Welcome back, everyone.

A quick note before we get into it: we just crossed 2,500 subscribers with 40% open rate.

Honestly, this means a lot.

It tells me this newsletter is landing in the rooms it was built for ‘aka - allocators, multi-managers, family offices, and the trading teams running real books behind the scenes.

The feedback over the last few weeks has been generous, sharp, and useful. Thank you!

If you find what we publish here valuable, please keep forwarding it to the people in your circle who would. That's how this thing grows.

I had a series of conversations last week with allocators I have been speaking with for years. People I deeply respect. Operators who have been deploying institutional capital in this space longer than most of the people have been in the space. including me. Respect to them.

In one of those conversations, the allocator told me - casually, almost in passing - that they had spoken with 1000+ trading teams… And btw I know dozens of other allocators who have similar depth databases, so its nothing too crazy.

The assumption being that if you have spoken to enough teams, you must have better chance to find the right ones. Bigger funnel = better access = better selection etc.

NOT how I feel about it, tho - and let me explain why exactly.

The bottleneck in institutional allocation in 2026 is not discovery. Its actual monitoring.

Alpha is rotating faster than at any point I have seen in my career. Teams that were flat or actively underwater just six months ago are now compounding cleanly through this range bound / low vol regime.

New alphas emerge from CEX-DEX & prediction markets, unique CEXes etc…

Teams that were the obvious "in-favor" allocations eighteen months ago are bleeding. The macro has changed. The volatility profile has changed. Liquidity has changed. Microstructure etc... And almost nobody has updated their views on the teams accordingly.

Most of the teams are not good in communication, they rarely update anyone. They are focused on execution.

The teams you wrote off in Q2 of last year for soft performance are some of the teams that are running 2–5% per month right now with clean drawdown profiles.

Beyond sourcing teams, we spend a real share of our time consulting on what not to do in this market. Where to walk carefully…. Which sales pitches deserve a second look and which deserve a permanent block. That part of the conversation is often more valuable than the introductions themselves, because the wrong allocation in this regime does cost you a lot, money aside - time is more important factor as the regime is changing too fast.

Let me say what most allocators and most platforms in this space are too polite to say out loud…

The universe of truly allocatable trading teams in crypto is small. Genuinely small. Especially if it comes to writing 10M+ checks.

My estimate, after sitting in the middle of this market full-time for years and tracking who is actually compounding through real conditions: globally, there are roughly 200 teams worth the introduction call. Across every strategy bucket, whether it is stat-arb, market-neutral, basis, long-short, quantitative discretionary, hybrid multi-asset, all of it.

That is the w h o l e universe. Two hundred teams.

At Quants.Space we work directly with 130+ of them. And of those 130, only about 25 to 33 percent are teams we actively make introductions for on a daily basis.
Total 40-50 teams. The rest may have have their time later, but it not there yet, at least today.

Then there are obvious names, which we rarely mention, as everyone knows them.

…And there are teams that need to outwork / and outsmart everyone else to stand out as their performance is not as good as others, in todays market. They will start performing, tho, and their time will come. But later.

The interesting work - the work that actually moves a portfolio - happens in the discovery layer underneath the obvious names and the ones that are not performing today. New names, old names with new alphas and upgraded performances.

The teams whose founders worked at tier-one institutions before going independent and never bothered to put up a website. The teams that simply will not show up in your CRM no matter how many conferences you go to, because they are not at conferences. They are at their desks, executing.

And here is the part that should genuinely concern any allocator reading this:

Even doing this full-time, even talking to allocators every single week, even watching live performance updates flow through the dashboard - we still find new gems. Constantly. And chances are YOU would not be able to find them given you are fully focused on other (more important and rightfully so…) things than new teams discovery.

If we are still discovering these in 2026, sitting at the exact intersection of supply and demand in this market, what are the odds that an allocator running a $200M book is going to find them between risk committee meetings and LP calls?

Not high.

The job of an allocator is portfolio construction. Risk management. Drawdown control. Yield generation. Capital preservation. That work is hard, full-time, and unforgiving on its own.

Layering "monitor the live performance, infrastructure status, key-person changes, and regime adaptation of hundreds of trading teams" on top of that work is not realistic. It is not a side quest. It is a separate full-time profession requiring its own team, its own infrastructure, and its own information network.

When allocators try to do both, what actually happens is predictable: discovery becomes a once-a-year event. CRM notes go stale. The teams that were exciting in last year's regime get re-introduced into this year's portfolio. And the teams that are currently compounding stay invisible until somebody else allocates to them first.

Discovery is the easy part. Monitoring is the (almost) impossible part.

This is the entire reason Quants.Space exists. The platform is not a directory. It is a live performance environment (or this is the core idea) where tier-one teams update their numbers directly, in real time, with verification filled into the workflow. When a team's equity curve flips from noise to signal, you don't read about it in a deck six months later. You see it the day it happens. And you get this info before anyone else.

In a market that punishes slowness as much as it punishes bad ideas, that lag is the entire game.

Now flip this around, because it explains why the problem persists.

The single most consistent observation I make across the trading-team side of this market: the best operators do not market themselves. Cannot. And most likely will not. They usually do not even have BD people in their team. They, in fact, most of the time, hate reaching out to people to promote themselves.

These are pattern-recognition and execution people. They are obsessive about microstructure, signal decay, infrastructure latency, and risk control. They are not obsessive about LinkedIn. They will not write a newsletter. They will not run a podcast. They will hide in a co-working space in Berlin or a converted warehouse in Vilnius and trade & code.

And honestly speaking… that is exactly the kind of operator you want running your capital.

But it creates an information vacuum. The best-performing teams in the world, in this regime, are also the hardest to find. Because they are heads-down on the only thing they actually care about: the next trade, the next risk control, the next infrastructure upgrade. They have no incentive - and often no ability - to put themselves in front of capital.

If you are an allocator waiting for those teams to come knock on your door, you will be waiting until the next cycle, when the short term hype will flood the space yet for you to buy the short term narrative that, we all know, how it ends.

That is the gap we sit in. We do the outreach so they don't have to. We run the verification rails so allocators don't have to chase down five different track records across four exchanges. The operators run their books. The allocators run their portfolios. Everyone stays in their lane, and capital actually flows toward the strategies it should be in - instead of toward whoever happens to be loudest on Twitter that month.

I want to leave you with the single most important framework I use when I look at any strategy. It is obvious, but it is overlooked constantly. And in this regime specifically - thin liquidity, war-driven headlines, a locked-up Fed, a Bitcoin chart still grinding sideways inside a deeper bear market - it is the only thing that actually matters in the long run.

This is the line that separates institutional-grade from retail-dressed-up-as-institutional. It is the line between strategies allocators can confidently scale into and strategies they politely walk away from. It is the line that, twelve months from now, will divide the teams still standing from the teams quietly delisting their fund.

When you look at any strategy in your pipeline right now, ask three questions:

Consistent returns that can disappear overnight are not consistent returns.

My macro position from the last edition has not shifted. We are still in a rally inside a deeper bear market. My downside target zone for Bitcoin remains in the mid-$50Ks before I expect to see a structural bottom form. Most of the time I am wrong btw, and I hope its not the case. The geopolitical risk is getting worse, not better. Expecting surprises in the next few weeks. The macro setup is fragile.

This is not the moment to lever up because you caught one good week. This is the moment to be in strategies that survive, and to be in front of the teams that are quietly compounding through this regime instead of waiting for the headline to tell you which ones.

The allocators and trading teams who are still standing when this resolves - with capital, credibility, and structural integrity intact - will own the next cycle.

Be one of them.

Quants.Space is an institutional discovery engine for systematic and discretionary trading strategies. With over 130+ independent world-class quantitative and discretionary trading teams to choose from - each with vetted track records and unique alpha sources - teams coming from all over the world.

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 are an allocator active in the SMA space and want access to a curated pipeline of strategies, or if you are a fund looking to open up SMA capacity for institutional tickets, please get in touch at [email protected].