Every day, Jason Calacanis and Molly Wood cover startups, technology, markets, media, crypto, and the all the hottest topics in business and tech. They also interview the world’s greatest founders, operators, investors and innovators.
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E729: Founder Richard Craib shares his A.I. hedge fund Numerai, built with an anonymous network of 15,000 (& counting) data scientists, encryption, the blockchain, his own currency to reward collaboration, and a mission to manage the world’s money
There’s a new way to make stock market predictions. Numerai, a hedge fund based in San Francisco, has gained a following as the first hedge fund that gives stock market data to machine learning data scientists using structure-preserving encryption to prevent them from mimicking the fund’s trades themselves. Several thousand anonymous data scientists compete to create the best trading algorithms—and win bitcoin for their efforts. At the same time, the company carefully organizes this encrypted data in a way that allows the data scientists to build models that are potentially able to make better trades. Founder Richard Craib believes that Numerai can become even more successful if it can align the incentives of everyone involved. His hope is that his new kind of currency, Numeraire, will turn online competition into a collaboration—and turn Wall Street on its head in the process.