The Pomp Podcast
Ateet Ahluwalia, Managing Director, Coventure: Inside the Mind of a Crypto Quant
- Ateet Aluwalia's background in quantitative trading at Goldman Sachs, Blue Crest Capital, Barclays, and now CoVenture, focusing on arbitrage, relative value, and macro strategies across asset classes.
- The critical challenge of data quality in crypto: only reliable data exists from January 2017 onward (versus 25+ years for traditional markets like the S&P 500), and price fragmentation across exchanges creates additional complexity.
- Bitcoin's role as a macro hedge during currency crises (Cyprus 2013, Venezuela, Argentina) versus its behavior in a full financial crisis, where liquidity-driven forced selling typically hurts even traditional safe-haven assets like gold.
- The inevitable arrival of high-frequency trading and algorithmic competition in crypto, which Aluwalia argues improves market efficiency and liquidity rather than harming retail investors.
- The missing market infrastructure: fully fledged options markets, physically settled futures, deliverable forwards, structured products, and ETFs would unlock new quantitative strategies and dampen volatility for institutional adoption.
- Why crypto and blockchain matter: the intellectual capital influx from Wall Street and Silicon Valley figures signals serious conviction; comparison to Amazon's evolution from online bookstore to AWS shows transformative technologies take time.