Good morning! For anyone who is not aware yet, it is Monday morning and here is your quant related newsletter, as always.

To everyone who has quietly forwarded this to a colleague over the past year: thank you. That's how this thing grows, and I notice.

This week is going to be an interesting one.

We never got a Dubai this year. TOKEN2049 Dubai, originally set for the end of April, was pushed to April 2027 after the Iranian strikes on the UAE made travel and security impossible to plan around. Rightfully so. Nobody needs a crypto conference that badly.

So Singapore is now the only major TOKEN2049 edition of 2026. Organisers expect 25,000+ people, more than 1,000 side events, and a Formula 1 Grand Prix running in the background for extra noise.
I went to F1 last year, and somehow it ended up being quite a dissapointment… Hope those of you attending will have a better experience.

Nevertheless, I see people are hungry. Not for panels. Not for keynotes. For each other.

Think about it. Half the people you work most closely with, you've never shaken hands with. You've traded thousands of Telegram messages, shared PnL screenshots at 3am, argued about funding rates across four time zones, and never once been in the same room.

This is the week that changes. That's what conferences have always really been about: putting faces to the names you already trust.

But I want to talk about what happens in those rooms, because there's something most people walking into Singapore haven't priced in.

NINETEEN KIDS PER PARENT

Picture a garden party.

There are 95 kids, each holding a jug of lemonade and a hand-drawn sign. There are 5 parents with actual money in their pockets.

That's nineteen kids for every parent.

One thing nobody tells the kids: even the parents with money can only drink so much lemonade. They have wallets, but they also have bladders. A parent can buy a cup from three, maybe four kids before the next cup just isn't happening, no matter how good your lemonade is or how nicely you drew your sign.

This is the conference circuit right now. Every room I've been in this year looks like this, and Singapore will look like this on a much bigger scale.

Even my own event this week is full of teams. Allocators? Far fewer. I'm saying that out loud because it's the reality of the (and really any) market, not a failure of the guest list.

Supply of strategies has never been higher. Appetite for new allocations has rarely been lower. You are not competing against the market. You are competing against the other eighteen kids at your parent's elbow.

So if you're one of the kids, which most of you reading this are, here's the honest version.

Raising LP capital right now is incredibly hard. The competition is enormous, and most of it has a deck that looks a lot like yours.

You have to be creative about how you sell your lemonade. And "creative" doesn't mean louder. It means three things:

THE PARENTS WHO RARELY BUY

Which brings me to the parents themselves.

I've said this many times and I'll keep saying it: there is no typical allocator. Some will wire $50K the same afternoon. Some take six weeks to answer one email. They really don't think alike.

But there's one type I want to spend a minute on, because they're the most valuable relationship in this industry and also the rarest.

The allocator who allocates rarely, but with conviction.

They're slow to buy. Painfully slow, sometimes. But that's because they do the work. Their due diligence is real. They understand what they're buying before they buy it.

And because of that, once they're in, they're patient.

They won't pull their capital on the first drawdown. Or the second. They understood the drawdown profile before they signed, so when it arrives it's a known cost rather than a surprise.

There is one condition, and it's non-negotiable: you have to remain the team they signed up for. Same strategy. Same thesis. Same risk framework. The moment you drift from what they diligenced, the patience goes, because what they're holding is no longer what they bought.

If you land a decent check from an allocator who almost never moves, you can be fairly sure the relationship is built on long-term expectations. That check is worth five times its face value, because it's sticky in a market where almost nothing else is.

These partnerships are getting rarer, especially in this market.

It's lonely at the top for a reason. Most of the people who started the climb fell off along the way. The ones still standing persisted long enough, and stayed institutional the whole time.

Which raises the obvious question.

WHAT DOES "INSTITUTIONAL" ACTUALLY MEAN?

I've watched a lot of teams on the road to becoming institutional. A surprising number of them already think they've arrived.

They haven't. At least in my opinion.

And this matters more than almost anything else in the business, because institutional is where the money goes. If you're not institutional, you are structurally capped. You get smaller checks, you keep smaller checks, and you rarely see a scale-up into seven figures per allocator. Eight-figure cumulative AUM stays a slide in your deck rather than a number in your account.

So here's my working definition. A set of behaviours.

One: communication. Yes, again. I've written about it more than anything else, because it's still the fastest way teams separate themselves. How you handle a question you don't like tells an allocator more than your Sharpe ratio does. I have seen conversations end fast and quietly, without giving the reasons why. I know these reasons.

Two: verification and transparency. There is no route around verification anymore. Last bull run, you could paint a picture and sell it with words. Everyone was printing, nobody was checking, and confidence was enough. That is impossible now. Literally impossible. If you can't prove how you achieved what you claim, what you claim doesn't matter.

Three: focus, which means a team. If you're the PM and you're also doing sales, onboarding, operations and writing invoices on a Sunday night, you aren't competitive against PMs who aren't. You're a talented trader running a small business on the side, and the allocator can see it, fast.

If your portfolio manager is also your accounts department, you don't have a fund. You have a freelancer with an API key.

Three people minimum. A PM who only trades. Someone who owns operations and risk. Someone who owns relationships. Below that, something always slips, and allocators are very good at spotting what slipped.

Four: presentable materials. Fact sheet, deck, DDQ. I wrote a full edition on exactly this a couple of weeks ago (Seventy-Seven Seconds), so I won't repeat it, except to say it's still the most overlooked thing in the industry. You get one page of attention. Spend it well.

Five: disclose every change, before anyone asks. This is the one that kills the most relationships, and it does it quietly.

Your trade changed. Your volumes changed. Your venue mix shifted. You added a leg or dropped one. The allocator opens the account and sees behaviour that doesn't match what they diligenced.

You may have a perfectly good reason. It doesn't matter. If they find it before you tell them, you've turned a strategy update into a trust problem. Tell them first, tell them plainly, and tell them why.

Most teams calling themselves institutional are one honest DDQ away from finding out they're not.

Now the last part, which is also why we exist.

We sit in an unusual seat at Quants.Space, right at the intersection of allocators and managers. People assume what we do is introductions. Introductions are the visible part. There's a lot more underneath.

What we've built over time is closer to an intelligence engine. It keeps relearning, and it keeps flagging things that are, frankly, impossible to notice on your own: a team whose behaviour is drifting from its stated strategy, a manager whose communication went quiet three weeks before the drawdown showed up, a strategy class that's quietly decaying across a dozen books at once.

So beyond the introduction, we can show allocators a team's weaknesses before they find out the expensive way. We help negotiate terms. We put more light on situations that look clean from the outside. We organise LP calls. We gather intelligence that no single allocator could gather alone, because no single allocator talks to everyone.

But the biggest problem we solve for allocators is simpler than all of that.

We stop you from spending your year talking to the wrong people.

If you have a mandate, you can speak with a thousand teams. Nobody's stopping you. Every one of them will take the call. That's the whole lemonade problem from the other side of the table.

But every one of those calls costs you something you don't get back.

Here's what that looks like. Say someone pitches you a delta-neutral fund netting 5% a year. You're looking for market-neutral yield, it seems clean, and you start the process. Six weeks of calls, DDQs and reference checks.

Meanwhile, there's a team in the same category doing 20%, with a better risk profile, that you simply never heard about. They don't go to conferences. They don't post on Twitter. They're busy trading.

On a $10M allocation, that's $1.5M a year left on the table, before you count the six weeks of your own time.

The cost of the wrong allocation is visible. The cost of the right one you never found is invisible, and it's almost always bigger.

Finding teams is a full-time job. Most allocators already have one, and its not cold-outreach. Just a quick reminder.

BEFORE YOU GO

If you're in Singapore this week, come and find us. Allocators and teams who want to be in the right rooms: say so now, not on the day. [email protected]

And if you're going, remember last week's note. You're making a trade with your body that week. Make it consciously.

The referral offer stands, as always. If you know someone genuinely worth an introduction, make it and we'll pay you for it.

Stay patient. Stay honest. Stay alive.

See you next week, possibly with a hangover I promised myself I wouldn't have.

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].