Watch the full panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel discussion with Evan Szu (Co-Founder & CEO at Gamma Prime), Will Leung (Head of Partnerships at Caladan), Marat Kasparov (Owner of Lightedge Capital), Akram Hamam (Co-Founder of 30D Capital), and Henri Arslanian (Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Nine Blocks Capital Management)
In this episode leading figures from various hedge funds come together to discuss their perspectives and strategies amidst the current volatile market. Speakers share details about their funds’ approaches to asset management, particularly within the realms of stocks, crypto, and IPOs. They discuss the rapid shifts caused by volatility and regulatory changes, the importance of risk management, and the evolving role of AI in trading. Also highlighted are the benefits and challenges of operating in Dubai as a crypto hub. The panel converges on the necessity of human interaction in finance despite the rise of AI, showcasing a blend of technology and personal touch in the future of asset management.
Evan (Gamma Prime)
My name’s Evan Szu, I’m one of the co-founders here at Gamma Prime, hence the Gamma Prime tie, and we love capital alpha creators like this. This is what Gamma Prime is about. We’re essentially a platform for hedge funds, for unusual alpha, and so we’re really pleased to have our guests here today.
Maybe we’ll start—just each person can briefly tell me about yourself, as well as a bit about what your fund does. So, we’ll start with you. Do you have a mic?
Marat (Lightedge Capital)
Good morning, gentlemen and ladies. My name is Marat Kasparov, I’m from LightEdge Capital. LightEdge Capital is about alpha returns in your classical instruments. We are long, short, duration-wise, short book—I mean short book with duration-wise—and long book.
Akie (30D Capital)
My name is Akie Hamam from 30D Capital. We’re actually a pretty traditional asset management firm, investing in stocks, crypto, and IPOs or pre-IPOs. Besides running or doing things in finance, I run a foundation called The Now Cleanup, Save Horses from Tourism in Egypt, and I love organizing events, connecting people with each other.
Will (Caladan)
Morning, everybody, I’m Will. I lead business development at Caledon. We are a crypto-native quantitative trading firm based in Singapore. Our roots are in traditional HFT, started in CeFi markets, expanded into DeFi, and then eventually VC, Liquid, OTC—a full range of strategies in crypto. Now we’re spending a lot of our time just trying to take what we’ve built, running our own capital, and giving it to our clients, whether it be projects, corporate treasuries, or investors.
Henri (Nine Blocks Capital Management)
Hey, everyone, very excited to be here. Thanks for having us. My name is Henri Arslanian. My passion is the future of finance. I do this as the co-founder of Nineblocks. We’re a $200 million market-neutral crypto hedge fund. We’re the first and only crypto hedge fund to be regulated by Vara here in Dubai. I’ve been in the crypto space now for 10 years, and previously, before launching Nineblocks, I was a partner and a global crypto leader at PwC, where I had a team of 400 people across 25 countries. It was a $100 million crypto business. I’m also very active in the crypto space. I’m a professor at university teaching crypto. I have a show on CNBC here on crypto and am very active in the crypto ecosystem. Very excited to share our passion for the future of money with you all today.
Evan
I think one of the interesting things we’ve seen in this industry is there really is a blending between the worlds of crypto, asset management, and trading and finance, possibly because crypto emerged from the likes of Bitcoin. One of the things I think our panelists really have expertise on is that you guys watch markets extremely closely, specific niches within the markets, and of course, as you know, we’ve had a lot of volatility recently. How has that affected your trading, in terms of where you see future opportunity? I’m not asking for a prediction going forward, but how have things shifted and changed for you over the last two or three months?
Marat
Yes, to be honest, it depends on your fund structure. I guess we love volatility because we’re long-short. And of course, our views had to be changed because of the new president and his friends, who have different views than the previous president. So we had to change our views quite quickly regarding the dollar, the long end, and all that, and cryptocurrencies as well. This time, we had to be quite fast; otherwise, it could be quite costly.
Akie
For us, in our asset management firm, in the last couple of months, we’ve seen that investors want to know more about what we invest in because the markets are volatile. Because we do stocks, crypto, and pre-IPOs, when the stock market crashes or crypto drops or goes up faster than expected, they ask way more questions than a year or two ago. Before, they were more focused on yearly returns—how much percentage can I make in a year? Lately, new LPs really want to know what we invest in and how long we take positions. We’re not a hedge fund, so we only take positions long or short term. I think in the last couple of months, this has been the major shift: investors are more cautious and want to validate their beliefs in us, asking way more questions than before.
Will
Adding to that, investors are scared, and there’s a wide range of capital allocators in this space. We think a lot about traditional investors, but we actually spend much more of our time with project foundations. These are business builders who have managed to amass hundreds of millions of dollars in capital, and over the past quarter, a lot of that has been wiped out—not by a conscious decision, but because there was no risk management applied; that wasn’t the core competency of that business.
A lot of our time now is spent educating clients on the right strategy to meet their long-term objectives. You are focused on building your new project, making an impact, but to do that, you need to consciously decide your exposure, whether to your own token or the broader crypto market. We’ve been doing this for eight-plus years, managing our own family capital, only in crypto. Many crypto firms tend to be aggressive. Crypto attracts those characters, but in this environment, those focused on risk management and protecting downside risk resonate more—the goal is survival, not maximizing returns.
Henri
From my point of view, fundraising has never been easy and has always been difficult. This is our fourth year of our fund. We’ve been around for some time, which is long in crypto—four years. A couple of big trends: first, on fundraising, investors sophisticated in crypto now do much more robust due diligence.
Big questions include counterparty risk mitigation, off-exchange solutions, and regulatory frameworks. As a regulated fund in Dubai, we have weekly reporting, monthly financials. While it’s a lot of work for our 20-person team, this diligence is interesting for investors. Investors already take a career risk investing in crypto; they don’t want to be fired because of operational mistakes in our business. Unfortunately, there are still many lapses in the industry—front-running, lack of PA trading policies, insufficient background checks. We are as strong as the weakest member of our community.
On the investor side, there’s more interest and activity. We have Swiss private banks as LPs, listed NASDAQ companies allocating at Treasury, financial institutions, and many family offices. Many conversations possible now were not even feasible two or three years ago.
Evan
Regulatory compliance is similar to risk management. It’s a different kind of risk—structural risk—but also market risk. As a trader, in a bull market, everyone’s a genius and focuses on spray-and-pray deployment. In a bear market, discipline returns. Those with experience have hedges to prevent or sidestep volatility.
I want to talk about doing business in Dubai and the UAE. Some of you are based here, and some came here recently. Talk about Dubai specifically as an environment—from a regulatory perspective and raising capital. What do you see about Dubai that’s been attractive for you, the UAE, and more generally the Middle East and North Africa?
Marat
I will give you my opinion. When I moved here three years ago, the reason I moved was because marketing and real estate were booming here, and I think classical hedge funds for high-net-worth individuals don’t have a lot of allocation. And the funds here, again, in my opinion, were working on a different model.
So they’re working on a management fee of 2%. All they care about is collecting the 2%, but nobody tries to make high returns, which is quite risky. And all the fund owners here were bankers, not traders. But the real fund owner has to be a trader if you’re talking about high returns. A banker cannot make high returns because he’s not a trader. He only cares about fees.
And that’s one of the reasons. Secondly, I saw that the market was very young in asset management because real estate has done well. I saw a lot of empty space and unaffectedness. That’s why I moved here.
Akie
Well, I think a city like Dubai, I should say, is very progressive in how they treat rules and regulations. They’re quick. They know what’s going to be the future. They have a long-term vision. I think it’s easier for smaller countries like Dubai or Singapore to implement certain rules very fast, also to attract a lot of outside investors. In larger countries, it would be way harder.
I think now, finally, Trump is moving in that direction, making crypto regulated. Or, as I heard yesterday, someone is filing for another 80 crypto ETFs in the next couple of months. So you see that all the big institutions are finally getting into it. But for example, me being based in Amsterdam and also here, Europe is very far behind. Yes, we have MECA regulations. Yes, we have VARA here in Dubai. But I still believe in terms of crypto, there should be an overall world MECA or VARA regulation combined or something. In terms of Dubai, I think it’s one of the better spots to be in because they’re so progressive.
Will
Admittedly, we are still pretty new to the Middle East. We only opened our office last August. Our biggest takeaway has been how aligned we as crypto investors are with the government. It’s very clear that the objective here is to make this place a crypto hub. I liken that to when there was a strategic decision to drive tourism and real estate as the core pillars of this economy. It seems clear that crypto is that next pillar. That’s why we are massively expanding now and devoting resources, hiring people to be on the ground because we see that opportunity. This is coming from a team that tends to be a bit more conservative, spending most of our time in Singapore primarily. But now we see the future is here.
Henri
Yeah, so we have quite a bit of experience now in launching a fund here. We’re the first and only crypto hedge fund with the VARA license. We were the first crypto company in One Central. Now I’m a one-minute walk away from all my counterparties. From my window, I see the headquarters of Binance, Bybit, OKEx, Deribit. Laser Digital is on my floor. Everybody is literally one minute away. I genuinely believe this is the best place in the world to run a crypto business.
I was for 15 years in Hong Kong and saw the rise of crypto there. I believe right now, this is the best place. But if you think it’s a place where you come, relax, set up a company, and go home, we don’t want you here. My VARA application had 108 appendices. We have weekly reporting, monthly financials. The way they dealt with it, they said, “We’re building the Ritz-Carlton. You want to operate by the Ritz-Carlton, you’re welcome. You don’t want to, get out.” I think it’s the right approach. This is where all the players come. Think about some of the big exchanges. Even the perps are regulated. There are a lot of benefits on that perspective.
On the investor side, unfortunately, many think money falls from palm trees here. It’s not the case. There’s a fairly large investor allocator base. Often they’re risk-averse. If you’re making 22% a year in real estate in Saudi Arabia, why bother with crypto? Many government jobs in family offices have visas dependent on the job. Screw up, you lose your job and go back to your home country. This has a real implication on decision-making and risk tolerance in the allocator community.
As a place to run a business, I lead by example. We’re here. If anybody is interested in setting up in Dubai, let me know. I also happen to be the chairman of the biggest crypto compliance services firm in the world. Happy to connect. But if you think it’s easy, like Diet Coke, you want light touch, don’t come here. Set up in the Cayman Islands—you’ll be fine. If you want to run a real business and grow it properly, it’s a great place to be.
Evan
Within Gamma Prime, we have three locations. One co-founder lives full time in UAE. I’m in the Singapore hub, and we have a US hub as well. That works for crypto, which runs 24/7. As the planet turns, trading moves from one timezone to the other. UAE has been our hub for MENA and Europe.
Last item, personal pet peeve: I’m a machine learning engineer as well. Many people ask about AI. They hear “traders,” they think AI will push out human trading. Will it replace humans? Or will it just be robots trading with each other? I think there’s a misunderstanding about machine learning. But you guys are in the trenches. You have faced what AI has or hasn’t done to your businesses. Tell me how it’s affected things.
Marat
Well, in classical trading, for me, it’s hard to see because how can AI measure emotions? Same event, but emotions are different. Same event, emotions can vary by nationality or day. Stock moves are not intelligent. Long-term, they are right. Short-term, they’re not rational. In two or three years, they become rational. If AI goes rational, everything is rational, there will be no moves. We just open blocks at the same price. It’s hard to see how AI can change human emotions.
You could say high-frequency trading is some kind of AI instrument, which existed previously. AI as a trading tool has been there for a while—machine learning, so-called. It hasn’t changed; it just has its place in the market. Classical buy, sell, hold still has its place. I overexaggerated at the beginning—the biggest gain of AI would be productivity, which was a wrong thesis. There’s no productivity gain at the moment. That was the biggest help for the US economy.
Akie
In our industry, as a traditional asset management firm, for stocks, we have analysts. The human aspect will always remain. Predictive tools have existed for ages. Only recently did the word “AI” become the hot, new term, but these tools already existed. In crypto, AI is more used day-to-day. People have access. We were talking earlier about meme coin investors making money quickly using simple tools to track things.
At the end, the human aspect is critical—how oversubscribed is a project. Meme coins pop off because people love them, not AI. We invest in IPOs. One of the biggest IPOs we did was Reddit last year in March. Everyone knows Reddit. Our broker said it was the highest oversubscribed IPO he had seen in a decade. He didn’t know the power of Gen Z and community. Although all numbers looked perfect on paper, the human aspect was unpredictable. We did about 72% in one IPO day on the first day—super high. Tools can’t predict how much the community loves a project. They can only calculate community size and data. Humans will always do the end call, but AI helps make better decisions.
Will
So our firm, our bread and butter has been quantitative high-frequency trading. Everything, we try to automate as much as possible. We are huge believers in using models. AI is just another model, but I want to make clear what it’s good at and what it’s not. AI is good for repeatable patterns, lots of data, it can recur many, many times over very short periods. I come from a quantitative trading background on the equity side.
Before going into crypto, I spent over a decade doing that. The largest players in quantitative trading—whether it be Citadels, Towers, or Jane Streets—make their money on quantitative trading over very short time intervals because there’s a lot of data. It’s not that hard to predict the next second or the next millisecond. The hard part is predicting the next hour, day, week, month, and predicting things that haven’t happened before.
We are in an environment with a lot more volatility from events that haven’t happened before. Yes, you’ve seen tariffs. Have you seen it to this degree? Probably not. Looking back a bit more, COVID. More with crypto, DPEGs across major exchanges in countries. All of these events, people think, “Oh, they create a lot of volatility. You must have made a lot of money.” If you were on the wrong side of that and your models weren’t calibrated to deal with it, probably not. You probably would have bled a lot when it first happened. In order to have made money, you would have had to quickly pivot, adjust the model, tune the risk parameters.
That’s all done by a human, an experienced trader trained to manage risk. That’s crucial in crypto, inequities, or any asset class. Speaking as a firm, we’ve built our whole business around AI to a certain extent in quantitative trading. We know it’s super valuable, but we also recognize where there are gaps and where we need experienced people to fill those gaps.
In crypto in particular, AI is a huge buzzword. Everyone wants to sell you the next AI agent, the great trading bot that’s going to make you millions. The reality is this bot is pretty low quality. Given that so many of them are similar, they end up eroding all returns. They are not designed to deal with the next thing that’s never happened before, the next geopolitical risk. People who deploy those strategies without thinking about broader risks often end up losing money. We see that there’s a lot of value, but you have to take it with a grain of salt and make sure you have people continually thinking about risk management.
Henri
As a hedge fund, of course, we use AI like other funds for various things. I’m a massive believer in the future of AI agents and all the developments we’re seeing. But to add something different than what you guys mentioned, there are certain things AI will never do.
For example, 100% of the money we raise, the investors want to see me face-to-face, have coffee, lunch, or dinner. It’s ironic with all the AI boom we’re seeing—people want this more personal touch, more human interaction. I did not expect this. I really thought we’d be more virtual, especially post-COVID.
Second, AI does not do panels. You can have the best product, fund, performance, but if you can’t tell a story, present on stage, or take a storytelling approach, it doesn’t work. Actually, the advice I give to my kids and young people is to go to Toastmasters to learn how to share a story, debate, present. That’s equally important as other skills we have.
Third is culture. You can use AI to draft policies, but if you don’t build culture within your organization and through leadership, AI does not do that yet, at least.
Akie
Can I jump in on it quickly?
Will
Go ahead. Thank you for raising that. To give some background, I’ve spent most of my career focusing on product and trading. I underprioritized the human aspect because I figured the models would do the work. In this space, there are tons of strategies. As soon as there’s a good strategy, someone will fork it. Then how do you make decisions? It’s the person sitting next to you, the person who’s got your back, has your best interest at heart. Why do investment managers and financial advisors continue to exist? It’s because you need that person to navigate this jungle. An AI model isn’t going to do that.
Akie
I want to jump in on Henry. One of the reasons why we’re all here is human interaction. I believe events are going to be the gold of the future, or the new Bitcoin of human interaction. Despite AI automating our lives, we all need human interaction, good conversations. A few weeks ago, I read that Shopify’s CEO said before hiring someone new, ask if AI can do the job. He wants new people in the company, as long as it narrows down the process and speeds things up. He’s not saying don’t hire humans, just how efficient can we be. AI adds value but humans are always needed for culture and interaction.
Marat
I want to add regarding AI and humans in trading. Basically, anything available—if everybody sees all the graphs, everyone watches the same metrics, I don’t watch graphs. My point is, if everybody sees the same information, how can I make money? Therefore, I don’t watch graphs or Bollinger points. If everybody knows the same, you can’t make money.
Henri
It’s super interesting. One thing I find amazing in crypto, we’re all using Telegram. After this week, you go back home, you’ll have 400 people you met on TG with their avatars. You don’t know their names or who they are. I now print even more business cards. I go to the washroom, gym, I carry business cards because if I give one to someone, and nobody else is, they’ll keep it. At home or hotel, they put it on their desk, bring it back to the office.
I have four or five touch points with someone and I’m amazed people aren’t doing this in crypto, especially with avatars. There’s zero trust. It works in the crypto bro community if you look cool, but if you want to raise money, nobody’s going to do that. Second is personal branding. I’ve been creating content on social media since 2016. I’m now number one on LinkedIn in finance, with half a million followers. I have a show on CNBC seen by 60 million people weekly. I started with content on personal branding. It’s critical. I’m amazed more people aren’t doing it, even myself. I was shy, mumbled, struggled to say words. My kids make fun of me. But this creates authenticity in building your personal brand. Even simple things like business cards matter. I’m amazed at the crypto ecosystem. We’re naive and sometimes it hurts us when trying to raise real capital.
Evan
I think human factors are something we focus on at Gamma Prime. When we built Gamma Prime, it was initially a digital platform, and a lot of the co-founders wanted to do physical events. We wanted to bring people together so they could meet and interact. People would ask us, “You have hedge funds, so all you care about is Sharpe ratio and number of years of returns. You’re just a machine to give them returns.”
That’s not at all the case. One of the most impactful things we’ve done is when someone comes here and shares their story—how they got into statistical arbitrage, the places they failed, the places they succeeded. That matters because you understand the human factors behind the investment.
Regarding AI, I can give you a technical reason why it doesn’t work. I started building AI models in 1997, modeling credit. My first thought was to build an AI model for trading, and I tried. Technically, it’s the same problem: you don’t have independent data examples, you don’t have enough, and the number of incoming variables is higher than the number of data points. But the real element is human analytical thinking, which can take a situation that’s never happened before and reason about it. That’s something machine learning, at least in its current form, cannot do.
LLMs and language models are amazing because human language has not changed much in 5,000 years and there are billions of examples. Trading is the opposite. It changes every hour, and recently, it changes depending on what tweet just comes in.
We’re coming up to the end, so maybe one last question: when you think of Bitcoin, what asset do you think it’s most like? Some people say digital gold, some say a high beta technology stock, and you can also say it’s its own animal. How would you characterize it?
Marat
I characterize it based on the current environment. Gold is one of the only places you can safely invest at this stage because nothing is certain. The second place that looks safe to invest and hold is Bitcoin. All other classical stocks and commodities are full of uncertainty. So basically, gold is the first investable instrument, Bitcoin is the second.
Akie
Good questions. I bought Bitcoin about 12 years ago, sold way too early, bought back again, sold too early again. After the second time, I decided to never sell my Bitcoin again, maybe hedging or loaning against it. I believe in acquiring as much as possible. China has around 190,000 Bitcoin, the US has a lot, BlackRock, Microsaver. If every big institution is getting it, why aren’t we?
Will
I don’t think Bitcoin has fully transitioned to one specific state yet. Many see it as digital gold, and it’s getting there. For example, during the recent Trump tariffs, Bitcoin was surprisingly resilient when the rest of the market dropped. But on a Sunday, it plummeted before everything else because that was the only thing you could sell. That indicates it’s seen as a safe haven but is still not that stable. When there’s panic and nothing else to sell, Bitcoin is still sold. I think it’s moving in the direction of stability with more institutional adoption, maybe in a few years.
Henri
I’ve been in Bitcoin for a long time. I’m a big believer it’s digital gold. I think everyone should have directional exposure to Bitcoin as part of a diversified portfolio. There’s also a generational element. Often, older generations don’t understand it. Whenever I meet people like that, I tell them to ask their kids or nephews about Bitcoin.
I remain extremely bullish on Bitcoin, especially in the coming months. With the recent tariffs, I think we’ve seen a new floor. I’m very bullish on BTC, especially with institutional and state-nation adoption. Many more countries may be buying than we know. Overall, I’m more positive on the industry than ever. Very exciting times to be in this space.
Will
Especially with the dollar devaluing. We lived in a world where the dollar is king; that’s not the case anymore. What’s the alternative? Some friends consider buying Yuan, which is funny to say as an American. Bitcoin is another potential option, and we’re starting to see people make that play.
Evan
Thank you to our panelists, everybody.
