is a single family office
serving the Dekker family
is a single family office
serving the Dekker family
Cat Trail takes strategic positions in publicly traded securities, makes strategic placements with unique fund managers, manages a portfolio of real assets, and takes positions in small growth companies.
Investing in both debt and equity, Cat Trail establishes active, on-going relationships with those with whom it invests. Investment partners are carefully selected based on their ability to achieve differentiation and generate true “alpha”.
Cat Trail maintains a portfolio of internally managed funds.
Cat Trail partners with many leading firms in the finance industry, including real estate, private equity, secondary, venture capital, and hedge funds.
Cat Trail invests in direct placements, participates in syndicated rounds, and also takes limited partner positions in funds or businesses demonstrating above average return potential. Participation includes both debt and equity placements, or often some combination therein.
David Dekker serves as Managing Partner of Cat Trail, which he founded in 2004.
David currently serves on the advisory committees of Freedom 3, a private credit solutions fund, Alta Community Investments, a real estate development fund, and Cirrus Ventures, a venture debt fund. David has also served on numerous boards of private companies.
David was awarded BS degree in Management Science from the University of Rhode Island and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Executive Management Program at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. Post graduate work included the Executive Education Program “Mergers and Acquisitions” at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.
Additional background information can be found on the history page.
Russell Dekker is a Partner of Cat Trail, and serves on Cat Trail’s investment committee.
From 1990 through 2004, Russell served as Chief Publishing Officer of Marcel Dekker, Inc. From 2004 through 2009, he was the Founder and Managing Director of Summit Communications, LLC.
Among Russell’s philanthropic interests, he serves as the Regional Chair of the New York Tri-State region for the American Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Russell received a BA degree cum laude with high honors from Hobart College in 1990 and an MA degree from New York University in 1994.
Andrew Budinoff serves as Director of Portfolio Management and Trading at Cat Trail. Andrew is responsible for development and execution of Cat Trail’s various internally managed trading strategies. Andrew is also responsible for developing and managing the firm’s asset allocation model as well as portfolio risk and performance analytics.
Prior to joining Cat Trail, Andrew was an analyst at Point Clear Capital Management (PCCM). Prior to joining PCCM, Andrew completed internships with UBS’s private bank and JP Morgan.
Andrew holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. He also earned an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business specializing in Quantitative Finance and Financial Instruments & Markets. Andrew is a CFA® charterholder.
Cat Trail is an investment company serving the Dekker family.
Cat Trail was founded by David Dekker after Marcel Dekker, Inc. was acquired at the end of 2003. Marcel Dekker, Inc. (Dekker) was a scientific/technological/medical (STM) publishing company founded by David and Russell’s father, Marcel Dekker, in 1964. Prior, Marcel worked in marketing and sales for the publishing firm, Interscience, which was founded by Marcel’s father, Maurits Dekker, and Eric Proskauer in 1947. Interscience merged with John Wiley & Sons in 1963, becoming Wiley-Interscience.
Like Interscience before it, Marcel Dekker, Inc. prospered, transforming into a mid-sized global STM publisher. In 1997, Marcel Dekker retained his Chairman title but vacated the Presidency, passing the company’s leadership to his two sons, Russell Dekker as Chief Publishing Officer and David Dekker as Chief Operating Officer.
At the time, technology and the internet were posing both opportunities and challenges for traditional publishers. With new leadership, the company embraced the digital challenges by building a strong web presence, a new brand image, pioneering in-house content management, and directly publishing material in real time to the web and syndication partners. Crossroads Media, a separate company owned by David and Russell Dekker, also purchased Achorn Graphics (Achorn) in 1998, a typesetter which had developed a unique technology to render STM content on the web. Achorn became well-regarded doing all production work for Dekker as well as for other STM publishers such as Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, Wiley, and McGraw-Hill. Achorn was sold in 2001 to SPI Graphics, a company financed by Tommy Lee Partners.
In 2003, Dekker’s Board of Directors agreed to sell Dekker to the Taylor & Francis Group, plc (T&F). Dekker’s American base and digital activism made it an especially good fit with the more English and print-centric T&F. Russell and David worked for T&F, honoring their required employment contracts, but left soon after to establish new ventures. Now well established and with better resources, Cat Trail has become a full service investment boutique for the Dekker family.
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