Now in its twentieth year, the Battle of the Quants has established itself as the premier global event for allocators, portfolio managers, data buyers, and data providers in the quantitative space. This definitive gathering offers unparalleled access to key industry influencers, decision-makers, and investment opportunities. With cutting-edge discussions on quantitative finance, AI, ML, LLMs, Agentic AI and alternative data, the Battle of the Quants places you at the forefront of groundbreaking conversations. Engage with the brilliant minds shaping the future of global finance, and meet the humans behind the machines.

New York City

May 6, 2025  I  The Yale Club

REGISTER HERE

Join us for an exclusive event starting with our Welcome Reception, an invigorating evening designed for building new connections and revitalizing past business relationships. Network with industry leaders and key players, setting the stage for an eventful day ahead.

The momentum continues the next morning with our exclusive invitation-only Allocator Breakfast and Data Breakfast, each offering a unique blend of insights. Enjoy a sumptuous breakfast as quantitative-focused allocators delve into discovering the strategies of leading quantitative managers, while quantitative portfolio managers, researchers and data buyers actively engage with leading data and signal providers to explore how innovative datasets and alpha-generating signals intersect with the dynamic world of quantitative finance. These high-impact sessions lead directly into the Main Event which include a keynote, engaging panel discussions, and thought-provoking presentations that capture the pulse of the quantitative hedge fund space.

Many networking opportunities, including two coffee breaks and a luncheon, provide ample time for follow-up discussions and fostering valuable new business relationships. Stay ahead of industry trends, connect with visionaries, and deepen your understanding of the evolving quantitative landscape.  

CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT THE QUANT ALLOCATOR BREAKFAST
CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT THE DATA BREAKFAST

SPEAKERS

Bruce Cundick

Keynote

BRUCE CUNDICK

Former CIO

Utah Retirement Systems

Christophe L’Ahelec

Christophe L’Ahelec

MD, Head of Active Public Markets

UPP

BIO
Christophe L’Ahelec

Christophe L'Ahelec is an investment professional with more than twenty years of global experience in France, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Canada.

As Managing Director, Head of Active Public Markets, he is responsible for UPP’s global investment strategy with a particular focus on Active Public Market activities, including Public Equity, Public Credit and Absolute Return Strategies.

Prior to that, Christophe was a Senior Principal in the Capital Markets (CM) department, at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board where he was accountable for the top-down management of the external managers portfolio and was part of the investment committee allocating to hedge fund, private credit and long only equity managers. During his 11 years tenure at OTPP, he originated, conducted due-diligence, and on-boarded systematic alpha managers in the equity and futures space, along with leading the group's work in the alternative risk premia space.

Before coming to Canada, Christophe was a quantitative analyst and assistant portfolio manager at Mignon Genève SA/Alpstar Asset Management, in Switzerland, where he took part in the creation and portfolio management of a European systematic market neutral fund.

Christophe spent the first two years of his career working for BNP Paribas in Hong Kong where he provided real-time quantitative support to the fixed-income trading desk.

Christophe is a graduate engineer in Finance and Applied Mathematics from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et de Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble, France and holds the Chartered Financial Analyst® designation. He has been invited to speak globally on advanced portfolio and risk management topics and is also known for his work as an academic writer. His papers have been published in the Journal of Asset Management and the Journal of Alternative assets.

Micheal Ijeh

Michael Ijeh

Senior Investment Associate

Teacher Retirement System of Texas

BIO
Michael Ijeh

Michael Ijeh is a Senior Investment Associate on the External Public Markets team at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a $200 billion public pension system. In this role, Michael works within a 12-person team to allocate over $50 billion to over 70 long-oriented and hedge fund managers of various investment strategies. Michael is also the subject matter expert on the team for early-stage hedge funds, machine learning quantitative funds, pre-IPO funds, and sector-based funds.

Prior to joining TRS, Michael spent a year working in Business Valuation and Litigation Support with Marcum LLP, and a year in an Analyst Rotational Program with Raymond James. Michael received his B.B.A. in Finance with Honors from Texas Tech University, an M.A. in Economics from George Mason University, and holds the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) designation.

Nick Mitsiou

Nick Mitsiou

Executive Director

LGT Capital Partners

BIO
Nick Mitsiou

Nick Mitsiou is an Executive Director at LGT Capital Partners (USA) Inc. He is responsible for Quant Equities, Macro, and CTA manager selection and portfolio management. Before joining LGT, he held similar positions at Unigestion and at ING Alternative Asset Mgmt. He started his career at the Millburn Corp., as a senior quantitative analyst & PM for the firm’s quantitative investment programs. Mr. Mitsiou holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Rochester and a Diploma in Computer Engineering from Greece. He is a CFA Charterholder.

Michael Geismar

Michael Geismar

President & Chief Risk Officer

QIM

BIO
Michael Geismar

Michael co-founded QIM in 2003. As the President & Chief Risk Officer of QIM, Michael oversees the implementation of the firm’s investment models and its portfolio management. He also manages QIM’s general business affairs. 

Michael and Jaffray first worked together in 1994 at Blue Ridge Trading. Michael then worked as an actuary and benefits consultant for Towers Perrin, Coopers & Lybrand, William M

Mercer, and Capital One Financial as an analyst. In 2000, he re-joined Jaffray, assisting in developing an equities investment program that let the two to co-found DHR. 

Michael graduated from the University of Virginia in 1994 with a B.A. in Mathematics and a minor in Statistics. Outside of the office, Michael enjoys following UVA athletics and serves on the board of the Virginia Athletics Foundation, the Cav Futures Foundation, and the Virginia Athletics Advisory Council.

 

Naim El-Far

Naim El-Far

Head of Equities Investment Engineering

Bridgewater

Adam Rej

Adam Rej

Head of Macro Alpha

CFM

BIO
Adam Rej

Adam Rej is Head of Macro Alpha, based in New York. He has previously worked for the Portfolio Construction and Alternative Beta teams. Prior to joining CFM, Adam held post-doctoral positions at École Normal Supérieure (Paris), Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and at Imperial College London. His PhD research was at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics - Potsdam in the field of string theory. Adam joined CFM in 2014.

Alberto Cozzini

Alberto Cozzini

Founder

Polymathique

Gene Reilly

Gene Reilly

CIO

Greenwich Quantitative Research

BIO
Gene Reilly

Gene Reilly is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Greenwich Quantitative Research LP. Gene has over thirty years of experience trading, investing, and managing risk across multiple products and geographies, with nineteen years’ experience in Asian financial markets.

As a career highlight, Gene was Partner and Head of Pan-Asian Equity Trading at Goldman Sachs and in that capacity developed a very successful Quantitative Trading business for GS. Additionaly, Gene was the Global Head of Quantitative Trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He has always been at the forefront of the industry in quantitative investing, automated trading and algorithmic trading. Gene started his career trading at the Susquehanna Investment Group straight out of the Wharton School. Gene also ran a very profitable trading business in Japan leveraging automated trading for Deutsche Bank. Gene also founded and ran a standalone high frequency market making firm, Arxis Capital LLC.

Gene holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the College and Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania respectively. Gene is also a CFA charter holder since 1994.

Jae Yoon

Jae Yoon

CIO

New York Life Investment Management

BIO
Jae Yoon

Jae Yoon is the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of New York Life Investment Management (NYLIM) and Chairman of NYL Investments Asia. He serves as the Chair of the Investment Governance Committee, responsible for the oversight of the investment performance of the strategies managed by NYLIM’s boutiques and affiliate portfolio teams. As Chairman of NYL Investments Asia, Mr. Yoon is responsible for developing and driving our business strategy in Asia.
Additionally, Mr. Yoon leads the Multi-Asset Solutions (MAS) team which oversees the portfolio management of MainStay and third-party multi asset strategies, asset allocation services and economic analysis for New York Life.
Prior to joining NYLIM, Mr. Yoon was Head of Quantitative Research, Analytics, and Risk Management globally at Western Asset Management. Previously, he was with Merrill Lynch Investment Managers where he served as the Head of Risk and Performance for the Pacific and European Regions in Tokyo and London, respectively. Mr. Yoon also worked at JP Morgan Securities in Asia as regional head of Risk Management Control for Fixed Income and Equity Derivative Trading.
Mr. Yoon is a CFA® charterholder and holds a FINRA Series 3 and 7 registrations.
Education
Mr. Yoon earned a BS in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Operations Research at Cornell University.

Neal Berger

Neal Berger

Founder, President & CIO

Eagle’s View

BIO
Neal Berger

Neal Berger is the Founder of Eagle’s View Capital Management, LLC, a hedge fund advisory firm and the investment manager to several fund-of-fund vehicles and advisory clients. Neal has 35 years of experience on Wall Street and has been in the hedge fund industry for nearly 30 years. He has been allocating to hedge funds for over 25 years. Prior to launching his own Firm, Neal was a proprietary global macro trader. Neal is also the Co-Founder of Eagle’s View Japan Management which manages a Convertible Bond Arbitrage hedge fund focused entirely on Japanese Convertible Bonds.

Prior to founding Eagle’s View, Neal was the Founder and Director of the multi-strategy funds Apogee Fund, Ltd. and New Edge, Ltd. Neal was a global macro trader on two separate occasions during the 1990s at New York-based Millennium Partners, which currently manages over $50 billion.

Neal has allocated capital to hedge funds on behalf of wealthy families and has also been employed as a Vice President of Proprietary Trading with Chase Manhattan Bank and Fuji Bank in New York. He also served as Vice President and senior member of a proprietary trading group for Union Bank of Switzerland. Neal started his career as a Financial Analyst at Morgan Stanley. He earned a B.A. in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany in 1990.

John Trammell

John Trammell

President

New York Episcopalian Diocesan Investment Trust

Gary Kazantsev

Gary Kazantsev

Head of Quant Technology Strategy

Bloomberg

BIO
Gary Kazantsev

Gary is the Head of Quant Technology Strategy in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg. Prior to taking on this role, he created and headed the company’s Machine Learning Engineering group, leading projects at the intersection of computational linguistics, machine learning and finance, such as sentiment analysis of financial news, market impact indicators, statistical text classification, social media analytics, question answering, and predictive modeling of financial markets.

 

Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2007, Gary had earned degrees with distinction in physics, mathematics, and computer science from Boston University.

 

He is engaged in advisory roles with FinTech and Machine Learning startups and has worked at a variety of technology and academic organizations over the last 20 years. In addition to speaking regularly at industry and academic events around the globe, he is a member of the KDD Data Science + Journalism workshop program committee and the advisory board for the AI & Data Science in Trading conference series. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and a co-organizer of the annual Machine Learning in Finance conference at Columbia University.

Sophia Sun

Sophia Sun

Managing Director, Quant Researcher

AQR

Conal Doyle

Conal Doyle

Senior Presales Engineer

KX

BIO
Conal Doyle

Conal Doyle is a Senior Presales Engineer at KX, leveraging over a decade of experience in technical roles across the financial services sector in both North America and EMEA. He began his career in quantitative and data-focused roles before transitioning into kdb+ development, ultimately working with top hedge funds and regulatory bodies on trading platforms and market surveillance systems. With a blend of deep technical expertise and client-facing acumen, Conal now focuses on driving new business growth through tailored presales solutions.

Qaisar Hasan

Qaisar Hasan

Founder & CEO

Maiden Century

BIO
Qaisar Hasan

Qaisar has a nearly 30-year career spanning investment research, portfolio management and data science. In addition to founding and running Maiden Century, Qaisar was more recently a portfolio manager at Lombard Odier Asset Management (LOAM). Prior to LOAM, Qaisar worked at Point72 for five years as a portfolio manager. 
Qaisar began his career in Asia as a research analyst and eventually Director of Research for affiliates of Bear Stearns, Jardine Fleming and J.P Morgan. He subsequently relocated to the US in 2001, where he began covering US TMT stocks on the sell-side. Qaisar transitioned to the buy-side in 2008, initially working for AllianceBernstein as its in-house TMT analyst for Growth Equities, before joining Point72 as the firm’s first Big Data hire in 2012. 
For his work, Qaisar has received numerous awards, including a #1 ranking in Institutional Investor magazine's All-Asia rankings in 2000 and as well as the #1 US Telecom analyst ranking by the Wall Street Journal in 2007.

Abhi Thakur

Abhi Thakur

Head of Business Development

ArcticDB

BIO
Abhi Thakur

Abhi Thakur is responsible for business development initiatives for ArcticDB at Man Group. ArcticDB is a high-performance data-frame database that is optimised for time-series data, data-science workflows and scales to petabytes of data and thousands of simultaneous users.

Abhi was previously staff business manager at Man Alpha Technology. Prior to that, he worked in Man Group’s finance team. He joined Man Group in 2018 and has prior experience working across a number of industries including big pharma and construction.

Abhi graduated with a BA (Hons) in International Relations and Economics from the University of Birmingham.

Adrian de Valois-Franklin

Adrian de Valois-Franklin

CEO

Castle Ridge

BIO
Adrian de Valois-Franklin

Adrian de Valois-Franklin is the CEO of Castle Ridge Asset Management. Prior to co-founding the quantitative multi-strategy firm, Adrian was an investment manager with some of the world’s largest financial institutions. As a member of the Principal Investing group for the now $700 billion CPP Investment Board (CPPIB), Adrian identified and executed global mega-cap acquisitions and financings across various industries. While in Silicon Valley, Adrian focused on technology sector investments with Accel-KKR; originally a joint venture between the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Previously, Adrian was an Investment Banker with Goldman Sachs in New York and San Francisco

Adrian attained his H.B.A with Distinction from the Ivey Business School at Western University. He is a frequent speaker at machine learning and quantitative investment conferences. Adrian also serves as an Advisor to NextAI, a global innovation hub for Artificial Intelligence related venture creation and technology commercialization.

Hunter Almgren

Hunter Almgren

Distinguished Technologist

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Ioana Boier

Ioana Boier

Global Head of Capital Markets Strategy

Nvidia

Michael Prichard

Michael Prichard

CEO & Founder

Shift AI

BIO
Michael Prichard

Michael J. Prichard is a serial entrepreneur and Founder & CEO of Shift AI, a company crafting products that enhance human creativity and intelligence within the financial services industry. In 2008, he founded WillowTree, which grew to become a leading digital products business that was acquired by Telus International in 2023. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, his entrepreneurial success also includes founding Metis Machine/Skafos.ai, specializing in machine learning solutions.

Samir Varma

Samir Varma

Managing Partner

VS Asset Management

and Author

Bartt Kellermann

Bartt Kellermann

CEO & Founder

Global Capital Acquisition

BIO
Bartt Kellermann

Bartt C. Kellermann is the Founder and CEO of Global Capital Acquisition. Global Capital Acquisition, founded in 2002, is a financial consulting firm assisting hedge funds in their marketing efforts. The firm also owns the Battle of the Quants events business which includes presentations, panel discussions and quantitative capital introduction meetings for quantitative based hedge fund strategies in North America, Europe and Asia.Mr Kellermann is a regular speaker at hedge fund conferences internationally and has appeared on MSNBC and Bloomberg TV reflecting on the current state of the hedge fund industry. Earlier in his career Mr. Kellermann worked for IBM in the Media and Entertainment Division where he pioneered the development of innovative computer based products for the television industry. He has an MIBA (Masters in International Business Administration) from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and an undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College.

AGENDA

Battle of the Quants New York City 2025 Agenda
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SPONSORS

Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Maiden Century
KX
Arctic DB
Oxford DataPlan
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aiQ
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Hatched Analytics
Increase Alpha
Interactive Brokers
Axioma By SimCorp Black

We hope you can join us in “Leading the Discussion in Quantitative Finance and Connecting the Humans Behind the Machines” 

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