AI & I · Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Will, CEO of a major hedge fund, shared his background as a 'bonafide nerd' with a PhD in math from Oxford and an early career in algorithmic trading. He explained that his firm has long incorporated advanced statistics and machine learning into their quant trading strategies. The recent accessibility and power of AI tools, particularly for structured data, has accelerated his conviction in their strategic importance.
“So I'm a, I'm a bonafide nerd by background. Um, you know, I, I wasn't an engineer prince then. I went to Oxford to do a PhD in math. I started my career writing code all day for, uh, you know, algorithmic strategies.”
“A large part of what our firm does is in pure quant trading. Um, so I've thought for for many, many years about how machines increasingly can, um, both augment or do jobs of of humans. And that's nothing that's new for me.”
“What has happened of course, in recent years is just that a lot of these tools have become more powerful and they've also become more accessible to non-technical people, particularly on on structured data.”