The Sophron Network

Rob de Rozario joins The Sophron® Network to explain why the gap between a sub 3 trillion dollar digital asset market and the roughly 200 trillion dollar world of traditional finance gets closed on risk and education, not on returns. After two decades structuring exotic and FICC derivatives, Rob moved into digital assets because most participants could describe extraordinary returns but could not...

Jeremy Kadouch, Portfolio Manager at MN Fund, joins The Sophron® Network to answer a deceptively simple question: how close are we to fully autonomous trading? MN Fund runs a 24/7 systematic volatility engine that reads the market, reasons about it, and executes on its own. But the trade decision is deliberately kept away from AI, and the honest answer on autonomy is fewer decision makers rather t...

Aditya Shetty joins The Sophron® Network to talk through "internet capital markets": the idea that with a phone and an internet connection you can access any asset, any market, regardless of your location, your politics or your investment size. Recorded the same week tokenized SpaceX went live, the conversation is grounded in a concrete example and an honest distinction every finance listener need...

Amay Patel joins The Sophron® Network for our first in-person episode on what it takes to build and run a market-neutral crypto hedge fund. An OG member of Amsterdam Investment Club, Amay went from independent quant trader, to an Amsterdam-based fund, to launching his own fund. We dig into the strategies, deal-making, and risk discipline behind that path. Amay Patel is Partner and Head of Investme...

Dr. Yves Hilpisch joins The Sophron® Network to discuss what happens to quants in the AI era. We trace two decades of Python in quantitative finance, from a language barely on the radar in 2005 to today's industry standard, and ask how generative AI and agentic coding are reshaping quant careers. The conversation moves from the practical gap between a backtest and a live strategy to the skills...

Marc Ostwald joins The Sophron® Network to discuss how the drivers of markets have changed across four decades, why the financial economy has drifted from the real one, and where the next generation of edge will come from. The conversation moves from central bank evolution and conditioned buy-the-dip behaviour into refining bottlenecks, the helium and rare-earth chokepoints behind the AI boom, and...

Nikita Granger joins The Sophron® Network to discuss how quantitative finance operates in physical commodity markets — from pricing exotic structured derivatives in power and gas to managing risk across Shell's global infrastructure portfolio. We explore why energy markets function fundamentally differently from equities, how spread options and compound options are used to model real assets, a...

Johannes Muhle-Karbe joins The Sophron® Network to discuss market impact, model misspecification, and why simple trading strategies often perform surprisingly close to complex nonlinear optima. The conversation spans three of his recent research areas: the P&L consequences of using incorrect impact models, Bayesian methods for estimating true out-of-sample Sharpe ratios, and the efficiency of...

Alex Zhong joins The Sophron® Network to discuss how quantitative traders build systematic strategies from scratch — from signal discovery and model validation to portfolio construction across dozens of uncorrelated strategies. The conversation covers what separates alphas that survive out-of-sample from those that don't, why crypto markets offer unique advantages for smaller systematic trader...

Lionel Martellini joins The Sophron® Network to discuss the structural evolution of modern portfolio construction — from the rise of passive investing to hidden factor exposures, broken retirement products, and the real implications of quantum technology for finance. We examine why cap-weighted indices dominate global portfolios, why equally weighted portfolios often outperform on a risk-adjusted...

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud is Chairman of Capital Fund Management (CFM). He founded ‘Science and Finance’ in 1994, the research arm of CFM with Jean-Pierre Aguilar, which merged with CFM in 2000. He supervises the research team alongside Marc Potters. Jean-Philippe maintains strong links with the academic world and is a professor at École Normale Supérieure (ENS). Prior to CFM, Jean-Philippe was a res...

Vincenzo Riflesso is Head of Risk at Maverix Securities, bringing over two decades of experience across trading and risk management. Before his current role, he spent nearly a decade at Leonteq as Head of Market Risk, IPV and PnL Reporting. Earlier in his career, he worked as an Equity Derivatives Trader at BNP Paribas, Intesa Sanpaolo, and UniCredit, after beginning as an Equity Analyst at Merril...

Sankarshan Basu is Professor of Finance and Accounting at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). He has held senior academic leadership roles at IIMB and served as Dean at Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad University, with extensive international teaching experience across Europe and Asia. A former derivatives researcher at ICICI Treasury, he bridges academic rigor with mark...