Today’s Sponsored Insight is from Richard Craib, the Founder and CEO of Numerai, a machine learning-based hedge fund launched in 2015 that crowdsources models from data scientists around the world to predict stock returns, incentivizes participation through cryptocurrency, and centralizes portfolio construction and risk management. Our conversation covers Richard’s background, some basics of data science, and the Numerai thesis. We discuss the firm’s idea generation, incentive system, quantitative modeling, portfolio construction, and team. We close with investors’ reaction to the product and research and development on the horizon.

Show Notes
1:43 Richard’s background
6:01 Building a machine learning model
8:17 Forming and testing a hypothesis
9:27 Founding Numerai
12:53 Crowd-sourced inputs for models
17:09 Compensation for participants
24:04 Features in models
26:13 Portfolio construction
32:21 Numerai’s team
34:43 Numerai’s competitive advantage
42:18 R&D
44:03 Closing questions