Richard Craib - Crowd-Sourced Alpha with Numerai (S7E28) скачать в хорошем качестве

Richard Craib - Crowd-Sourced Alpha with Numerai (S7E28)

Today, I’m speaking with Richard Craib, the CEO and founder of Numerai. If you’ve heard of Numerai before and thought of it as an interesting experiment at the intersection of data science and crypto, it’s worth updating that mental model. Over the last few years, Numerai has quietly grown from roughly $60 million in assets to over $600 million. JPMorgan has invested and secured $500 million of capacity, and Numerai recently raised a Series C at a $500 million valuation led by top university endowments. This is no longer a toy project. It is a real, institutional-scale market-neutral hedge fund with a very unconventional engine. In this conversation, we go deep into how Numerai actually works. Richard walks through the core insight behind Numerai’s design: that crowd-sourced alpha only works if incentives are aligned, not just participation. Simply opening up data and ranking models creates incentives to game the system, not to produce durable signals. That realization led to the introduction of the Numeraire token. By forcing researchers to stake real capital behind their predictions, Numerai shifts from a leaderboard-driven experiment to a capital-weighted signal engine. Instead of rewarding activity, the system rewards conviction, accountability, and uniqueness, creating a self-filtering model that naturally reduces noise and discourages the behaviors that caused earlier crowd-sourced platforms to fail. We also talk about portfolio construction and risk management, including how Numerai neutralizes common factor exposures, what went wrong during the 2023 drawdown, and how those lessons reshaped their approach to diversification and concentration. Finally, we look forward, covering the limits of crowd-sourced modeling, the next frontier for Numerai’s research ecosystem, and how Richard sees AI agents reshaping model development. Please enjoy my conversation with Richard Craib. 00:00:00 Interview with Richard Craib and Overview of NumeraI 00:01:53 Numeraire token, staking, and Richard Craib's background 00:04:37 Machine learning and NumeraI's operational model 00:09:01 Data obfuscation and staking mechanics 00:15:17 Residual correlation and Numeraire token distribution 00:18:28 Adversarial user protection and behavioral biases in staking 00:21:58 Crowdsourcing investment strategies and Numeraire token economics 00:25:26 Orthogonal alpha, MMC, and risk management 00:27:57 Liquidity importance and hedge fund comparisons 00:31:40 Stake-weighted meta model and portfolio construction 00:35:14 Learning from the 2023 drawdown and risk system enhancements 00:41:23 Real-world alpha signals and new tools at Numerai 00:47:15 Numerai's pillars, advancements, and Data Predictive LLM 00:50:15 Portable alpha and Numerai Singularity 00:53:17 Personal passions and time conceptualization 00:54:57 Closing thoughts and gratitude