Odds on Open

Ethan Kho

Conversations with leading thinkers on trading and investing. Hosted by Ethan Kho. Produced by Patrick Kho.

  1. 3d ago

    Ex-Lehman Trader: AI Won't Give You Edge

    Checkout Flux 4.0 here: https://www.flux.live/flux4/index.html In this episode of Odds on Open, Alpaca Co-Founder and CEO Yoshi Yokokawa breaks down the changing microstructure of systematic trading, the democratization of quantitative R&D, and why AI agents alone will never grant you a defensible market edge. As LLMs compress strategy iteration and backtesting feedback loops, the traditional line between retail quants and institutional fund managers continues to blur. Yoshi shares high-signal data from Alpaca’s API platform—tracking a 4x explosion in active algorithmic developers—and explains why execution discipline, behavioral risk control, and operational frameworks remain the true drivers of alpha in liquid markets.The conversation dives deep into the structural economics of modern asset management, analyzing the recent surge of YC-backed AI hedge funds, the reality of competing against multi-manager scale, and why top-tier trading firms spend aggressively on compute. Drawing from his background as a former trader at Lehman Brothers and his journey building global brokerage infrastructure, Yoshi explores the rise of entity-based solopreneurs, tokenized equities, and MCP-ready financial services. Whether you are a portfolio manager, quant developer, or market allocator, this episode provides actionable frameworks for handling strategy recalibration through regime shifts and cultivating defensibility in an increasingly commoditized financial landscape.

  2. Sep 24

    Retail Trader vs. Hedge Fund Manager: Where Is the Real Alpha?

    Checkout Flux 4.0 here: https://www.flux.live/flux4/index.html Chris Camillo and Tom Costello go head-to-head on Odds on Open's first every debate episode. They answer a question every trader eventually confronts: who is actually better positioned to take risk — a concentrated retail investor with no LPs, mandates, or career risk, or an institutional hedge fund manager with a two-and-twenty product to protect? Chris, who compounded $20K into roughly $80 million over 18 years using his "social arb" strategy, argues that a 50–70% drawdown is rational inside a properly bucketed, levered, long-horizon risk account. Tom, a former Tudor, Moore, and Caxton PM who now runs a market-neutral fund targeting ~20% annual returns with a 1.4% peak drawdown, counters with the Pareto distribution of hedge fund and day-trader returns, the beta-versus-alpha logic behind institutional portfolio construction, and why allocators refuse to pay for beta they can get on margin themselves. Along the way they debate 3x leveraged S&P ETFs and the hidden roll and theta costs inside them, "too big to fail" AI concentration, the Situational Awareness blowup, crypto's 98% correlation trap, and why overfit backtests stopped landing in Tom's inbox.The second half is a live stress test of social arb as an edge: Chris walks through the Beacon Roofing hailstorm trade built on Google Trends, the Hunger Games and Stranger Things trades built on conversational data, and the e.l.f. Cosmetics trade triggered by a single Jeffree Star video that no sell-side cosmetics analyst had seen. Tom critiques it as an institutional money manager — alpha decay, crowding, discretionary-desk constraints, and whether Citadel plus LLMs will systematize TikTok sentiment before retail's information asymmetry is arbitraged away. If you care about risk management, leverage, position sizing, uncorrelated returns, alternative data, market microstructure, and where retail traders still hold a structural advantage over multi-manager pod shops, this episode is for you.

  3. Sep 17

    Ex-IMC Semiconductors Quant: AI Is Good Enough to Beat the S&P 500

    Lihong Wang spent his career as a discretionary options trader at IMC, one of the world's largest market makers, trading semiconductor volatility on names like Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom. In this episode, he breaks down how a prop trading desk actually makes money: reading order flow to identify counterparties, trading against structured product hedging flows from Asian banks, warehousing benign risk instead of externalizing it, and why correlation blowups — like the DeepSeek selloff and July's deleveraging cascade — are how options market makers get hurt. He explains why the seat at a top trading firm is one of the most leveraged information positions in markets, how firms like IMC, Jane Street, SIG, and HRT train and allocate quant trader talent, and what separates market making from prediction.Now the founder of Freeport, a YC-backed perpetual futures exchange, Lihong shares his AI investing thesis: why he holds a 2x levered portfolio of 50 stocks across the entire AI and semiconductor supply chain — from TSMC and ASML to optics, connectivity, and memory names like SK Hynix — and why nearly every quant trader he knows is doing the same. We cover how narratives move from private conversations to Twitter to Bloomberg (and where the edge dies), Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund, whether AI is a dot-com-style bubble, Kelly criterion leverage sizing, the future of perp DEXs like Hyperliquid, and how young people should think about risk, career moats, and personal brand in the age of AI. Essential listening for hedge fund analysts, quants, options traders, and anyone trading the AI supply chain.

  4. Sep 11

    Hedge Fund Manager Alix Pasquet: How Small Funds Can Outsmart Multi-Managers

    Checkout Flux 4.0 here: https://www.flux.live/flux4/index.html Alix Pasquet, hedge fund manager and Managing Partner at Prime Macaya Capital, breaks down how fundamental investors build durable edge in modern markets. In this episode, Alix explains the three sources of competitive advantage in the investment business — analytical, informational, and behavioral — and why exploiting group behavior beats behavioral finance checklists. He covers what he learned inside a top quant fund (data scrubbing, transaction costs, temporal stops), how smaller hedge funds compete against multi-manager pods like Citadel and Millennium, and his full idea generation process: investor networks, 13F tracking, thematic collisions, and the customer-investor mismatch. He also makes the contrarian case for technical analysis as a behavioral tool, explains why moats and chart strength are connected, and shares why buying stocks at new highs beats bottom-fishing in a post-2022 market.Later in the conversation, Alix delivers a warning on AI in investing: why over-reliance on AI tools will produce the worst portfolio managers of the next decade, the five core analytical skills every analyst must protect (pattern recall, visualization, reading between the lines, leap of judgment, synthesis), and how to become a "bionic" investor who combines analog training with digital tools. He closes with career advice for young analysts and aspiring PMs — building a personal moat, the power pair concept, network as competitive advantage, and applying margin of safety to your personal life. Essential listening for hedge fund analysts, portfolio managers, long-short equity investors, and anyone pursuing a career in active management, stock picking, or the hedge fund industry.

  5. Aug 27

    22-Year-Old Hedge Fund Manager: “Hedge funds are the least sexy business in the world”

    Checkout Flux 4.0 here: https://www.flux.live/flux4/index.html Noah Kann is 22, running his third firm, and managing capital raised from some of the wealthiest families in America. On this episode of Odds on Open, Ethan Kho sits down with the co-CEO of Venari Asset Management to unpack what a 22-year-old hedge fund manager knows that 20-year Wall Street veterans miss: why running a hedge fund is the least sexy business in finance, why compliance and a well-written PPM are an emerging manager's competitive advantage, and why complacency, not inexperience, is the real driver of alpha decay. Noah walks through his path from buying HCA at $15 during the COVID drawdown at 16, to a leveraged crypto trading firm at 17, to launching SageTech Capital at 19, and explains how behavioral finance and studying past cycles like the Great Depression substitute for market reps he hasn't lived through.The conversation then moves into Venari's macro discretionary playbook: trading government intervention and defense spending, a top-down process that turns a geopolitical thesis into a position, non-consensus indicators like data-center HVAC suppliers, and how the firm handles crowded trades and momentum with hard stops, max drawdown limits, and disciplined profit-taking. Noah breaks down the multi-strategy structure across long/short equity, LEAPS options, and ETF baskets, explains why mindfulness is the single most important risk control for a discretionary macro fund, and shares what family offices actually diligence when an emerging manager raises capital — stewardship, lockups, and the next generation. The episode closes on what people miss about Jane Street, SIG, and WorldQuant, hiring for rate of improvement over credentials, pod-shop culture, and why differentiated inputs produce differentiated returns. Essential listening for hedge fund analysts, PMs, quants, allocators, emerging managers, and MFE and MBA students building an edge in liquid markets.

  6. Aug 21

    He Started a Quant Fund in His Dorm. Now He's Building the Brokerage for Everything.

    Checkout Flux 4.0 here: https://www.flux.live/flux4/index.html Lucas Schuermann started a market-neutral quant fund in his Columbia dorm room, trading stat arb across FX and early crypto markets, before dropping out to scale it into Q Capital. In this episode of Odds on Open, he breaks down how he electronified Genesis Trading's OTC desk as VP of Engineering — taking a phone-and-Telegram trading operation to a fully electronic market-making system with HFT execution — and why flow, capital, and trust are the real moats in market making, not speed. He explains the biggest misconception about HFT firms and market makers like Jane Street, Jump, and Citadel Securities, and why having flow and economies of scale matters more than latency.Lucas then dives into building Variational, first as a crypto prop shop trading DeFi and OTC derivatives, and now as one of the largest on-chain perps trading platforms — a broker-like model with zero-fee trading, aggregated liquidity, and a new swaps instrument that fixes the funding rate problem with perpetual futures. We cover perps vs swaps vs spot mechanics, total return swaps, internal vs external market makers, RWA perps, and why he believes the cypherpunks already won. Plus: how to identify trends worth riding using growth-curve data, why asset prices are uncorrelated with industry durability, how to build expertise in a technical domain fast, and the role of hubris in career differentiation for young quants, traders, and founders.

  7. Aug 13

    Inside the Billionaire-Backed Prediction Markets Hedge Fund

    Checkout Flux 4.0 here: https://www.flux.live/flux4/index.htmlCamilo Saravia is the founder of BlueWalker Capital, a systematic hedge fund trading prediction markets — and possibly the only fund dedicated exclusively to the asset class. Backed by Daniel Howard, son of Brevan Howard co-founder Alan Howard, Camilo breaks down how the fund prints alpha across taker and maker strategies, reflexive vs. proactive pricing, and why event contracts carry different adverse selection and binary risk than equities. He makes the contrarian case that insider flow is a feature, not a bug — the mechanism that makes prediction markets a money-backed source of truth — and maps where systematic edge actually comes from: proprietary order book and on-chain fill data, vertical integration, execution speed, and a team hungry enough to make unit economics work in a market Citadel and Jane Street won't touch.The back half is a blueprint for launching an emerging fund from scratch: underwriting talent, hiring quants who turn down Citadel and Wintermute offers, missionaries vs. mercenaries, and why speed is a startup fund's structural edge. Camilo details his research philosophy — collapsing internet entropy into tradable signal, mining exotic alternative data from TikTok virality to Spotify streams, and applying a venture-style lens to price what markets can't: unstructured data, operational KPIs, and execution quality. The episode closes with prediction markets 101 — order books, market microstructure, narrative risk, and why the best trades exit at 50 rather than waiting for resolution on Polymarket — plus how to build durable personal edge as AI commoditizes technical skills. Essential listening for quants, PMs, traders, allocators, and anyone tracking prediction markets as the next institutional asset class.

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
9 Ratings

About

Conversations with leading thinkers on trading and investing. Hosted by Ethan Kho. Produced by Patrick Kho.

You Might Also Like