2001 as a trustee of the Canadian Independent School District and became the board president in 2007. In 2008, the then Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Tom Craddick of Midland,^[9] appointed Abraham, along with the since departing State Representative Diane Porter Patrick of Arlington to the Public School Accountability Task Force, a group established to oversee a new educational accountability system for public education. Abraham also serves on the legislative committee for the Texas Association of School Boards.^[10][11] Abraham is also a coach of Canadian youth teams but he is no longer a CISD trustee.^[12]

In the 2012 Republican runoff election for state representative from District 88 to fill the seat vacated by Warren Chisum of Pampa, Abraham donated $100,000 to former school board colleague Ken King,^[13] an oil and gas businessman from Canadian, who unseated the conservative Jim Landtroop of Plainview in Hale County, who was moved from District 85 in which he had served a single term.^[14]

Abraham Trading Company

Abraham Trading Company began before there was an office in 1988 with $50,000 in seed money from Malouf Abraham, Sr. Based in Canadian, a small Texas town few would recognize and described in 2012 by Barron's as "a far piece from almost anywhere that might be thought of as a financial center, an unlikely spot for a managed-futures hedge fund that has been racking up positive returns for twenty-four years."^[15]Salem Abraham describes his primary objective as "to provide our investors long-term capital appreciation with very low correlation to traditional investments."^[16]

The 1,000-square-foot ATC office is located on the second floor of the refurbished turn-of-the-century Moody Hotel; below the office is the popular Cattle Exchange Steakhouse. From 1988 until 2009, the company's hedge fund, a separate operation from futures,^[5] had been earning positive returns of 18.4 percent annually on total investment portfolio of nearly $600 million.^[15] Most of the fifteen employees of the firm have backgrounds working in the region at feedlots or for natural-gas drilling and pipeline transport companies. Their training is provided not through higher education but on the job by Salem Abraham himself.^[5]

Considered a persuasive salesman, Abraham lured investors like the former Commodities Corporation, a firm acquired in 1997 by Goldman Sachs, to invest in ATC. That move alone increased Abraham assets to more than $130 million.^[5]ATC posted a 21.8 percent average annual return for the twenty-one years ending in 2008. One thousand dollars invested in January 1988 was worth $82,000 at the end of 2008.^[6] Then came a downturn. A thousand dollars invested in 1988 would have been worth about $59,000 in April 2012. The Abraham investment model tracks trends in eighty-three markets with as many as thirty trades daily. Half of the investments are in commodities futures: energy, metals, grains, meats, and soft commodities, including orange juice, sugar, cocoa, and cotton. The other half of the investments are in currencies, interest rates, and global stock indexes.^[15]Abraham bet that the British pound would lose value against the dollar -- it sank 26 percent in 2008 -- and that the Japanese yen would grow in value.^[6]

The Palace Theater in downtown Canadian, Texas, was restored through a $1 million gift from Salem Abraham.

Abraham has also made millions in real estate and in selling underground water. “He's the only money manager who's made me any money this year. And that includes myself," said legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens in November 2008. Abraham and Pickens are sometime business partners; their ranch lands are just twenty miles apart. The Abraham family spread totals 27,000 acres.^[6]In addition to the Moody Hotel building, Abraham owns nine buildings along Main Street in Canadian, including the Palace Theater, where he and Ruth Ann once went on dates. He spent $1 million restoring the structure.^[6]

Abraham is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and is a member of the National Futures Association, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He has appeared in articles by Bloomberg Business News and is mentioned too in the Michael Covel books, The Complete Turtle Trader and Trend Following.^[16]

A 2003 article in The New York Times notes that Abraham is "betting that his firm's homespun image will be a plus even for his wealthy investors. It would be hard to find a financial firm in the United States as removed from Wall Street, geographically and culturally, as the Abraham Trading Company. Housed in the same building where his grandfather, Malouf Abraham, once chewed the fat with local politicians and ranchers while building a sizable land-speculation business, the company has evolved into one of the nation's most unusual trading operations."^[5]

An Abraham friend at Notre Dame, Mike Nelligan, said: "He was always more together than the rest of us. He had high expectations for himself and knew he was going to be successful."^[6]

References