Helmut Weymar had an extraordinary influence on the managed money business. As the charismatic founder and president of Commodities Corp., he led a remarkably successful team of traders and created an environment that nurtured some of the most famous money managers of the subsequent decades, including Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon and Bruce Kovner. Weymar, an MIT graduate, began his career advising Nabisco on how to buy cocoa and other commodities. After four years there, he launched his own company in 1969 and recruited a team of experts in computer programming and scientific analysis of markets. The firm was one of the first to hire PhDs to apply complex mathematical techniques to commodities trading, and is widely considered an inspiration for a generation of trend followers.