Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
I intentionally avoid the world of quantitative investing on this podcast. The whole point of this format is to learn about many different fields and the vast majority of my time is already spent in the quant world. Occasionally, I've broken this rule because of something unique, including this week's conversation with Richard Craib, the founder and CEO of Numerai. If you listen to the podcast often, you'll have heard me reference Numerai, a hedge fund which blends quant investing, cryptocurrencies, crowdsourcing, and machine learning. Talk about a PR company's dream. One important note, Numerai is both incredibly open and very secretive. You may sense a bit of frustration on my part, but that is only because as a fellow quant who loves details about data and modeling, we couldn't go deeper into the details on the record.
We discussed how Numerai has created an incentive structure to work with data scientists around the world in an attempt to build better investing models. The idea of having data scientist stake cryptocurrency in support of the quality of their models is fascinating to me. Like many hedge funds, Numerai doesn't share its track record, so we don't know if this works. But I hope you, like me, use this conversation as inspiration for how different technologies can intersect.