The Hedgineer Podcast

Opus 5.5 shipped at 40% below Fable. Meta Muse explodes in popularity. It's a busy time in the world of AI. Michael and Jhanvi go through their first reactions of Muse. The onboarding asks you to name an agent before you've asked it to do anything, then connects your email and calendar, then asks about your health, your finances, and the relationships you want to work on. It never asks whi...

OpenAI and Anthropic are calling for a slowdown in frontier AI development. Nvidia and Meta are not. The line runs between companies whose revenue depends entirely on frontier research and companies with tested businesses underneath them. Jhanvi and Michael take apart the incentives behind the debate, and they cover everything from the moat heavier regulation would build for larger players to the...

Data engineering in asset management was always a context problem, not a technology problem. The analyst knows what the data means, the data scientist knows how to query it, and the data engineer sits two steps removed from the domain, building pipelines against a business problem nobody translated cleanly. Michael and Jhanvi make the case that AI collapses that chain: you can now apply context at...

Hedgineer's annualized AI bill has grown past $1M, which brought back up a long-running internal discussion at the company: how do you measure ROI on a token? Michael and Jhanvi work through both layers of the problem. The first is instilling good AI hygiene practices across the company — encouraging thoughtful model selection, session discipline, keeping irrelevant context out of the window t...

Stripe just bought OpenRouter for over $7B. At first glance, a payments company acquiring a model proxy for that much money sounds strange, until you consider what Stripe sees. It watches spend across a very large customer base, and AI spend is rising at an exponential pace. When inference becomes something you shop for rather than something you're locked into, owning the venue where tokens ge...

Michael and Jhanvi have never edited a video before, and this week they built an entire marketing campaign. They walk through the whole pipeline: Claude Code turning a long prompt about the product into a storyboard of 12 to 16 shots, generating a color scheme and reusable SVG characters, routing clip generation through Runway to Veo, Kling and Seedance, then pulling narration and a score timed to...

Building application prototypes has never been easier. The ceiling comes after, when someone has to deploy it, host it, and keep it running without much engineering support. This week, Jhanvi and Michael work through what stands between a good prototype and a good application: setting up AI environments that are faster to work in and harder to break, wiring in MCP connectors thoughtfully, and what...

AI names were sold off for several days, a heavily levered AI fund wound down its entire equities book, and then one earnings print reversed most of the damage within hours. The same industry supported two opposite readings in the same day, which says more about how funds are measuring their AI exposure than it does about AI. Michael and Jhanvi start with why so few funds formally manage their exp...

Almost every fund has a couple of power users spending their weekends in Claude Code, prototyping automations, and proving out how useful AI can be. But then what? How do they hand it to a teammate, and how does a prototype become a production automation that compliance signs off on? Michael and Jhanvi make the case that the gap is a governance problem sitting upstream of every technical one. Ever...

Kimi K3 shipped this week, topped multiple coding benchmarks against Fable and Soul, and its full open source release is expected before the end of the month. Where does that leave the frontier model providers? Michael and Jhanvi get into why Anthropic and OpenAI have new incentive to lock down session data, conversation history, model reasoning, tool and skill calls, so a competitor can't dis...

Hedgineer stopped hiring forward-deployed engineers. Michael and Jhanvi explain why and reflect on when the FDE operating model breaks. Hedge Fund clients showed up assuming a shared context about their business that even the strongest engineers could never have. They also talk through what replaced it: forward-deployed analysts who have worked in similar roles as the teams they're deployed to...

Anthropic has been quietly redacting pieces of what Claude Code and Cowork report back through its telemetry logs. First the model's own reasoning disappeared from the traces. Then, briefly, so did users' prompts. No release notes, no explanation, just a feature flag that got flipped and eventually flipped back. Michael and Jhanvi use the incident to get into a bigger question: what does i...

Michael and Jhanvi break down what an agentic loop actually is, how it works under the hood, and what it looks like when investment teams put it to use. From earnings recap to idea generation, the conversation covers how loops shift analysts from reactive prompting to autonomous pipelines that accelerate idea velocity. We also cover what's new in AI: Claude's new Slack tag feature and the...

Overview The standard order book matches trades by price and time priority, one at a time. For a fund executing a basket or a pair trade, that means legging into positions sequentially, facing the exposure problem on every leg. In 2016, Kelly Littlepage began building OneChronos around a different premise: let traders express their full intent, and let a mathematical optimization engine find the b...

Sell-side research is the last data category that still resists clean AI integration. US brokers monetize through trade execution, not data sales, which means feeding analyst reports into an LLM removes the attribution that justifies the entire model. No attribution, no incentive to share. That standoff has left buy-side funds cobbling together workarounds for years. This week brought two competin...

The barrier to impressing institutional investors with artificial intelligence is high because portfolio managers and analysts already know their coverage universes deeply. Traditional chatbots that merely summarize 10-Ks or earnings transcripts often act as an enemy to true market comprehension, resulting in weak adoption across fundamental investment teams. In this episode of The Hedgineer Podca...

Anthropic and Google both had massive dev days recently. And they couldn't be more different. In this episode, Jhanvi and Michael break down what each announcement signals about the frontier model race and where it's headed. Anthropic is doubling down on enterprise agents, memory stores, and "dreaming," while Google is going wide with consumer AI, a multimodal Omni model, and Spa...

The transition from AI as a chatbot to AI as an autonomous agent requires more than just better models; it requires agents capable of regulating their own state and context at scale. In this episode of The Hedgineer Podcast , co-hosts Michael Watson and Jhanvi Virani sit down with Mitch Troyanovsky , co-founder of Basis , an agent platform specifically designed for the accounting industry. The con...

Anthropic just announced an enterprise services venture backed by Goldman, Hellman & Friedman, and Blackstone. OpenAI is raising $4B for something similar. So why are frontier model providers suddenly trying to become consultants? In Season 3 Episode 3 of The Hedgineer Podcast, Michael and Jhanvi break down what's driving the move: why handing a company a Claude license rarely translates i...

Neel Somani is a quant engineer turned content creator covering power markets, AI infrastructure, and crypto. In this episode of The Hedgineer Podcast, we dig into how the AI boom is reshaping energy markets, how rising compute costs are forcing companies to measure AI ROI, and whether open source models are changing the build vs. buy decision. About the Guest Neel Somani is a technologist and res...

SaaS companies are pivoting: less investment in the dashboard, more in the API. Salesforce's headless MCP suite, Ramp's CLI, Linear's AI connectors — the pattern is the same. Products are being rebuilt for agents, not humans. In this episode, Jhanvi and Michael dig into what's driving the shift and what it means for funds evaluating their stack. They also get into the architecture...

Season 2 Finale: Open-Sourcing the Investor Library with Daloopa CEO Thomas Li The Season 2 finale of The Hedgineer Podcast features the return of Thomas Li , Co-founder and CEO of Daloopa , for his third appearance on the show. This episode marks a significant milestone as we transition into a new chapter for the podcast. Special Announcement: Season 3 and New Format Before diving into the discus...

AI Orchestration: From Custom Skills to Autonomous Hedge Fund Operations Most asset managers treat AI as just a chatbot, failing to bridge the gap between an LLM's general reasoning and the specific, high-stakes workflows of their actual day-to-day. In this episode of The Hedgineer Podcast, Michael Watson sits down with Jhanvi Virani, COO of Hedgineer, to discuss the practical mechanics of deployi...

Data Liquidity and the Agentic Marketplace: Moving Beyond Bulk SaaS Contracts The traditional model of purchasing financial data is structurally misaligned with the requirements of modern AI development. While hedge funds have historically navigated opaque pricing and rigid, six-figure bulk contracts, the rise of Frontier Labs and agentic workflows demands a shift toward data liquidity and consump...

Welcome back to The Hedgineer Podcast, where host Michael Watson dives into the world of AI, data, and technology within asset management, hedge funds, and financial services. In this episode, Michael sits down with Jonathan Regenstein, who leads AI within Financial Services at Snowflake . This conversation explores the critical role of data and platform strategy in the successful enterprise deplo...