Toby Crabel

Toby Crabel (born 1955) is an American tennis player, commodities trader, and author.

Crabel attended Florida Technological University (renamed the University of Central Florida), and majored in finance. He played on the tennis team, and was a 3-time NCAA Division II All-American. In 1977 he reached the quarterfinals of the NCAA Division II National Championship singles tournament.

He then attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied mathematics. Following college, Crabel played on the professional circuit for three years on the ATP Tour. He competed in Men's Doubles in the 1980 French Open with Ian Harris, and they lost their first-round match against Vitas Gerulaitis and former World No. 1 Fred Stolle in straight sets.

Following his retirement from the ATP Tour, Crabel remained active in senior tennis circuits under the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and the International Tennis Federation (ITF). In October 2021, he captured a USTA Gold Ball by winning the USTA National Men's 65 Clay Court Championships in New Orleans. Later that year, he won the Crabel Capital USTA National Men's 65 Grass Court Championships, hosted by his company. He finished the 2021 season ranked as the No. 1 player in the US in the Men's 65-and-over age division. Crabel was selected by the USTA to represent the US at the 2021 ITF Super-Senior World Team Championships, competing for the Britannia Cup. He achieved a peak ranking of No. 11 in the International Tennis Federation Senior World Rankings.

Financial career In 1975, while attending college, Crabel began to trade the markets. In 1980, he worked as a runner on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Crabel released his book, Day Trading with Short-term Price Patterns, in 1990.

In 1991, Crabel moved to New York City to work under hedge fund manager Victor Niederhoffer in research and trading at Niederhoffer Investments. At the firm, he focused on short-term pattern research and quantitative analysis alongside other traders such as Monroe Trout and Roy Niederhoffer. During this period, he also provided short-term market analysis and advice directly to floor traders through his advisory work and commodity newsletters. He left Niederhoffer Investments in 1992 to run systematic asset strategies independently. He focused on launching the Crabel Diversified Futures program, engaging in automated and managed futures trading. He initially managed the hedge fund's diversified futures programs from his house in River Hills, Wisconsin, adjacent to cornfields, northwest of Milwaukee. He is the fund manager of "Crabel Capital Management," which in 2005 ranked highly on Absolute Return magazine's list of US groups with more than $1 billion assets under management. Crabel managed $3.2 billion with growth of 16.7% in 2005. In 2005, the Financial Times called Crabel "the most well-known trader on the counter-trend side". He lived and worked out of the greater Milwaukee area until relocating his family and corporate headquarters to Southern California, establishing the firm's main offices in Los Angeles. In California, Crabel and his wife, fashion designer Lorena Sarbu, established their family residence in Beverly Hills.

Crabel manages private client assets, using the Crabel Fund Ltd for non-US investors and the Crabel Fund LP for US clients. The firm's total assets under management reached over $5 billion. This asset base is traded systematically across several quantitative programs. Crabel manages these funds with a staff of 31 researchers focused on quantitative research and development, and 28 traders. In an hour-long April 2026 interview, Grabel ruminated on his decades of experience navigating the fact that markets are not stable, and discussed why momentum behaves differently now, how liquidity has changed, and why execution is now a defining edge.