Flirting with Models

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 foundation for one of the most active liquidity providers in digital assets.The thesis of our conversation is what I'll call the cold start problem. In traditional markets, every newly listed stock arrives with scaffolding already in place — a designated market maker, a reference price, a universe of comparables, and decades of regulatory infrastructure. Crypto inverts that. A new token can launch with no orderbook, no comparables, and no clear demand curve. Someone has to quote a two-sided market into that void, and how they do it shapes whether the asset becomes a real, tradable thing — or a graveyard of wide spreads and stranded liquidity.John and I dig into how you bootstrap liquidity from zero, how the quoting playbook evolves as a market matures, the economics of token market making contracts, and how that same infrastructure now bridges into structured products and treasury solutions for token foundations.Please enjoy my conversation with John Gu.

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 Variational, which seeks to bring the trillion dollar OTC derivatives market on-chain by disaggregating settlement, margining, and derivative payoff logic into programmable primitives.Built on top of Variational is the OMNI perp dex – or decentralized perpetual futures exchange for the non-crypto-speaking listeners. Unlike other perp dexes that are build around a centralized order book, OMNI effectively acts as a user interface to a OTC RFQ system. On the other side is OLP – the OMNI Liquidity Provider. This structure allows OMNI to provide significant depth of liquidity on a huge breadth of investable assets despite the platform being in closed beta at the time of recording. Given its unique design, we spend a significant amount of time discussing the pros, cons, and risks of this structure.This conversation is, obviously, out of my usual realm. But for those listeners interested in market structure and where the world of finance may be headed, this is one not to miss.Please enjoy my conversation with Edward Yu.

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 risk management. We discuss: • The structural vs. academic premia distinction and why it matters. • How Simplify evaluates and customizes QIS offerings from banks. • The need and challenges of dynamic allocation across dozens of strategies. • How QIS strategies integrate with traditional beta portfolios. • The operational and counterparty considerations of trading these strategies.For those interested in the practical realities of QIS investing, this episode provides a deep dive into both the opportunities and challenges of running a systematic, multi-strategy portfolio.I hope you enjoy my conversation with Roxton McNeal and Siddharth Sethi.

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 market making being just a small component of what she does. In this conversation, we walks me through how the NFT market place has evolved, how she thinks about managing inventory risk, key features that impact spreads, and how platform evolutions changed orderbook strategies.In the back half of the conversation, Thao shares her thoughts on the state of crypto markets today, the emerging opportunities in decentralized exchanges, and how the landscape of alpha opportunities has changed over the last two years.I hope you enjoy my conversation with Thao Tran.

In this episode of the Get StackedInvestment Podcast, Corey and Rodrigo have an insightful conversation withJonathan Glidden, Chief Investment Officer of the Delta Airlines Pension Plan.Since joining in 2011, Jonathan has been pivotal in elevating Delta’s pensionplan funded status from 38% to over 100%. They delve into Jonathan'sunconventional career journey, his implementation of portable alpha strategies,and share valuable lessons learned from turbulent financial periods such as2008 and 2020. Whether you're a seasoned investor or new to the concept ofportable alpha, this episode provides a masterclass on optimizing pension planmanagement through innovative investment strategies.

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 fund. As a semi-support role to the fundamental PMs, Gappy explains how portfolio manager coverage, factor hedging, and internal alpha capture can all work together to help maximize firm P&L.We then discuss the broad field of factor research and portfolio construction, where Gappy shares some of his strongly held views, both on how factors should be constructed as well as how they should be utilized. Topics include returns versus characteristics, mixing versus integrating alpha signals, single- versus multi-period optimization, and linear- versus non-linear models.Please enjoy my conversation with Giuseppe Paleologo.

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, payoff space, trading, optionality, and seeing the world through a volatility lens.Kris is a passionate educator, so it should come as no surprise that learning is a key thread throughout this entire episode. Kris discusses how learning is accelerated in the pits and how we can think about replicating it in electronic space. Kris discusses what he had to unlearn and relearn in his move from market making to relative value trading. He also shares his thoughts about how firm lineage influences how you learn to trade markets.Finally, we discuss Kris’s newest venture, moontower.ai, which seeks to provide a “volatility lens” to opinionated traders to help them better express their bets in option space.There is a lot of experience to unpack in this one. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kris Abdelmessih.

In this episode, I speak with Nicolas Mirjolet, CEO and Co-Head of Research at Quantica Capital.We begin with Nicolas’s experience operating a statistical arbitrage fund, where he provides his thoughts as to what makes a strategy easier or harder to scale a business on. Nicolas also provides some context for his somewhat counter-intuitive view that the larger players had a bigger edge in this capital constrained space.We then transition to Quantica’s flagship managed futures program. Nicolas explains that while Quantica is a price-based trend follower, they apply a multivariate approach to their signal analysis. We discuss how the approach works and how it contrasts against a standard univariate approach. Specifically, Nicolas shares his thoughts on how the multivariate approach impacts the portfolio return profile and why you may want more or fewer variables in your signal universe than your tradable market universe.We end the conversation with Quantica’s most recent quarterly research paper, which provides quantitative insight into the convexity versus robustness tradeoff trend managers make when they add more markets to their portfolio.Please enjoy my conversation with Nicolas Mirjolet.