The Sophron Network

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Direct insights from experts in the trading, quant, and finance industry.

  1. vor 4 Tagen

    Henry Atkins – Building A Quant Desk From Scratch

    Henry Atkins joins The Sophron® Network to discuss what it actually takes to build a quantitative trading desk from nothing. A group of university students wrote trading code between lectures and ran it from the library. What began as a $25,000 seed allocation has grown into a firm managing over $50 million in assets. Three or four years later the firm was FCA regulated and allocating for institutions in the UK and the US. Henry founded and led its quant desk, and this conversation is about how that is really done: designing the business before the strategy, raising against a track record that barely exists, and the research process that has to sit underneath any of it. Henry Atkins is Head of Quant Trading at Deeter Analytics, a quantitative trading firm founded in 2025. He previously spent close to four years at MCD Capital, a London based systematic firm trading listed options and futures across CME, Cboe and the New York Stock Exchange, where he founded and led the quant trading desk and ran its intraday book in futures and equities. Before finance he spent three years at Expedia Group as a machine learning scientist, working on learn to rank problems across millions of customer interactions. He read physics as an undergraduate and holds a master's in quantum computing. We examine what a proprietary investor actually evaluates in a pitch, which has far less to do with performance statistics than most students expect, and what regulation is worth when the constraint is not the quality of your numbers but the quantity of evidence. The conversation then turns to research process: building a platform against synthetic data with known faults injected, establishing bounds by training with look ahead bias, rolling walk forward models to generate a family of curves, and a bar data workaround for bracketing volume and slippage without tick data. We close on technology. Where AI compresses the work and where accumulated tech debt stops it, why the infrastructure edge of the large multi manager platforms is falling in cost, how prediction markets may push the quant role from asset class specialty towards method specialty, and what separates a world model from a large language model when the environment gives continuous feedback. Follow Henry Atkins LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-atkins/ Blogs Henry Recommends Stefan Schlamp, for interesting nuggets of financial data science and great storytelling: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanschlampAleksa Gordić, for big machine learning work: https://www.aleksagordic.com/blog Main Topics Covered Designing a systematic trading business before choosing a strategyWhat proprietary investors evaluate when there is no track recordRegulation as a way to buy trust over a short trading historyThe three buckets of running a fund, and why trading is the hardestWhy the infrastructure edge of large multi manager platforms is falling in costWhere AI helps a quant team and where tech debt breaks itStress testing a research pipeline with synthetic data and injected signalBracketing volume and slippage when you only have bar dataAsset class specialty versus method specialty as prediction markets widenWorld models, feedback driven learning, and what that could mean for marketsConnect With Us Instagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvestLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-clubX: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

  2. 1. Sept.

    Merlijne Keuss – Global Payments Are Broken

    Merlijne Keuss joins The Sophron® Network for a practitioner-level hour on what it actually takes to get a real business settling on a regulated stablecoin. Her first job in any client conversation is not selling. It is working out whether a compliant euro or dollar token improves anything at all, and a fair amount of the time the honest answer is that it does not. Merlijne Keuss is a Business Development Manager at Quantoz, the Utrecht-based fintech and Dutch electronic money institution behind EURQ and USDQ, the MiCAR-compliant stablecoins supervised by De Nederlandsche Bank. She develops use cases, finds strategic partners, represents the firm at industry events, and works with clients from payment companies to real-world businesses worldwide. Before Quantoz she spent three years in business development at AssetCare, in the New Funds team specialising in fund setup and fund services. She holds a Master in Financial Econometrics and a Bachelor in Econometrics from the University of Amsterdam. We start with what developing a use case really means: mapping how a client moves money today, and what they are genuinely paying in FX margins, settlement fees and monthly charges that nobody has fully added up. The worked example is the live TerraPay flow from Europe to Ethiopia, where EURQ provides the regulated euro settlement leg over Xahau, Cooperative Bank of Oromia pays out in local currency, expensive pre-funded positions disappear, and every existing licence and compliance framework stays exactly where it was. From there we test the pitch. Cost is almost never what makes a business switch; settlement speed, counterparty risk and increasingly yield are. Regulation rarely wins a deal on its own, and MiCAR is a set of commercial constraints before it is an edge, which is why what you are really selling is trust. Roughly 99% of circulating stablecoin supply is dollar denominated, and inside SEPA a euro stablecoin has no problem to solve. We also discuss agentic and programmable payments, whether the chain matters to the businesses using it, treasury interoperability, accounting treatment as cash, and where adoption breaks open first: containers held in port until money lands, end of day settlement in oil and energy trading, and small remittances where 12 euro of SWIFT fees on a 20 euro payment simply does not work. Follow Merlijne KeussLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merlijne-keuss-998a0a1ba/ Quantoz: https://www.quantoz.com Main Topics CoveredWhat developing a stablecoin use case involves, week to weekThe TerraPay remittance flow, Europe to Ethiopia, settled on XahauSettlement speed, counterparty risk and yield as the real switching driversOn-chain alternatives to money market funds, without DeFi riskDollar dominance in stablecoin supply, and what shifts itMiCAR as a commercial constraint, and selling trust rather than complianceTreasury interoperability and stablecoins accounted for as cashConnect With UsInstagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvest LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-club X: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

  3. 25. Aug.

    Martijn Bron – Inside The Wild West Of Cocoa Trading

    Martijn Bron joins The Sophron® Network to describe what physical commodity trading actually consists of, and how little of it resembles the version visible from outside. We start with a cocoa futures market that ran for years with no position limits and no delivery limits, where squeezes and corners were part of the furniture, and work through what it takes to hedge a global processing business inside a market like that. Martijn Bron is a commodity trading, risk and recruitment specialist, independent since 2023. He works as a headhunter in the commodity industry through his own practice, Maverack Talent Experts, consults for clients including Keystone, co-hosts the Strong Source commodity podcast with Vesper founder Alexander Sterk, and writes Vesper's bi-weekly cocoa market reports. Before going independent he spent 26 years at Cargill, seven of them as Global Head of Trading for Cargill Cocoa & Chocolate, a business of roughly 3,500 people. He joined in Amsterdam in 1997, traded European grains and oilseeds in Geneva, moved to cocoa in 2006, and spent around ten years on the exchange body governing the cocoa contract under LIFFE and later ICE. We examine merchandising, the part of the business almost never described properly: trading around an asset, where the decision is whether to run a factory, slow it down, or buy someone else's production. We look at why the price on the screen is a given and the job is the analysis before it, and why the purpose of price in commodities is to prevent a structural deficit or surplus. The conversation then turns to origin, following the crop from a farm in rural West Africa to the port and every way it can go wrong on the road, and to his argument that climate change is being used as a scapegoat for years of absent replanting and mismanaged tree stock. We close on the market as it stands now, and his advice to anyone speculating: think about what is your edge, not a hedge. Follow Martijn BronLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martijn-bron-77a4224/ Read The Full Write-Uphttps://www.amsterdaminvestmentclub.com/publications?id=ApWWx49UOD1QQ1hmFnWm&collection=The%20Sophron%20Network Core Timestamps00:00 - Welcome and introductions04:13 - Which commodity you start with, and why it does not matter09:34 - Cocoa as the Wild West: squeezes, corners, no position limits10:31 - Ten years on the exchange advisory body20:47 - Merchandising: trading around a factory23:51 - Where the money sits: basis, supply and demand, deep analysis28:40 - Why what gets called trading online is not trading30:07 - Confirmation bias mistaken for conviction40:26 - Cargill, Citadel, Optiver: three different business models45:56 - Turning an earnings call straight into a supply and demand balance49:24 - Why cocoa went up four times before the shelf price moved52:31 - Climate change as a scapegoat1:02:26 - El Niño, and a market moving six percent a day1:08:24 - Edge, not hedge Main Topics CoveredPhysical commodity trading and merchandising around assetsHedging, basis, correlation and the Texas hedgeExchange governance, squeezes and position limitsOrigin risk in Ghana and Ivory CoastAI applied to fundamental researchThe cocoa rally, the demand shock and the shelf price lagConnect With UsInstagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvestLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-clubX: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

  4. 20. Aug.

    Cboe – What Most People Misunderstand About Options

    Raj Shah joins The Sophron® Network to correct the way most people frame options: not as levered stock trades, but as risk transfer contracts. Cboe created the listed options market in 1973. Raj is a Senior Instructor in its education division, The Options Institute. We use his correction as the way into how an options trade physically moves through the market, what the data actually says about 0DTE, and where options innovation goes next. Raj Shah is a Senior Strategy Associate and Senior Instructor with The Options Institute at Cboe Global Markets, the exchange group's educational arm. His work centres on breaking the mechanics of derivatives down to their component parts for investors, and he also oversees the team's education expansion into Europe. He has traded options personally for around eight years. We start with the mission of the Options Institute, which Raj frames as increasing investor IQ across asset classes, and his insistence that accessible means clear and structured rather than easy. From there: the three main reasons anyone uses options, a worked covered call showing what risk transfer actually is, and his argument that business schools open with pricing formulas when the real world risk lives in market structure, clearing and margin. The middle of the episode is a full walk through of an SPX trade, from the buy button to settlement. We then turn to 0DTE, where Raj explains that it is not a new instrument at all, and gives the numbers behind its growth from Cboe's Derivatives Market Intelligence research. We close on product governance at Cboe, what digital asset markets could take from fifty years of listed derivatives, and why prices are outputs of the market rather than the reason markets exist. Follow Raj ShahLinkedIn Core Timestamps00:00 - Welcome and introductions03:33 - The mission of the Options Institute06:38 - The three reasons people use options07:14 - The biggest misconception about options07:57 - Risk transfer explained with a covered call11:57 - What business schools get wrong16:19 - Building blocks: definitions first, then the math19:18 - What happens after you hit buy on an SPX option25:05 - The central limit order book, and mark to market27:47 - What 0DTE options actually are29:43 - From roughly 20% to roughly 60% of total SPX volume31:32 - Why anyone trades an option that expires today35:17 - Gamma, and why 0DTE moves the way it does37:20 - Who is actually trading 0DTE40:58 - What comes after 0DTE46:46 - When Cboe decides not to launch a product50:17 - What digital asset markets could take from TradFi55:07 - Prices are outputs, not the reason markets exist From CboeThe Options Institute Learning Portal Cboe Derivatives Market Intelligence Connect With UsInstagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvestLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-clubX: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

  5. 18. Aug.

    Imran Lakha – 25 Years Of Options Trading In One Hour

    Imran Lakha joins The Sophron® Network to discuss what it takes to run an index options book at institutional size, and what changed when he left the bank to trade his own. We go through the 2008 volatility regime from the seat, why skew rather than gamma was the trade that made the money, and the risk that quietly kills short skew desks when the market stops behaving. We then move to the market he trades today: 0DTE dominance, dealer gamma, dispersion at single digit correlation, and how he decides when a volatility spike is worth fading. Imran Lakha is the founder of Options Insight, the London based options education and market research business he started in 2018, where he teaches traders and asset managers to express market views and manage risk through options, and where he trades a US options book of his own. Before founding it he spent seven months as a portfolio manager at BlueCrest Capital Management. He joined Citi in 2013, trading European index options and going on to head the desk before leaving in 2017. Earlier, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, he traded the European index flow options book and took it over in 2009. He began his career in 2001 at Credit Suisse First Boston, taking over the FTSE vanilla flow book and trading global relative value, variance swaps and dispersion. We cover the flow book that could not be hedged in its own market, the two ways to be bearish in 2008, and why several desk heads were annihilated when skew switched from sticky delta to sticky strike. Imran sets out the mistakes he sees most in retail option books, the three structural changes he has watched since the early 2000s, and his three VIX regimes with the one week rule that follows from them. Follow Imran LakhaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imran-lakha-465b4558/Website: https://options-insight.com Read The Full Write-Uphttps://www.amsterdaminvestmentclub.com/publications?id=XDjh1yTU1keJpD4eQ6Lb&collection=The%20Sophron%20Network Core Timestamps00:00 - Welcome and introduction04:20 - The 2008 book: hedging FTSE size with Eurostoxx05:18 - Why skew, not gamma, made the money06:45 - A million a day of theta, or a neutral book11:03 - Sticky delta, sticky strike, and how short skew blows up16:54 - 0DTE, dealer gamma, and reading the gamma wall22:33 - Pay caps, and being told to stop making money30:13 - The mistakes retail option traders repeat38:19 - Retail, 0DTE and dispersion: three structural changes41:41 - The three VIX regimes and the one week rule47:28 - The mining basket hedged with free FTSE puts51:24 - Options Insight and the free masterclass Main Topics CoveredRunning an index flow options book at sizeSkew as a position you can hold, gamma as one you cannotSticky delta versus sticky strike, and short skew blow ups0DTE, dealer gamma maps and the gamma wallDispersion and the collapse in index correlationThe three VIX regimes and volatility clusteringBank floor versus hedge fund seatCommon mistakes in retail option booksConnect With UsInstagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvestLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-clubX: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

  6. 13. Aug.

    Guilherme Bernabe – Your Firm Can Go Bankrupt If You Forget About This

    Guilherme Bernabe joins The Sophron® Network to discuss why hedging is bought as insurance rather than traded as a position, and what happens to the companies that get that distinction wrong. We cover how you protect a margin in an economy where the currency moved from 2.4 to almost 6 against the dollar in a decade, the instruments that get used when a CFO has a real invoice to pay, and why the firms that go under are usually the ones that skipped the hedge or tried to profit from it. Guilherme Bernabe is a corporate and institutional finance advisor at XP Inc, one of the largest brokerages in Brazil, working through Center Investimentos. He advises CFOs, treasurers and institutional clients on foreign exchange, commodity and interest rate exposure, across the steel industry, schools, hospitals, real estate and family holdings. He began in 2021 at Youprime Investimentos, an XP affiliated office, building a private client book from zero to roughly 30 million Brazilian reais. He trained as a mechanical engineer: at KUHN Group he developed diesel engine systems for agricultural machinery, and at Electrolux he was a senior cost out engineer owning an EBIT improvement programme end to end. He is completing an executive Master in International Finance at the University of Amsterdam. The conversation covers the path out of engineering, why a client book gets built on referrals rather than cold calls, and how he explains risk to clients who accept it in principle and reject it the moment a portfolio drops ten percent. He walks through a steel importer whose profit would have disappeared on a three day move in the real, and a one million euro machine invoice from Italy that had to be paid regardless of the currency. We also discuss why the non deliverable forward covers ninety nine percent of his Forex hedging, when a farmer is right to pay an option premium or build a collar, why he hedges the commodity before the currency, what the Americanas fraud changed about his due diligence, and why Wirecard should have taught Europe the same lesson. Follow Guilherme BernabeLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guilhermebernabe Core Timestamps00:00 - Welcome and introductions00:56 - From mechanical engineer to the financial market03:40 - Building a client book from zero to 30 million reais05:32 - Why referrals beat cold calls when the product is trust08:19 - How to explain risk to a client who says he accepts it10:34 - Cost out engineering and the CFO conversation17:33 - Hedging as a trade versus hedging as insurance19:50 - A steel importer and a three day move in the real22:13 - The million euro machine from Italy25:32 - Why firms in Brazil go bankrupt27:18 - Stacking commodity, currency and interest rate risk30:59 - Funded NDFs and short term liquidity36:26 - Options, collars, and why farmers pay the premium39:39 - The Selic, the leverage party, and private credit42:25 - Americanas, the fraud that changed his due diligence48:25 - Wirecard, governance, and not trusting a name52:36 - The açaí franchise that COVID closed Connect With UsInstagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvestLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-clubX: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

  7. 11. Aug.

    Euan Sinclair – The Man Who Wrote The Book On Volatility Trading

    Euan Sinclair joins The Sophron® Network to discuss where the edge in options trading has actually gone after thirty years. He explains why the mathematics he learned during a physics PhD mostly did not transfer, why a GARCH model that printed money in 1998 is priced in today, and why the edge now lies in finding situations rather than in building a better pricing model. Euan Sinclair is Portfolio Manager and Senior Financial Engineer at Hull Tactical Asset Allocation in Chicago, responsible for the research and implementation of the firm's volatility strategies. He has traded options professionally since 1995. Before Hull he traded a long and short equity volatility book at Bluefin Europe and Bluefin Trading, and was a partner at the volatility fund Talton Capital Management. He is the author of three books published by Wiley: Volatility Trading, Option Trading, and Positional Option Trading. He has sat on the editorial board of the Journal of Investment Strategies since 2012, and holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Bristol, where he studied quantum chaos. We cover the philosophy Blair Hull carried from counting cards at blackjack into the option pits, why no single indicator survives transaction costs, and why the firm's advantage lies in combining fifty small signals rather than discovering new ones. Euan draws a distinction between having a model and having a situation, illustrated by the difference between a blackjack card counter and a player who has found one sloppy dealer. We also discuss hedging at implied against realized volatility, the Kelly criterion as an organizing principle rather than a formula, the variance premium as a consequence of risk aversion, what separates a genuine bubble from an expensive stock, and the two things he teaches practitioners first: that theta is not an edge, and that hedging is not a way of making money. Follow Euan SinclairLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/euan-sinclairHull Tactical Asset Allocation: https://www.hulltactical.comHull Tactical blog: https://www.hulltactical.com/blog/ Core Timestamps00:00 - Welcome and introductions01:43 - From a physics PhD to the option pits04:42 - Blair Hull, blackjack, and find an edge, bet the edge, stay in the game07:18 - Which parts of the physics mathematics transferred09:51 - What the junior quants can do that he cannot15:07 - Why the edge moved from pricing models to risk premia18:41 - Market timing, fifty small signals, and a 2% alpha22:51 - Why the data layer is the foundation of the house24:45 - Hedging at implied versus realized volatility28:59 - Two ways to find an edge: a model or a situation34:54 - The switching option, and finding the easy game37:53 - Kelly as an organizing principle rather than a formula42:59 - The variance premium and what a real bubble looks like51:36 - Theta is not an edge58:03 - Crypto as TradFi twenty years earlier1:01:41 - Where to follow Hull Tactical Main Topics CoveredThe variance premium as a consequence of risk aversionModel based edge versus situation based edgeBet sizing, fractional Kelly, and parameter misestimationHedging at implied against realized volatilityWhy theta is not an edge and hedging is not a profit centreWhy there are no new ideas in trading, only new places to apply themConnect With UsInstagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvestLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-clubX: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

  8. 4. Aug.

    Plettenberg Capital – How To Build An AI-Native Quant Fund

    Alexander Levin and Daniel van Flymen join The Sophron® Network to explain how they built Plettenberg Capital, an AI-native quantitative fund in New York run like a software company. Roughly 500 live algorithms, and no language model anywhere near the market. We take the fund apart layer by layer: the mental model they started from, the data layer everything rests on, the single engine that does both research and live execution, and the precise place where AI is allowed to sit. Alexander Levin is Founder and Chief Investment Officer for public markets at Plettenberg Capital. He previously co-founded the AI startup Beautiful Technologies, held P&L ownership across core cloud networking at Amazon Web Services, and helped launch Cisco's $400 million Digital Alpha fund, after starting in mergers and acquisitions at Houlihan Lokey. Daniel van Flymen is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, and the engineer behind the research engine, cloud infrastructure and AI tooling. He has spent two decades as a technical co-founder and engineering leader in New York, including CTO roles at Spice and Foodwit and engineering leadership at Candid and BlinkRx. Levin argues that most people analyse the market zoomed all the way in, and that the useful move is the opposite: treat it as one lake of capital moving between sectors, where almost everything reduces to momentum or mean reversion. Van Flymen then takes the system apart: the data layer, where a missed corporate action invalidates every backtest above it; the simulation engine, which is the same engine that runs in production; and the execution stack, all built in house. We also discuss deliberately brittle code, two minute deploys, the Swiss cheese model of aviation safety applied to a trading system, why they use no volume or fundamentals or alternative data, whether sentiment is already in the price, and what happens to research teams once the tooling that compresses weeks of work into seconds is available to everyone. Follow Alexander Levin and Daniel van FlymenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/levinalexander/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielvanflymen/ Plettenberg Capital: https://plettenbergcapital.com Enquiries, as given on the episode: ir@plettenbergcapital.com Core Timestamps00:00 - Welcome and introductions 02:58 - Two seats: the investment side and the engineering side 11:36 - The lake: liquidity, sectors and how hot money moves 18:43 - Regimes, and why an eight month downtrend is not a random walk 24:17 - A flock of birds: why they run around 500 algorithms 27:42 - The data layer, and why getting it wrong invalidates everything 32:49 - Pragmatism, brittle code and a two minute deploy 36:16 - What they deliberately do not use 43:08 - Where the AI actually sits: compression, not prediction 48:54 - The Swiss cheese model, applied to a trading system 50:41 - Is everything already in the price? 55:40 - Twenty strategies you understand, or 500 you do not 59:31 - The five year view: leaner teams, more autonomous systems Main Topics CoveredMarkets as a lake of liquidity moving between sectorsMomentum and mean reversion as the two underlying behavioursRegime identification across 500 decision treesPoint in time data, corporate actions and backtest integrityOne engine for research, validation and live executionWhere AI belongs in a quant fund, and where it does notPrice only research, and sector exposure through ETFsConnect With UsInstagram: https://instagram.com/amsterdaminvest LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/amsterdam-investment-club X: https://x.com/amsterdaminvest Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of markets, research, and technology.

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