Eric Hickman is a career-long specialist in U.S. interest rate markets, with two proprietary indices live on the Bloomberg Terminal and 25 years spent on a single problem most of the industry sets aside: reading the economy and the Fed through the U.S. 2-year Treasury. The 2-year draws few dedicated specialists because on its own, it offers little — no credit spread and minimal duration. With leverage it can compete with any asset, and a career spent there, close to the Fed funds rate, turns the cleanest signal in finance into a refreshingly intuitive and consistent read on the economy.
His 25 years span U.S. Treasuries, repurchase agreements, interest rate futures, FX, and global sovereign debt. He spent 20 of those years at Kessler Investment Advisors under U.S. Treasury pioneer Robert Kessler, serving as President from 2012 to 2021. There he co-created and co-managed a Goldman Sachs partnership fund distributed to institutional investors across the Middle East and Asia, and co-created and co-managed the systematic Kessler Cornerstone Absolute Return Strategy, offered as a Cayman hedge fund, through SMAs, and on the Deutsche Bank Select platform.
In 2021 he founded Lantern Capital LLC, an independent advisory and economic research firm managing $149 million in assets under advisement (6/2026). Lantern’s work is built from first principles rather than pulled off the shelf. His dollar-yield differential model shows the U.S. dollar index carrying a 0.91 correlation to interest rate differentials. His “average numerical credit score,” which puts the three major rating agencies on one scale and tracks the average as a time series, poked a hole in the 2025 mid-year narrative that the U.S. was facing a credit problem.
In 2024 he built the first-of-its-kind Lantern Daily Economic Index (LDEI) to formalize something he had long tracked by instinct: how fast high-quality economic data is growing on average, the throughline of the nominal economy and the economic component of Treasury yields. When no larger narrative is pulling against yields, the LDEI tracks them tightly. The Philadelphia Fed’s ADS index is its closest conceptual cousin, but the ADS measures real rather than nominal growth, does not report on the release date, does not produce a daily number, has no sectors, and draws on 6 indicators to the LDEI’s 45. The LDEI has flagged several economic inflection points few others saw.
Both the LDEI (LTRNLDEI) and a Beige Book recession measure (LTRNBBRE), derived from his whitepaper on the GDP of each Federal Reserve district, are live on the Bloomberg Terminal. His research reaches institutional investors and advisors globally, published extensively on Advisor Perspectives and quoted in Barron’s. In October 2023 he published “Views from the Top,” calling the cyclical peak in Treasury yields on the exact day it occurred, from a framework rooted in 75 years of market history and entirely outside the conversation at the time.
Since June 2023, Eric’s public calls have been 79% accurate, spanning not just rate direction but the narratives that most often derail other forecasters: AI, oil, the 2024 election, tariffs, Iran, the Japanese and U.S. fiscal situation, and gold. That record includes correctly calling a majority of the last six secondary trends in U.S. rates, each a multi-month shift in direction. Over the last year (6/30/2025 to 6/30/2026), across 91 predictive pieces of public content, he has been 90% accurate. Clients of his paid daily commentary receive the same discipline applied in real time, at greater depth than the public posts, grounded in his proprietary frameworks and 25 years of pattern recognition across full business cycles.
Contact:
Lantern Capital LLC
720 16th Street, #214
Denver, CO 80202
(303) 668-0502
eric.hickman@lanterncapital.com
@EricWHickman on X
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