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Ethan Kho

@ethanrkho18,203 subscribers

Host of Odds on Open (presented by @onyxcapgroup)

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Victor Haghani helped build LTCM & watched it collapse — with winning trades still on the books. The lesson was never what to buy. It was how much. Victor Haghani (Co-founder @ LTCM | Founder @ Elm Wealth | Author of The Missing Billionaires) "It wasn't on the selection of the trades. It was on the sizing." We cover: - The two decisions every investor makes: what to own and how much, and why everyone fixates on the harder one - The biased-coin game that bankrupted Wall Street PMs and finance grads: a 60/40 edge handed to them, and they still blew up - Why the cost of risk is a fee you pay yourself, plus the napkin rule to price it (15% vol = 2.25% a year) - The Elon problem: 50% vol on your net worth means a ~90% chance of little left in 10 years, before anyone's even bearish - "The right answer to the wrong question," and why chasing billionaire money wrecks the plan - The crystal-ball game: hand someone tomorrow's WSJ front page and watch 1 in 6 still go bust - Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok play the same game, and the two AIs that actually lost money - His 92-year-old mother, who day-trades every day and won't hear a word of it Highlights: 00:00 Right & ruined — the LTCM paradox 01:40 The two decisions: what to invest in vs. how much 02:50 The 60/40 coin & why max-EV bankrupts you 04:00 The experiment: PMs & PhDs sizing it all wrong 07:00 Kelly in plain English — a constant 10–20% 08:20 Why sizing isn't zero-sum, but beating the market is 10:30 Why even pros don't optimize sizing 12:50 The cost of risk is a fee — paid to yourself 15:20 Pricing your own risk: variance as the charge 16:30 Concentrated stock: 30% vol = a 9% toll 20:50 Elon, 50% vol & the log-normal trap 22:45 The right answer to the wrong question 23:35 The real objective: smooth lifetime spending & giving 27:35 The crystal-ball / WSJ front-page game 33:25 Claude, GPT, Gemini & Grok step up to trade 37:40 Claude's 66% hit rate — & the two AIs that lost money 40:35 Can anyone actually beat the market? 50:25 How much risk a young person should take 58:00 Estimating your human capital 1:02:40 The mom who won't stop day-trading 1:07:30 The one rule: if you don't save, nothing else matters

Ethan Kho

575,702 views • 14 days ago

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"I haven't seen a real new idea in trading in at least 15 years." Tom Costello (Tom Coste) ran money at Tudor, Moore Capital, and Caxton. Built one of the first NLP-driven equity systems in 2003. 20 years managing capital, never had a down year. "Comparing what a retail trader does to what a quantitative hedge fund does is like comparing driving a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike to winning a Formula One race." We cover: - His hot take: no genuinely new trading idea in 15 years — only better people doing the same things faster - Why everyone in quant finance is a genius — and why that makes you ordinary, not special - Crypto is "super smart guys cosplaying at finance" — built for retail, which is exactly why it's the easiest money in finance right now - Why AGI won't beat the hedge fund industry — all the readily-capturable alpha is already captured - The status trap: why the path that made Paul Tudor Jones a billionaire won't work for the kid trying to copy it in 2026 - His friend the investment banker who'd quit it all to run a 10-employee ambulance supply company worth $150M - Why excitement is "wildly overbid" in finance — and why wanting an exciting trading job is itself a disqualifier - The most honest end of the financial industry — and why the media has it exactly backwards Thanks so much to Tom for coming on Odds on Open! Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:18 Building institutional credibility for early-stage managers 03:01 The Pareto distribution of hedge fund returns 04:25 Applying the Unified Field Theory of Finance to fair value 08:14 Trading against human incentives in a deterministic market 13:54 Why allocators don’t steal alpha from prospective PMs 25:16 Evaluating career edge in quantitative finance for 2026 30:48 Paul Tudor Jones and the art of game selection 33:42 Analyzing the economic viability of starting a new fund 35:16 Identifying common retail pitfalls: Mean reversion and arbitrage 38:55 Why there hasn't been a new trading idea in 15 years 50:33 Managing tail risk: Physics vs. deterministic financial distributions 59:10 Career pathing for PMs after a fund blow-up 1:07:53 SBF and FTX: Credibility vs. the "Founder-Genius" archetype 1:13:44 Establishing proof-of-concept through audited multi-year returns

Ethan Kho

1,185,257 views • 2 months ago

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"Crypto is the dumbest market in the world" Scott Phillips (Temu Robot James) runs HyperTrend — $20M of his own capital, one losing year in six. His edge? Picking the table big firms can't sit at. "There's no second-best counterparty in crypto. You see crime, you run towards it — crime is the foundation of edge." We cover: - Why crypto still has edge in 2026 — even when your uncle is talking about Bitcoin at Thanksgiving - The simple rules (buy 20-day highs, top-20 coins) that print through any market - Why stacking trend + momentum + carry gets you there from a spreadsheet — no automation required - Price-insensitive buyers (Saylor), price-insensitive sellers (North Korea) & why both are permanent alpha - The 90-day Binance listing short — an edge hiding in plain sight in market maker contracts - Why most shit coins trend to zero — and how to trade the ones that don't - Building a tokenized, permissionless DeFi hedge fund on hyperliquid — 2 & 20, fully on-chain - Why the best quant firms are run by near-non-verbal autists with one translator Thank you so much Temu Robot James for coming on the pod! Highlights: 01:04 Table selection and the math of competitive alpha 06:21 Why basic trend following yields outsized Sharpe in crypto 08:49 Why market inefficiency persists despite institutional inflows 14:58 Price insensitive buyers: Cults, VCs, and North Korean hackers 17:17 Factor analysis and the size-decay effect in shitcoins 25:40 The structural edge in mid-frequency crypto strategies 32:43 Tokenized DeFi vaults and on-chain hedge fund governance 40:43 Designing a robust portfolio: Equal weighting vs. MVO 44:21 Sourcing alpha from ghost chains and VC exit liquidity 49:58 Exploiting market maker contracts and post-listing drift 53:55 Operational alpha: Managing margin and manipulated funding rates 01:01:13 Shifting from quant to CEO 01:11:28 How to bridge the mentorship gap with elite traders 01:22:38 Building network triads: The secret to compounding social capital 01:29:23 Why 10x goals require total identity transformation

Ethan Kho

1,457,317 views • 2 months ago

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One agentic workflow now does 1,000 hours of hedge fund analyst work. Aakarsh Ramchandi founded the data team @ Third Point, built screening engines @ FactSet, & now builds agentic research tools @ RavenPack. "There's gonna be a full convergence of quant and qual. Most discretionary analysts I know are somewhere in their Claude journey — and the quants are going the other way around." We cover: - Year one at Third Point: onboarding 100 data sets with a team of 4 — & why they kept point-in-time copies of every vendor feed to catch panels that silently changed overnight - The Dan Loeb pitch story — a 45-page deck, six weeks of work, he stops at page 26, asks one question, & the whole thesis breaks - "Kind but not nice" — the zero-politics office where everyone gets corrected by elite people daily - Why analysts don't want your forecast — they want facts in Excel, red-green-blue, formatted their way - Hedging a concentrated activist book with alt-data short baskets built from a 400-500 factor model - Why Nvidia broke the Barra model — & building custom semiconductor factors instead - The agentic earnings preview: 8-9 step workflows, 35M tokens per run, ~1,000 hours of analyst work encoded - Self-improving loops — agents reviewing their own last 10 traces & patching their mistakes - The WorldQuant hackathon: 7,000 quants turning unstructured text into 35M unique time series Highlights: (00:00) Intro (01:38) Founding Third Point's data team in 2017 (03:55) Six months building point-in-time data infrastructure (06:20) How an event-driven fund actually uses alt data (12:40) Team structure & the original forward deployed engineer (17:10) Nobody wants your forecast — just give it to them in Excel (19:35) Measuring signals: direction, point estimates & confidence intervals (24:05) Working with Dan Loeb — the elite bullshit detector (26:05) The page-26 "Why?" story (28:55) 5AM Saturdays & discipline that compounds (32:05) Kind but not nice: the zero-politics office (33:55) How an activist creates alpha by re-running the business (43:10) Hedging the book with alt-data short baskets (50:40) Why Nvidia broke standard factor models (56:25) From search to RAG to agents (1:04:20) Opus 4.5 changes the game: 70% → 90% accuracy (1:11:00) Anatomy of an agentic earnings preview — 35M tokens per run (1:17:20) Ambient agents: the always-on Jarvis (1:19:40) Self-improving loops & encoded judgment (1:20:20) Finance in 10 years: the full convergence of quant & qual

Ethan Kho

298,733 views • 20 days ago

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Ex-Point72 Proprietary Research Head Kirk McKeown on building edge, alpha decay, & why everything that happened on Wall Street is about to happen on Main Street. Kirk McKeown (8.5 years @ Point72 under Steve Cohen | Built primary research at Glenview under Larry Robbins | Now founder of Carbon Arc Carbon Arc) "Alpha rewards those who value assets in a cold way. You want to get it right — not be right." We cover: - How alpha creation differs across multi-manager vs. concentrated shops - The 3 vectors every middle office function must move to justify its existence - Why he worked 6-hour Sundays from 2006-2020 — and the math behind it - The TSMC call that signaled semiconductor cancellations before anyone else knew - What the quant revolution on Wall Street tells us about the AI economy today - His framework: 4 market structures, 9 business models, & why they have rules - The MIT beer game & why every business problem is really an inventory problem - His hot take: a top hedge fund launches an enterprise AI lab in 2026 Highlights: 00:00 Intro 04:47 Tutor vs Glenview vs Point72: how edge differs 12:29 How to build “lift” for PMs: at-bats, hit-rate, sizing 18:44 Building research edge: outwork, read, fieldwork 27:16 Personal moat in 2026: analogs, history, decision trees 40:08 “Main Street becomes Wall Street”: what that actually means 44:30 Carbon Arc thesis: “decimalization” of data market structure 46:43 Why the edge migrates to data plus domain context 51:00 How to win in commoditized research: sample size beats anecdotes 01:03:26 Factorizing everything: themes, market structure, business models 01:08:37 Pruning decision trees: signals, scale points, inventory dynamics 01:14:18 Contrarian 2026 take: hedge funds launching enterprise AI labs 01:23:32 Final question: one habit to build career alpha

Ethan Kho

1,457,321 views • 3 months ago

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Ex-WorldQuant Head of Data Strategy Matt Ober on why quants don't care about the stock market, & why prediction markets become a new asset class. Matt Ober (Ex-Chief Data Scientist @ Third Point | Ex-Head of Data Strategy @ WorldQuant | Now GP @ Social Leverage) "Nobody actually really cared about the stock market. I bet if you asked people there when Nvidia was reporting, nobody had a clue." We cover: - The WorldQuant thesis: out-consume the world on data, out-manage the world on money - How a Chico State grad found the job on Craigslist — then walked into a room of PhDs - Revere, the alt-data goldmine only quants understood - Tracking CEOs' private jets to front-run M&A - WorldQuant's factory vs Third Point's fine-art boardroom - Selling data science to analysts who thought it was a joke - Why you sell beta, not alpha — alpha erodes, beta is sticky - The "degenerate economy," and why he can't hire interns anymore - Prediction markets as the next asset class — bigger than options and futures - The only edge left in an AI world: your network Thanks a ton Matt Ober for coming on the pod! Highlights: (00:00) Intro (01:18) The WorldQuant thesis - more data, more money (02:00) Building the alt-data stack (03:00) Revere - the dataset only quants understood (04:50) A finance major among PhDs (09:40) Trading datasets like stocks (10:30) Why quants don't watch the market (12:30) WorldQuant Ventures is born (16:30) Factory vs. boardroom (18:30) Data's wild west at Third Point (23:15) Tracking private jets to front-run M&A (24:20) Igor vs. Dan & the power of network (32:10) The degenerate economy (36:25) Patience & outworking everyone (38:55) Alpha vs. beta, markets & careers (46:10) Somebody's gotta sell (51:20) Prediction markets, the new asset class (53:30) The DoorDash earnings call (56:35) Going mainstream (01:03:10) The single source of all edge

Ethan Kho

432,870 views • 1 month ago

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"85% accuracy on Wall Street will get you 100% fired." Brett Caughran (Brett Caughran) has managed analysts at Citadel, D.E. Shaw & tiger cub funds. His take on AI and the future of junior analysts: "There's almost no better time to be starting a career as a fundamental investor. These tools let junior investors get to the juicy part of the investment process more quickly." We cover: - Why the junior analyst role is transforming faster than any point in the last 20 years — and why the juniors who adapt will reach the real work of investing years sooner - The old grunt work that's already dead — and what's replacing it - Why billion-dollar funds won't cut analyst headcount, but the job description is changing dramatically - “Should I still learn Excel modeling?" — yes, because you can't debug what you don't understand - Why creativity & tenacity are becoming the new differentiators over raw quantitative skill - How multi-manager alpha factories scaled from $10B to $60B+ while sustaining double-digit returns — proof that more information hasn't compressed alpha - Why reading a 10-K with pen and paper still matters even when AI can summarize it in seconds - The most underrated skill in the best investors he's worked with: genuine curiosity Thanks so much to Brett (Brett Caughran) for coming on Odds on Open! Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:29 Frameworks for developing a differentiated variant perception 05:16 Financial drivers vs. narrative cycles: The Focus 5 framework 08:29 Analyzing the stock vs. business: Bayesian updating in public markets 12:52 AI as an intellectual power tool vs. consensus "alpha slop" 17:21 Accelerating the hunch-to-hypothesis pipeline with AI sniff tests 21:52 The evolution of junior analysts: From data entry to primary research 28:46 Why market microstructure and behavioral alpha prevent index efficiency 38:44 Training junior analysts: Earning the right to use power tools 48:28 LLMs as orchestration tools for human primary research 54:55 Teachable scientific process vs. revealed investment judgment 57:54 Common threads across Multi-Managers, Single Managers, and Tiger Cubs 59:49 Curiosity as a meta-skill and the art of system thinking

Ethan Kho

878,403 views • 2 months ago

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This guy beat the market for 17 straight years trading a sector many investors have written off post-2008 Derek Pilecki (Derek Pilecki) runs a financials-only fund. 21%+ annualized. His edge? A corner of the market many investors moved away from after the GFC. We cover: - Why he expanded from 25 → 40 positions and returns went UP - His counterintuitive rule: buy higher, not lower (positions get LESS risky as they rise) - The Robinhood call — bought late 2023, rode it to a multibagger - Why he's quietly watching FactSet, Morningstar & Verisk right now - His view on private credit risk (and why he disagrees with Jamie Dimon) - How he uses AI to analyze more stocks without losing his edge - Why markets chronically underreact to good news — and how to exploit it - The brutal career reality no one tells young PMs about Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:06 Derek's +21% annualized return track record 02:50 Fundamental business change vs market noise in Robinhood 05:25 Portfolio construction: Concentration limits and adding to winners 09:09 Sourcing alpha and identifying three-year doubles in financials 12:44 Developing edge through repetition and management team cycles 14:16 Why the post-GFC regime fundamentally changed bank underwriting 17:07 Assessing tail risk and leverage in the private credit market 21:23 AI-driven market dispersion and identifying moaty businesses 24:11 Why shareholder base turnover matters for timing broken charts 29:37 Integrating AI into fundamental research and SEC filing analysis 35:39 Risk management: Permanent capital loss vs mark-to-market volatility 37:12 Capacity constraints: Optimizing for returns over AUM scale 50:39 Career risk and the reality of active money management

Ethan Kho

798,903 views • 3 months ago

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A 4-Sharpe crypto fund. 27 of 28 months positive. Leigh Drogen (Leigh Drogen) is CIO of Starkiller Capital, a crypto quant fund running momentum and market-neutral crypto strategies. His edge is diligence — and a "never lose more than 1%" position rule. We cover: - Why block space is worthless — and the fiber-optics-in-1999 analogy that explains every L1 collapse since blobs launched on Ethereum - Starkiller's "never lose more than 1%" position sizing rule (how it compounds into 27 of 28 positive months) - The Ripple / RLUSD / USCC trade — borrowing at 2.5% against a 5-8% yielding tokenized basis fund, hidden in plain sight on Aave Horizon - How Starkiller dodged the Kelp DAO hack, lending USDC at 17-18% APR while the rest of DeFi was on fire - Why momentum is the only actual persistent alpha (it's the only persistent behavioral characteristic of humans) - "F*ckery risk" on the short book — why Drogen runs a more diversified short book than long book, even when his thesis screams short - Why "sales is way overcompensated" relative to the difficulty of the job — and what that means for ambitious young quants - The 2019 DM from a 21-year-old that became Drogen's biggest career miss — and how Polymarket's Shane Coplin (Shayne Coplan 🦅) actually solved the SEC problem ("USDC and VPNs") Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:09 Mechanics of a 4 Sharpe market neutral DeFi strategy 03:24 Quantifying protocol risk and code provenance 06:40 Case study: Exploiting incentivized spreads in carry trades 10:53 Three primary sources of alpha in liquid crypto markets 14:28 Capacity constraints and institutional yield compression 18:54 Position sizing via the 1% max loss rule 21:38 Pro-cyclical returns and the risk modulation framework 26:44 Compounding capital through trend following and cross-sectional momentum 33:35 Why momentum is the only persistent behavioral alpha 48:39 Extracting alpha from token unlock schedules and market structure 51:20 Lessons from building Estimize and the SEC/ForceRank fight 55:00 The Polymarket origin story: Arbitraging regulatory hurdles 01:01:45 Career risk premia and the value of "eating sh*t" 01:05:34 Table selection: Positioning your career on the right macro curve

Ethan Kho

259,839 views • 1 month ago