Good morning - its your Monday quant-related newsletter.

Some thoughts I have been carrying around this week, from the seat between allocators and trading teams, learning something new most days and passing it straight to you. With no bs.

First, housekeeping session, and it is a good one.

We are hosting an event at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. 7 & 8 October at Marina Bay Sands. If you are an allocator or a quant trading team reading this, we would like to send you an invite. Registration link here.

And a little teaser.

The context matters for this time. Big time btw.

TOKEN2049 is expecting 25,000 people from 7,000 companies and over a thousand side events across five floors. It is genuinely the largest gathering in this industry, and this year the institutional programming is heavier than ever -BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq, NYSE, CME, Franklin Templeton all sending senior people.

Which is exactly why a room of a hundred right people beats a hall of 25,000.

That is what we are focusing on. There is no need to waste hellova lot time to catch one relevant person.

Allocators and quant teams, in one place, with nobody selling you anything from a stage.

That event announcement leads straight into the first thought, actually.

I speak to people all day. But the best ideas, the best introductions, and by a distance the most useful things I learn do not arrive over messages. They arrive when I get on a call with a manager or an allocator with no agenda, no ask, nothing I am trying to close - just to catch up and bounce ideas around.

It is expensive. Thirty minutes is thirty minutes and I do not get it back. Neither does the other side.

It is also, measured honestly over years, the highest and most consistent ROI activity I have.

The most reliable return in this business comes from the calls where you were not trying to get anything. Only to give. Without exepcting anything in return.

No miracles happen on their own - an idea only counts if you act on it afterwards. But almost every meaningful thing that has happened for us started as a loose thought in a conversation nobody had an outcome attached to.

So the advice is boring and I will give it anyway: even with people you already know well, especially with people you already know well, book the thirty minutes every now and then. Synchronise on what is actually mattering right now, and ask where you can be useful. The relationship you keep warm in a quiet quarter is the one that produces something in a loud one.

Now, let me say something uncomfortable about the industry we operate in.

It is aggressively greedy. I understand why. There is real money on the line, the stakes are high, the competition is brutal. But the consequence is that relationships here get priced on performance and almost nothing else. The moment you stop performing, stop communicating, stop explaining your ups and downs… the relationship degrades. Quickly. Even more so - it stops. All of a sudden. Without much of a warning. Nobody cares.

And in that environment, almost nobody says thank you. Not the polite sign-off version. The real one, from someone who understands that a person went out of their way for them and did not have to.

Here is why this is not a soft point. Everyone in this market is trying to build durable relationships on top of the one variable nobody controls - returns.
That is a terrible foundation btw… and you already know it.

What you can control is being the person who gave something without an invoice attached. An introduction with no fee. A warning about a counterparty. A read on a strategy that saved someone three months. There is so much risk to oversee in this business that it becomes very easy to forget there are people quietly working to make you succeed.

Sometimes a genuine thank you is the entire thing that was needed. Say it more often. It costs nothing and it is one of the very few relationship assets in this market you can actually manufacture on demand.

Now the operational one, and this is non-negotiable in this market if you do not want to end up in the graveyard section of the industry.

Update your returns. Write a monthly performance report. Do it monthly.

Ive mentioned it here many times, but I have to do it again and again, as noone listens, yet suffers from the consequence of not doing so.

Write. What you did. Where it worked. What did not work and why. Where you see the strategy going. What you are implementing to stay ahead. Every month, without exception.

My estimate, from where I sit: roughly 5% of teams actually do this. Stupidity.

It is easy when you are printing. Suddenly everybody wakes up and wants to be heard. But I have written this more times than I can count and I will keep writing it - it is not about the good months. It is about the consistency.

The single thing every team in the graveyard has in common is that at some point they stopped writing the update.

Not blow-ups. Not fraud. They just went quiet and never came back into anyone's field of view.

And understand what you are competing on. You are one of hundreds. Performance is the one category you share with every other team on that allocator's list - it is the entry ticket, not the differentiator. There is no single criterion that wins you the mandate. It is the combination, and the monthly report is the cheapest item on the whole list. It is also the only asset in your business that appreciates during a drawdown.

Reporting is a cost with no immediate payoff, which is precisely why humans systematically underinvest in it. That is the entire explanation for the 5%.

Because here is the trend I am watching form right now, and it cuts directly against the transparency argument I have been making for two years.

Managers are starting to move to managed sub-accounts aka MSAs - where the allocator sees the P&L but does not see the trades.

It happens out of self-preservation.

When you hand over a read-only key, or run a $100K account for a prolonged period, you are exposing your fills, your timing, your venue selection, your sizing logic - your entire operating intelligence - to anyone holding that access. Alpha leakage and copy trading behind your back are not hypothetical concerns in this industry. There have been scandals. People remember them. Yet they want to forget fast, as it is not working in their favor.

And look at the asymmetry. For the team, trade-level transparency carries no upside and unlimited downside. It does not improve the returns. It only creates the possibility that the thing putting bread on the table gets replicated by someone.

One structural point I do not think gets said clearly enough:

Trade-level transparency is a control imported from a market where it was nearly free, into a market where it is genuinely expensive.

In equities, showing your positions to a fund administrator costs you essentially nothing - the edge usually lives in research, capacity, or relationships, none of which are visible in a trade file. In crypto, a meaningful share of edge lives in exactly what a trade file shows: replicable, capacity-constrained execution patterns. Same control, radically different price. Most allocators have never priced that difference because in their previous career they never had to.

So this is a real divergence, and neither side gets it for free.

For the team: going MSA means accepting a smaller addressable market, possibly permanently. A large number of allocators run inside fund structures with obligations to report at the fund admin level. They physically cannot take a product where trades are invisible. If you go this route, you are trading access to institutional scale for protection of your edge. Some teams will make that trade deliberately and I expect more of them will over the next twelve months.

For the allocator: the honest version is that trade-level opacity is also how essentially every fraud in this industry worked. "Just trust the P&L" is the exact sentence that precedes the blow-up. Wanting the key is not bureaucrac… it is scar tissue, and it is earned.

Which means neither position is right on its own, and the resolution is structural rather than moral.

If you are a team refusing trade-level access, you have to overdeliver on every other verification vector - independent fund administration, segregated custody, independent NAV, client reference calls, and the monthly report from the section above, done properly. Opacity in one place has to be paid for with radical transparency everywhere else.

And there is a middle ground that already exists in traditional markets and is barely used here: delayed disclosure and third-party attestation. Trades released on a lag long enough to be commercially useless aka T+30, T+60. Aggregated exposure rather than fill-level detail. An administrator who sees everything and issues an attestation that the allocator relies on, rather than the allocator holding the raw feed themselves.

That is the answer. It gives the allocator verification without giving anyone the strategy. I expect the platforms and admins that build this properly will quietly own the next phase of this market.

If you want something genuinely institutional producing real alpha consistently, it does not arrive on a golden plate. As an allocator, you will have to fight for it - and part of fighting for it is accepting terms you did not want to accept a year ago.

I said last week that a year in this industry is a full turnover of the population, and this week keeps proving it.

Teams that were the most relevant names in this market eight months ago are now nowhere to be seen - not reporting, not visible, no signal about what they are doing. And new teams are appearing constantly, highly institutionalised, unknown to almost everybody, who will matter far more than the current favourites within a year. For now they are irrelevant, tho.

Which is the whole argument against the giant database. There is no value in holding thousands of quant teams in a CRM when only a handful will matter, and the handful rotates.

You do not want to interview a thousand teams. You want to speak to the eight that are worth your time this quarter.

If you are an allocator, come and see us in Singapore - the invite is above. And if you are sitting on a CRM full of names you have not spoken to in two quarters, we do this full-time, with techniques and access that are not available to someone running a book. We know who is actually performing right now, and we will still be in this market sourcing them in three years.

If you are a team, or you know an exceptional one we have not found - introduce us properly and we reward it. [email protected]

Stay patient. Stay honest. Stay alive.

See you next week.

Quants.Space is an institutional discovery engine for systematic and discretionary trading strategies — 130+ independent, world-class quantitative and discretionary trading teams, each with vetted track records and unique alpha sources, plus a dedicated Emerging Managers sector for early-stage teams. Our mission is simple: connect institutional capital and allocators directly with best-in-class teams, all within a secure Separately Managed Account (SMA) framework. If you're an allocator active in the SMA space, or a team opening SMA capacity for institutional tickets, get in touch at [email protected].