Flirting with Models

My guest this episode is Ben Wellington, Head of Complex Feature Engines at Two Sigma. In a modern quant process, one might argue that edge can live in three places: the data you can get your hands on, what you do with that data, and how you forecast from it. Ben lives squarely in the middle layer — feature generation — which also happens to be the place AI is reshaping fastest. So that's where we...

My guest this episode is Peter Hecht, co-head of the North America Portfolio Solutions Group at AQR. Portable alpha is drawing serious attention right now. Long the province of large institutions, it's now being wrapped into mutual funds and ETFs — which means, for the first time, advisors and the individual investors they serve get a seat at the table. So I wanted to sit down with someone who's b...

My guest today is John Gu, founder and CEO of Caladan, one of the most active market makers in crypto and a firm that has provided liquidity to more than 200 token launches. John's path runs through MIT, AlphaSimplex, Citadel's principal strategies group, and Tower Research before landing in Singapore at the dawn of the ICO era — where what started as a trade on the kimchi premium became the found...

In this episode I speak with Faheem Osman, Managing Director and Global Head of QIS Structuring at Macquarie Group. Faheem has spent nearly two decades inside major investment banks — first at Citi, where he spent about ten years on the commodities trading and structuring side, and now at Macquarie, where he's built out their cross-asset QIS business. Commodities, though, remain firmly in the DNA...

Today, I’m speaking with Richard Craib, the CEO and founder of Numerai. If you’ve heard of Numerai before and thought of it as an interesting experiment at the intersection of data science and crypto, it’s worth updating that mental model. Over the last few years, Numerai has quietly grown from roughly $60 million in assets to over $600 million. JPMorgan has invested and secured $500 million of ca...

Today, I’m speaking with Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, the founder of Extended, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange. Ruslan is the fifth perpetual futures exchange founder I’ve had on the podcast, and that’s very intentional. Flow continues to move toward these platforms, and while trading perps can feel familiar to anyone coming from centralized or traditional exchanges, the way risk is absorbed an...

Today, I am speaking with Angana Jacob, Head of the Research Data group within the Enterprise Data business at Bloomberg. We talk about Angana’s career path through quantitative research and data platforms, and how the industry has evolved from a world dominated by bespoke models and backtests to one where many models have become increasingly commoditized. A central theme of our conversation is th...

A few years ago, I sat down with Moritz Seibert and Moritz Heiden of Takahe Capital to talk about trend following at the edges of the futures markets: places where liquidity is thin, contracts are obscure, and capacity constraint is a feature, not a bug. Since then, despite strong performance, asset growth, and even winning industry awards, they made a very un-industry decision: they shut down the...

In this episode I speak with Annanay Kapila, founder and CEO of QFEX, a 24/7 centralized perpetual-futures exchange for traditional financial markets. Before founding QFEX, Annanay worked at Flow Traders and Tower Research, where he was introduced to high frequency trading and market microstructure in both crypto and traditional markets. Insights gleaned during these experiences lead him to the co...

In this episode, I speak with Jay Rajamony, Director of Alternatives at Man Numeric. Jay has been with the firm since 2004, giving him a front-row seat to the evolution of quant equity: from simple factor models and broad signals to today’s world of alternative data, model ensembles, and human-machine collaboration. We start with the history: what’s changed in quant over the last two decades, why...

In this episode I’m joined by Vladimir Novakovski, founder and CEO of Lighter, a decentralized crypto exchange. To kick off the conversation, we explore Lighter's three big design choices: it’s built as a custom Layer-2 on Ethereum, it relies on zero-knowledge circuits for proving transactions, and it runs with a private sequencer. Don't worry – if that sounds like gibberish, Vlad explains it...

In this episode, I speak with Antti Ilmanen, Principal and Global Co-head of the Portfolio Solutions Group at AQR Capital Management. Antti has long been one of the most thoughtful voices in the world of expected returns, having written not one, but two landmark books on the subject. But in his latest paper series, he returns to the topic with fresh urgency—probing the difference between objective...

In this episode, I speak with Chris Carrano, Vice President of Strategic Research at Venn by Two Sigma. Chris has had a rare vantage point in the world of factors — spanning smart beta, long/short hedge funds, and risk modeling — and that experience has shaped a thoughtful view of what factors really are and how they can be practically used. We dive into the philosophy and design behind Venn: why...

In this episode I speak with Jeffrey Rosenberg, Managing Director at BlackRock where he leads active and factor investments for mutual funds, ETFs, and institutional portfolios for the Systematic Fixed Income team. In the first half of the conversation we discuss the history of quant fixed income. Specifically, its evolution within the halls of sell-side institutions and how solutions were sh...

In this episode I speak with Edward Yu, co-founder of Variational.  We begin the conversation with Edward’s background in crypto OTC markets. He explains how the space evolved away from Telegram chats, the complexities of pricing derivative structures on the long-tail of alternative crypto currencies, and the sources of natural flow in the space. This experience led Edward to co-found Va...

My guest this episode is Benjamin Hoff, Global Head of Commodity Strategy and Research at Société Générale. Ben started his career in rates before making the jump to commodities, and that lens—shaped by curve arbitrage, convexity, and carry—colors everything he does. In this conversation, we explore how commodities differ fundamentally from other asset classes: the importance of cash-and-carry eco...

My guests today are Roxton McNeal, Managing Director and Head PM of QIS Investments and Siddharth Sethi, portfolio manager and Head of QIS structuring. Together, they’re spearheading the development of QIS-driven solutions at Simplify. In this conversation, we explore what it takes to build and manage a multi-strategy QIS portfolio—from infrastructure requirements to portfolio construction and ris...

Scott Phillips is just the second independent trader I’ve interviewed for this show. Like many independent traders, Scott found that his constraints – including the size of their capital pool, the ability to execute trades efficiently, and a lack of supporting infrastructure – made trading anything but loose-pants trend following almost impossible in traditional markets. These constraints led...

Today I’m talking to Thao Tran, Co-founding Partner at Vamient Capital. This episode was born from a question I had watching the NFT market place: how do you make markets in illiquid, non-fungible assets? Clearly people were doing it and I wanted to know how it differed from traditional market making. Several people recommended I speak with Thao, and she was kind enough to oblige, despite NFT mark...

My guest today is Victor Haghani, founder of Elm Wealth. Victor is, in many ways, one of the last tactical asset allocators standing after the 2010s. That might be because Victor wouldn’t categorize himself as such. Rather, he sees his dynamic index investing approach not as a tactical alternative to traditional static portfolios, but as the rational approach for anyone starting from first princip...

In this episode of the Get Stacked Investment Podcast, Corey and Rodrigo have an insightful conversation with Jonathan Glidden, Chief Investment Officer of the Delta Airlines Pension Plan. Since joining in 2011, Jonathan has been pivotal in elevating Delta’s pension plan funded status from 38% to over 100%. They delve into Jonathan's unconventional career journey, his implementation of portable al...

In this episode, I speak with Farouk Jivraj, Portfolio Manager and Head of Alternative Risk Premia at Fidelity Investments’ Asset Management Solutions division. After spending nearly a decade on the sell side, Farouk joined Fidelity in 2021 with the goal of building out an alternative risk premium platform, tapping into the best of what both the sell-side QIS desks have to offer and what can be bu...

In this episode I chat with Giuseppe Paleologo – or Gappy as he likes to be called. Currently on garden leave, Gappy has previously worked in Risk & Quantitative Analytics at Citadel, as Head of Enterprise Risk at Millennium, and most recently as Head of Risk Management at HRT. We begin the conversation with a discussion as to what a quant researcher actually does at a multi-manager hedge...

On this episode, Ben Carlson and Michael Batnick are joined by Corey Hoffstein of Newfound Research to discuss: managed futures, return stacking, using leverage effectively, and much more!

My guest in this episode is Kris Abdelmessih, co-founder of moontower.ai. Kris began his career at SIG, where he worked as a market maker in several different option pits, before moving to Parallax where he ran a relative value commodities volatility book. For the last five years, Kris has been writing on his blog Party at the Moontower, which is one of my favorite reads for all things probability...