Flirting with Models is the show that aims to pull back the curtain and meet the investors who research, design, develop, and manage quantitative investment strategies. Join Corey Hoffstein, Chief Investment Officer of Newfound Research, on a journey to explore systematic investment strategies, ranging from value to momentum and merger arbitrage to managed futures. For more on Newfound Research, visit www.thinknewfound.com.
My guest this episode is Stacie Mintz, Managing Director and Head of Quantitative Equity at PGIM Quantitative Solutions. Stacie has spent 33 years at PGIM, and she's been there for every defining moment of the firm's quant equity effort: a first strategy born from a client's challenge to move beyond indexing, a 1999 decision to abandon Barra and bring the risk model in-house, surviving the quant…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…