HN user

izyda

191 karma

Writing about hedge funds x data x ai: https://magis.substack.com/

About me: HTTPS://alexizydorczyk.com

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Comments123
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www.fa-mag.com 2mo ago

AI Bots Auditioning for Wall Street Are Mostly Losing

izyda
1pts1
magis.substack.com 3mo ago

When AI Trading Works, You Won't Hear About It

izyda
33pts5
magis.substack.com 9mo ago

Early Trends and PMF in AI-for-Hedge Funds Startups

izyda
1pts0
alexizydorczyk.com 10mo ago

AI Startups Building for Hedge Funds

izyda
1pts0
magis.substack.com 10mo ago

Why Perplexity Finance Is Powered by Startups

izyda
3pts0
alexizydorczyk.com 1y ago

AI Tools for Hedge Funds

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2pts0
magis.substack.com 1y ago

GenAI Startups for Hedge Funds

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1pts0
substack.com 1y ago

Why Financial Data is so lucrative

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2pts0
docsend.com 1y ago

Data Engineering Startup Shut Down – Hire Us

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1pts0
magis.substack.com 1y ago

Regulatory moats and data join keys

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1pts0
catalog.cybersyn.com 1y ago

Search 2M Timeseries of freely available data on Snowflake

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2pts0
magis.substack.com 1y ago

Data Marketplaces in a LLM World

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1pts0
magis.substack.com 2y ago

You can't buy certain data

izyda
1pts0
magis.substack.com 2y ago

Why Data Dividends haven't happened

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1pts0
magis.substack.com 2y ago

List of AI Content Licensing Deals

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1pts0
magis.substack.com 2y ago

LLMs are still bad at chaotic timeseries systems

izyda
2pts0
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

Token Counter Functions Added to Cybersyn AI Utilities

izyda
1pts0
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

Run Anthropic or OpenAI Models Against Your Snowflake Data

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2pts1
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

Daily Nasdaq Stock Prices/Volume Direct to Your Snowflake Instance with Cybersyn

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1pts1
magis.substack.com 2y ago

Aggregation Bias in Churn Metrics

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1pts0
magis.substack.com 2y ago

Why Selling Data for LLM Training Is Hard

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1pts0
magis.substack.com 2y ago

Why hedge funds still make money with credit card data

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2pts0
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

Track US Weekly Jobless Claims on Snowflake with Cybersyn

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9pts1
www.snowflake.com 2y ago

Interview: Cybersyn Makes External Data Easy with Snowflake Native Apps

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1pts0
magis.substack.com 2y ago

Measuring Web Traffic is so hard

izyda
1pts0
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

What countries produce the most CO2? Cybersyn global emissions data from OWID

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1pts1
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

300M+ Registered Domain Names, Redirects and Active HTTP Response Statuses

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1pts1
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

Mortgage Status, Rent, Income Estimates from the US Census Bureau on Snowflake

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2pts1
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

WTO Trade Flows, WHO Health Indicators, USDA Export Sales Data on Snowflake

izyda
2pts1
app.snowflake.com 2y ago

Income by Zip, Population by City, Home Ownership Stats – ACS Data from Cybersyn

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13pts9

New Hedge fund | Full Stack Engineer | On-site (NYC)

We are a new discretionary, tech industry focused hedge fund, founded by a portfolio manager with 15+ years of experience at a Tiger Cub. I lead the data/technology team here and previously spent ~6 years in a similar role at a well known Tiger Cub and briefly running a data startup.

We are hiring for: - Fullstack engineer for our internal research management web application

Our tech stack: * Frontend: Typescript, Vue3 * Backend: Cloudflare, Supabase/Postgresql, Typescript *

On the data side: AWS, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Clickhouse, Dagster

Obviously, we are not the only ones trying to figure out how to use AI in investing but in a world where there are lots of people trying to build picks & shovels, this is an opportunity to be one of the goldminers at a greenfield, new firm. This role makes sense for people who are interested in finance/investing (although you do not necessarily have to have experience in the industry).

We're in full-time in office in NYC, so that's a requirement for FTE.

We work very hard, hours are long, and people are very dedicated to the mission. It is not for everyone, but for those interested in competing in financial markets, love startup atmosphere without near-term existential risk, and want to work with super smart colleagues (both technical and investors!), this could be a great fit.

I write about hedge fund data teams frequently here, if you are just interested in learning about the space: https://magis.substack.com/

Target salary 180-250K, depending on experience + Bonus/Carry (hedge fund equity equivalent)

Contact: I am at: ai (at) nx1 (dot) com (I'm Alex, ai are my initials... you are not being sent to an ai :] )

--

What we're looking for: - 4-8 YoE in Typescript (we use Vue) + Python experience - Ability to be in-office in NYC - Bonus: SQL (ie. you know Window Functions), AWS (ie. you'd know how to configure an IAM role)

New Hedge fund | Sr IC Frontend Engineer | Full-time | On-site (NYC)

We are a new discretionary, tech industry focused L/S hedge fund, founded by a portfolio manager with 15+ years of experience at a well known Tiger Cub. I lead the data/technology team here and previously spent ~6 years in a similar role at that firm as well. We are not the only ones trying to figure out how to use AI in investing but in a world where there are lots of people trying to build picks & shovels, this is an opportunity to be one of the goldminers at a greenfield, new firm. This role makes sense for people who are interested in finance/investing (although you do not necessarily have to have experience in the industry).

We are hiring for a frontend IC engineer for our internal web application.

One of our core advantages is marrying domain experts (ie. experienced fundamental investors from top tier hedge funds) with tech talent. Our frontend (the design, the UX, the UI) _really_ matters to tie the two sides together. The quality of the data we can collect, the speed of testing new ideas, and there ultimately success is driven by the quality of our frontend -- as unintuitive as that might sound.

Our tech stack: * Frontend: Typescript, Vue3 * Backend: AWS, Cloudflare, Supabase/Postgresql, Typescript *

- We work very hard, hours are long, and people are very dedicated to the mission. It is not for everyone, but for those interested in competing in financial markets, love startup atmosphere without near-term existential risk, and want to work with super smart colleagues (both technical and investors!), this could be a great fit.

- We're in full-time in office in NYC, so that's a requirement for FTE. We are potentially open to exceptional contractors located remotely.

- Target salary 180-250K, depending on experience + Bonus/Carry (hedge fund equity equivalent)

If you are interested, I would love to hear from you:

- Contact: ai at nx1 dotcom , I'm Alex. - Please include resume or LinkedIn and some example of something you have built (could be Github, could be your current company, anything really)

If you want to learn more about types of things we think about, I will shamelessly direct you to my blog where I write about the space (and did so more while I wasn't at any fund): https://magis.substack.com

New Hedge fund | Sr/Staff Frontend Engineer | On-site (NYC)

We are a new discretionary, tech industry focused hedge fund, founded by a portfolio manager with 15+ years of experience at a Tiger Cub. I lead the data/technology team here and previously spent ~6 years in a similar role at a well known Tiger Cub and briefly running a data startup.

We are hiring for: - Frontend senior/staff engineer for our internal research management web application - VP Eng, to lead data engineering + fullstack development (this is a player-coach role, with a lot of IC work expected; it is a small team)

Our tech stack: * Frontend: Typescript, Vue3 * Backend: Cloudflare, Supabase/Postgresql, Typescript *

On the data side: AWS, Cloudflare, Snowflake, Clickhouse, Dagster

Obviously, we are not the only ones trying to figure out how to use AI in investing but in a world where there are lots of people trying to build picks & shovels, this is an opportunity to be one of the goldminers at a greenfield, new firm. This role makes sense for people who are interested in finance/investing (although you do not necessarily have to have experience in the industry).

We're in full-time in office in NYC, so that's a requirement for FTE.

We work very hard, hours are long, and people are very dedicated to the mission. It is not for everyone, but for those interested in competing in financial markets, love startup atmosphere without near-term existential risk, and want to work with super smart colleagues (both technical and investors!), this could be a great fit.

I write about hedge fund data teams frequently here, if you are just interested in learning about the space: https://magis.substack.com/

Target salary 180-250K, depending on experience + Bonus/Carry (hedge fund equity equivalent)

Contact: I am at ai dot nx1 dot com (I'm Alex, ai are my initials... you are not being sent to an ai :] )

New Hedge fund | Sr/Staff Frontend Engineer | On-site (NYC)

We are a new discretionary, tech industry focused hedge fund, founded by a portfolio manager with 15+ years of experience at a Tiger Cub. I lead the data/technology team here and previously spent ~6 years in a similar role at a well known Tiger Cub.

We are hiring for a frontend senior/staff engineer for our internal research management web application.

Our tech stack: * Frontend: Typescript, Vue3 * Backend: Cloudflare, Supabase/Postgresql, Typescript *

Obviously, we are not the only ones trying to figure out how to use AI in investing but in a world where there are lots of people trying to build picks & shovels, this is an opportunity to be one of the goldminers at a greenfield, new firm. This role makes sense for people who are interested in finance/investing (although you do not necessarily have to have experience in the industry).

We're in full-time in office in NYC, so that's a requirement for FTE. We are potentially open to exceptional contractors located remotely.

We work very hard, hours are long, and people are very dedicated to the mission. It is not for everyone, but for those interested in competing in financial markets, love startup atmosphere without near-term existential risk, and want to work with super smart colleagues (both technical and investors!), this could be a great fit.

Target salary 180-250K, depending on experience + Bonus/Carry (hedge fund equity equivalent)

Contact: ai@nx1.com , I'm Alex.

I work on alternative data in the hedge fund industry. We're not quants -- we don't try to predict the stock market... instead, we try to forecast how individual companies are performing using aggregated clickstream, point-of-sale, and payments data. It's a data cleaning, timeseries, and modeling problem with a lot of domain knowledge necessary.

LLMs can be helpful (Ie. for example, entity resolution for data cleaning) but the core models you have to use to actually make the predictions (this looks a lot more like "old" tabular data approaches).

New Hedge fund | Sr Frontend/Fullstack Tech Lead, AI Engineer | On-site (NYC)

We are a new discretionary, tech industry focused hedge fund, founded by a portfolio manager with 15+ years of experience at a Tiger Cub. I lead the data/technology team here and previously spent ~6 years in a similar role at a well known Tiger Cub.

We are hiring for a frontend (or fullstack) tech lead for our internal research management web application.

We also are hiring talented engineers interested in applying AI to the investment research process, focused on

Our tech stack: * Frontend: Typescript, Vue3 * Backend: Cloudflare, Supabase/Postgresql, Typescript * Data Stack: S3/R2, Snowflake, Iceberg, Dagster, dbt

Obviously, we are not the only ones trying to figure out how to use AI in investing but in a world where there are lots of people trying to build picks & shovels, this is an opportunity to be one of the goldminers at a greenfield, new firm. This role makes sense for people who are interested in finance/investing (although you do not necessarily have to have experience in the industry). You can read a little bit about the type of data work we do here: https://magis.substack.com/p/how-to-do-alt-data-research

Target salary 180-250K, depending on experience + Bonus/Carry (hedge fund equity equivalent)

Contact: ai@nx1.com , I'm Alex.

I think there is a subset of VCs that would pay for this.. unfortunately, that very particular subset of VCs has the smallest budget to pay for things based on their fixed fees/fund sizes.

Firms like CapitalIQ or Pitchbook have their largest contract with giant asset managers for whom a 6- or 7-figure deal would be a very small percentage of AUM (and thereby small percentage of management fees).

For angels/seed stage VCs, you are likely looking at "pro-sumer" like prices. So, something like 100-1000/month at most.

The two other main competitors, aimed at startups (and really venture investors) are Pitchbook and CB Insights.

There are several equivalent products like CapitalIQ (owned by S&P Global), Preqin, and offerings from Factset/Refinitiv that are aimed more at private equity investors (later stage) but also include some startup data.

Finally, there are specialized startup data providers like Harmonic.ai (in depth scraping of stealth startups), G2 (Yelp for enterprise software), or Clay.run (innovative UI) that all specialize in something specific but are not at the scale of the above.

How do they get the data?

The first place is SEC Form D Filings. These are required in the US after private funding rounds (lots of caveats, if, buts, etc. but let's keep it simple). This data alone can give you a decent database to start with. After that, it is web-scraping news articles, news wires, LinkedIn, etc. For very specialized areas (ie. Dev Tools), specialized data sources (say Github Archives) might be useful.

Most importantly, many of these providers aim for give-to-get dynamics. Once they become popular enough, startups will actually seek out having a profile (create data) or fix incorrect data (contribute). This is a great dynamic, of course, because it essentially creates proprietary but free data collection.

Websites like TheOrg.com have done a nice job with org charts -- they take a guess at who you report to... and a lot of employees, annoyed at being "layered", will freely fix the data. If you get enough volume, you create a give-to-get flywheel.

I agree with you what is valuable here is the proprietary data. But, behind that, is the _process_ for creating the proprietary data. You could get very good at web-scraping, parsing esoteric government filings, etc. And, maybe that space can get disrupted by someone better (say with LLMs). But ultimately, if you can get users to contribute data -- that's the "promised land" in DaaS.

I also think UI/interface is not value-less. Companies like Clay.run have done a great job making proprietary data accessible to more users. There is value there -- but the data owner collects a (fair) toll on that.

It sounds like an interesting product but not a fit for us:

- We actually don't want no-code. We want configuration based (or something else that can fit into version control). - We want very nice, very customizable charts, but don't want to bring our own (our team is Python/SQL and data based; no one writes Javascript)

There is a new approach of using static site generators to make BI pages feel instantly responsive.

- Evidence.dev (https://evidence.dev/) - Observable Framework (https://observablehq.com/framework/)

I have found that both the speed and the frontend control either of these tools gives you is pretty good (with Evidence looking better out-of-the-box just in my personal opinion).

The main problem I always had with the embedded versions of Tableau, Looker, etc. is that they felt super canned (it was obvious it was a poorly/"lightly" white labeled solution -- when you see an embedded Tableau dashboard, you _know_ it is Tableau, etc) and they were slow.

More on this here: https://magis.substack.com/p/an-observation-on-dashboard-spe...

PS -- I would add that the "headless" version of the above tools that I have seen is https://cube.dev/

I loved this game and then this style of game (all the Tycoons, SimCity, AoE, etc.).

I did not know it, but it was my first experience with economics. I mistakenly thought that this is what policy planners _actually_ did in the real world. Imagine the disappointment when I found out that was not true.

Nonetheless, it ultimately inspired me to go into data science in market/competitive intelligence. First at hedge funds and now as my own startup.

I have never been able to shake the notion that build a real-time view of the real economy was the most interesting thing to work on.

I do not have a horse in the race, but it is interesting to see open source comparisons to traditional timeseries strategies: https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtla/tree/main/experiments/amazo...

In general, the M-Competitions (https://forecasters.org/resources/time-series-data/), the olympics of timeseries forecasting, have proven frustrating for ML methods... linear models do shockingly well and the ML models that have won, generally seem to be variants of older tree-based methods (ie. LightGBM is a favorite).

Will be interesting to see whether the Transformer architecture ends up making real progress here.

It has been very impressive to see what LLMs can do for transforming data into useful structured datasets in Snowflake.

Snowflake Cortex has been critical in this process for open-source and Mistral models. We have also found that using GPT4 and Claude3 to be meaningful within Snowflake. Setting up connections between Snowflake and these LLM providers is not too complex but is annoying, so we've done it once so you don't have to.

I have been wondering how to support interactive / real-time web apps based on Snowflake data. I suppose pushing down to DuckDB a subset of data needed for a chart would be one way to do this...

Our team at Cybersyn aggregated 300M+ domains in a single source. Domains are cleaned into a standardized format with any protocols and subdomains stripped away.

For a subset of domains, the dataset includes information on redirects such as a website’s redirect domain, the start/end dates for which the redirect relationship was observed, and whether or not a domain is the primary landing page. HTTP response statuses indicate whether a domain is active or inactive.

More info in Cybersyn Docs: https://docs.cybersyn.com/public-domain/technology/tech-inno...

American Community Survey (ACS) 2018-2022 5-year estimates provide the most up-to-date social, economic, housing, and demographic statistics. Available down to zip code and census block groups, example topics include: median income, poverty rates, education attainment, mortgage status, gross rent, population, and home ownership rates

The raw data from the US Census Bureau is large and challenging to work with. Our team at Cybersyn made it easier to use by making the data available on Snowflake Marketplace in a consistent and intuitive form.

Docs on this dataset: https://docs.cybersyn.com/public-domain/economic-and-financi... Docs on our data structure, in general: https://docs.cybersyn.com/getting-started/concepts/unified-s...

Unlike the US Census released every 10 years, the American Community Survey is published annually. The data is difficult to wrangle but extremely important. Everything from income by zip-code, population growth by city, and home ownership statistics are published. There are even entire websites dedicated to just selling CSVs of income by zip-code.

Cybersyn made the data easier to work with by releasing it on Snowflake in a consistent, intuitive form.

Docs on this dataset: https://docs.cybersyn.com/public-domain/economic-and-financi...

And docs on our data structure, in general: https://docs.cybersyn.com/getting-started/concepts/unified-s...