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 conversati...
May 11, 2026•1 hr 10 min•Season 7Ep. 30
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 of what Macquarie does, and it's where Faheem cuts his teeth. We spend the bulk of our conversation ...
Apr 06, 2026•1 hr 7 min•Season 7Ep. 29
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 capacity, and Numerai recently raised a Series C at a $500 million valuation led by top university end...
Feb 23, 2026•56 min•Season 7Ep. 28
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 and resolved under the hood for decentralized exchanges can be very different. In this episode, we go ...
Feb 17, 2026•58 min•Season 7Ep. 27
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 the idea that while models are easier than ever to replicate, data — how it’s sourced, cleaned, standa...
Feb 09, 2026•57 min•Season 7Ep. 26
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 their original fund. In its place, they launched a new Global Markets Fund built to stay small, so they...
Jan 12, 2026•1 hr 7 min•Season 7Ep. 25
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 conclusion that the perpetual futures model applied to traditional, so-called “real world asset” marke...
Dec 29, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 24
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 the 2007 quant quake still matters, and how the definition of “alpha” has shifted alongside new tool...
Oct 13, 2025•57 min•Season 7Ep. 23
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 all. Each of those decisions comes with trade-offs — but also big potential advantages. We discuss why E...
Sep 22, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 22
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 and subjective expectations, and asking why even rational models can go so wrong in real time. We e...
Sep 15, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 7Ep. 21
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 it uses just 18 orthogonalized factors, how it blends Lasso and OLS to reduce overfitting, and why i...
Sep 02, 2025•56 min•Season 7Ep. 20
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 shaped by demand for underwriting, securitization, and derivatives. We then make the leap to the buyside, w...
Aug 18, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 7Ep. 19
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 settlemen...
Jul 30, 2025•50 min•Season 7Ep. 18
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 economics, the sparse information cadence that rewards technical models, and the physical realities tha...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 7Ep. 17
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...
Apr 21, 2025•56 min•Season 16Ep. 7
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 Scott to look for easier markets to trade: markets where the edges were so big they could survive ineffi...
Mar 03, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 15Ep. 7
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 h...
Feb 03, 2025•55 min•Season 14Ep. 7
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 principles. This conversation dances between theory and implementation. Victor is just as comfortable shari...
Dec 09, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 13Ep. 7
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 alpha strategies, and share valuable lessons learned from turbulent financial periods such as 2008 and...
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 9 min
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 built in-house. We spend the majority of the conversation peeling apart the layers of Farouk’s 5-step ...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 12Ep. 7
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, fact...
Sep 02, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Season 11Ep. 7
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!
Aug 20, 2024•38 min
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 pass...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 7Ep. 10
In this episode I speak with Bill Gebhardt, founder of 10Dynamics. Bill spent the better part of his career as a discretionary energies trader, with roles at Koch Industries, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Trailstone. In May 2020 he struck out on his own to co-found 10Dynamics. Given Bill’s fundamental and discretionary background, it may come as a surprise that 10Dynamics runs a fully systematic process. This dichotomy serves as the foundation for much of our conversation, where Bill provide...
Jul 01, 2024•52 min•Season 7Ep. 9
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 e...
May 27, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 7Ep. 8
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Get Stacked Investment Podcast. This episode brings together Corey Hoffstein, Rodrigo Gordillo, Mike Philbrick, and Adam Butler to dive deep into the concepts of Return Stacking, market efficiency, and investment strategies beyond traditional stock picking. Providing insights into Return Stacking's relevance in today's investment landscape, the importance of structured diversification to enhance portfolio sustainability and its potential to create excess r...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 14 min
In this episode I chat with Markku Kurtti, author of the blog Outcast Beta. Markku is classically trained as an electrical engineer and works on receiver algorithms for mobile phones. A passion for investing, however, lead him to pursue an MS in Finance and an interview with Ed Thorp compelled him to devote his time to better understanding compounding processes. This obsession has driven him to develop a number of analytical and numerical models that provide differentiated insights into topics s...
Apr 22, 2024•58 min•Season 7Ep. 7
In today’s episode I speak with Otto van Hemert, Director of Core Strategies at Man AHL. After briefly touching upon Otto’s background, we dive into one of his most popular papers: The Best Strategies for Inflationary Times. Otto shares the inspiration for the research as well as some of what he feels were the less obvious results. Trend strategies, which were a standout winner in the inflation resilience horse race, serve as the bridge to a discussion on seasonality. Interestingly, Otto’s resea...
Mar 25, 2024•47 min•Season 7Ep. 6
My guest this episode is Clayton Gillespie, VP at Deutsche Bank where he works in quant equity research for the QIS team. Clayton began his career at Credit Suisse HOLT, where he got his hands dirty in extracting fundamental information. This formative experience dramatically impacted how he views how fundamentals should be incorporated into quantitative equity strategies. Today, at DB, he strives to improve quantitative equity strategies by anchoring them with a strong fundamental understanding...
Feb 05, 2024•56 min•Season 7Ep. 5
In this episode I am joined by Hari Krishnan, Head of Volatility Strategies at SCT Capital and author of the books Second Leg Down and Market Tremors. This is Hari’s second appearance on the show, but he comes to us with a very different topic: how to develop a low carry hedge for a commodity bull market. Taking a similar line of thinking to his book Market Tremors, Hari evaluates the market through the perspective of both commodity producers and consumers. By understanding their business incent...
Jan 08, 2024•55 min•Season 7Ep. 4
