Crucial physical criteria when Liddle joined the Navy – perfect eyesight (no longer required of pilots), spatial awareness and randomly tested co-ordination – are now not relevant. But the ambition and drive that made him the first pilot from his forces family is now being brought to bear in building a business. Liddle has also needed to leverage the leadership qualities he demonstrated during years of combat.

Rescues and helicopters

Liddle is a realist who makes the most of any situation. Having dreamt of becoming an elite Harrier pilot in the Royal Navy, he was instead chosen to fly Commando helicopters and relished this challenge on the battlefield. Switching from the Royal Navy to the Royal Air Force, he finally had a brief spell flying Harriers before they fell victim to UK defence cost cutting. He later decided that helicopters had anyway been more fun to fly.

Liddle found flying the Sea King helicopter immensely rewarding, carrying out daring and hair-raising civilian search and rescue operations in the West of Scotland and Northern Ireland: “A notable rescue was once when myself and crew rescued a 12 year old at the bottom of a waterfall in the Lake District in the middle of the night, as well as numerous Ben Nevis and Glen Coe mountain climbers in Scotland, and even a lady mid-delivery with complications delivering twins who needed major hospital care”. This sort of work entailed some hideous dilemmas: during a dark and stormy night, should the crew be put at risk to save another life?

Gruelling missions

Liddle’s worst experience came quite early in his career, in the Second Gulf War in 2003, when the UK military had been out of combat practice since the 1982 Falklands War. “Flying with night vision goggles and no peripheral vision was very dangerous and there was more risk of dying through collision or accident than of being shot down. Two US aircraft collided one night, and one UK aircraft crashed killing all on board. By the 2000s in Afghanistan, the military had become much more proficient after learning lessons from Iraq.”

In Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan in 2010, Liddle participated in some of the largest helicopter assaults and invasions since Vietnam, led by Americans, in the biggest joint mission up to that point. “The mission was to take out a huge area of opium production funding Taliban terror. This involved 36 hours of constant fighting with only brief breaks, flying injured troops and ammunition back and forth,” he recalls. Another special co-mission involved UK, US, Dutch and Australian special forces targeting a key Taliban chief, who was later captured by the Dutch SAS after a week of reconnaissance.

This perseverance through adversity stood Liddle in good stead when the time came to launch Bowmoor on a lean budget. “I was parachuted into the role of leading the team at Bowmoor. The trading desk, consisting of Gareth [Abbot] and Brendan [Mulvany], are experts at modelling and trading but did not have the time to set up a regulated business by themselves. I had to learn the entire industry “overnight”, and understand how distribution, operations, regulations and compliance fit together in the best light. The military rulebook went out of the window, and I had to learn the regulatory rulebook.”

Respect for rulebooks

Liddle was no stranger to complex rules. On military missions he sometimes had to ask HQ for clarification of the “rules of engagement” and remembers the UK lawyers interpreting these more strictly than the US lawyers. “We needed fast and accurate decisions and were aware of cases where soldiers had broken the rules and been sued in a civil court. It would have been very dangerous to second guess decisions in a war situation.” Many battles were fought through predator drones, which also required legal approval delivered by radio. Confidential communication and data are important in finance and the military: radios were encrypted and back in 2003 Liddle was even using World War II style numbers representing letters.

Risk-taking and improvisation

Liddle has the courage to take danger in his stride: “Alertness to risks was vital since helicopters have limited armour and are very vulnerable. And even in training when flying jets, my Hawk single seat jet became severely damaged by a collision with birds, I had to make a May Day call, but fortunately landed safely at RAF Valley in Holyhead, North Wales”. Some studies suggest that financial traders and veterans thrive on adrenaline, which may provoke cortisol and increase risk-taking, Liddle however kept emotions on an even keel: “I became nearly numb in the end after so much drilling and practising. I genuinely felt no different during life at danger. I needed to confidently and quickly make and execute decisions in high pressure situations”.

Liddle often had to deal with breakdowns in sat nav, Wi-Fi, radar, radio, signals, communication lines and other signals, and coming close to running out of fuel: “I was prepared with practice, rehearsals, processes and procedures to remove the risks. Any decision would be better than no decision, even if it was the wrong one”.

Resilience and thick skin

Whether humans or machines are fighting, the job is stressful. “The use of predator drones in Afghanistan did not remove post-traumatic stress disorder, as the stress of 12-hour missions dropping bombs from drones on all sorts of targets took its toll,” says Liddle, who spent two years in Afghanistan away from his family and has seen plenty of marriages and parental relationships with children fall prey to army stress. He has seen the situation deteriorate further after people retire from the forces: “Some people find themselves in a lonely void without structure or discipline, and the rate of homelessness is huge”.

Covid baptism on Civvy street

The first challenge he met the day he retired from the Royal Air Force was the Covid lockdown, but he immediately adapted to the situation: “I had a fantastic time at home with my children. Military people can hold a lot in and carry a lot of responsibility”.

Liddle’s continuing involvement in the forces has included co-founding a for-profit firm, Supported Living Gateway, which houses homeless ex-service people as well as others with housing needs. He sold part of his shareholding in the firm to focus on Bowmoor, setting a good example that could be followed by others after they leave the military: “There is huge latent potential; leadership, problem solving and lateral thinking skills are hugely beneficial in business,” says Liddle.

Honour, ethics and values

Military retirees may find that (any) codes of ethics are rather more relaxed in civilian life, and Liddle has quickly become streetwise in sussing out if counterparties share his values: “I believe in honour, respect and ethics and do not deviate from any of them. I trust very few people but will work to the death with those that I do trust. I am not always suspicious of people but am less trusting than I once was after some potential business partners let me down in my previous company – or put their own interests before those of the company’s. Their ethics were in the wrong place, and I see the same problems in fund promotion. I would rather grow assets slowly to ensure long lasting investors”.

Apart from moral ethics, work ethic comes naturally to Liddle who has worked 24/7 on many missions. That said, the work ethic of the movie industry was what most impressed him during his 15 minutes of fame working on Rogue One: A Star Wars Movie. “My training school received a request for 14 pilots to spend 10 days in costume conveying an impression of confidence climbing in and out of the aircraft, the X Wings, for the movie. I was exceptionally impressed by the hours worked in the movie industry.”

Bowmoor: ownership, empowerment and multi-tasking

A mutual friend introduced Liddle to Gareth Abbot and Brendan Mulvany, who enjoyed running their own capital, but did not have direct ownership. “They had great trading careers but wanted to be empowered with ownership of a management company,” recalls Liddle. Common ground between the team from the start was MECE (Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive) diversification principles, which are used in the military, though Abbot was also using them previously, not only for fund literature but also for defining the investment universe of the Global Alpha strategy.

Each team member brings distinctive edge to the table. Liddle’s background as a fighter pilot infuses the firm with a unique strategic perspective, driving the fund towards bold yet achievable goals. Abbot’s deep expertise in quantitative modelling, honed through years with leading hedge funds, ensures that strategies are built on rigorous, data-driven foundations. Mulvany’s long-standing experience in execution, tracing back to the era of floor trading, brings crucial industry insights and connections that have contributed significantly to Bowmoor’s growth.

Says Abbot, “Our team is part of the MECE theme at Bowmoor, the whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The team was formed for synergy, with each of us bringing a core competency: Richard navigating operational elements, Brendan in the markets, and me doing the math to ensure we always beat not only the markets but the competition”.

Initially the Bowmoor team doubted their multi-tasking prowess, but Liddle convinced them they could do it, by showing them how to multi-task and prioritise certain things to build up core skillsets and grow faster into new avenues. This harked back to pilot duties monitoring multiple inter-related systems such as engine temperature, individually and in unison.

The team at Bowmoor now monitors over 100 markets including some 21 that are traded by the first Bowmoor strategy. Multi-tasking skills were stretched again, when in July Bowmoor launched a second strategy in the US trading the same 21 alternative markets however with a higher volatility. The team is now very cohesive: “We all bonded together as a team at Bowmoor – just as my flying career demanded effective teamwork with a co-pilot in the front, gunners and air crewmen in the back, and more teamwork within the overall platoon, safely moving troops between front lines and safe locations,” recalls Liddle.

Their shared vision is clear. “Being ex-military, I have crystal clear goals and targets to raise a billion dollars of assets, even if the detail of the journey is a bit fuzzy. We all come from different backgrounds, but the core is our shared values, and ethics as a team – no-one is a lone operator,” says Liddle.

Automation is the future

After leaving the military Liddle qualified as a commercial pilot as a backstop option, though he almost regrets the effort put into the exams and flying tests since, “What has become essentially a systems monitoring role is nowhere near as satisfying as the challenges I faced in the military and am facing now as I help to grow Bowmoor”.

Yet the systematic financial trading world that Liddle has joined also happens to fit his vision for the military world he has left behind. Matching Bowmoor’s sophisticated models, Liddle envisages that, “Combat will ultimately be done using unmanned aircraft and drones. The weak link in fighter aircraft now is the human. We will soon see a robotics driven air force”.