Why We Built a Firm, Not a Trade

Most crypto trading operations don't need to be firms. A person with capital and a strategy can trade a cycle alone, take the profit, and stop. We chose the harder version on purpose.

Arbitrage doesn't work that way. It's not one person finding one edge. It's people who understand the same problem well enough to sit in a room and solve it together, continuously, as the market changes around them. If you're not doing that, you're not really solving the problem; you're just trading. We are problem solvers.

A Firm Built Around a Room, Not a Time Zone

Most of the crypto industry runs distributed. Hire the best person wherever they are, let them work from home, coordinate across time zones. We understand why: the work is largely digital, so the logic makes sense on paper.

We do the opposite. Everyone sits in the same room, most days, for hours. Not because the work requires it technically, but because the ideas that actually move the firm forward tend to come from being in the room when someone says something half-formed, and someone else immediately sees what's missing. That kind of exchange doesn't happen over a shared document or a video call.

Built to Outlast the Asset Class

We don't think about the next 10 to 20 years in terms of which asset we'll be trading. We might be trading crypto, equities, commodities or something that doesn't exist yet. What matters is whether the same group of people, working the same way, believing the same things about how the problem should be solved, is still intact.

That's already playing out. We started as a crypto-only shop. We aren't one anymore, a meaningful share of what we trade now sits outside crypto entirely. The asset class was never the point. The point was building something that could hold together regardless of which market it was pointed at.

Choosing to Be Wrong Sometimes

A structural trait we think matters more than people give it credit for: being willing to make a call and be wrong. Most teams avoid this. Nobody wants to own a bad decision, so the default becomes inaction: don't adapt, don't change, wait for more certainty that never fully arrives.

We built the firm to do the opposite, in a controlled way. Try new things. Look at opportunities most teams wouldn't bother evaluating. Accept that some of those calls won't work out, because the alternative, never being wrong because you never decided anything, is worse.

AI Widened the Pool. It Didn't Change the Plan

We don't have a grand AI thesis. When we started the firm, AI wasn't part of the picture at all. It showed up later, and what it mainly did was widen the talent pool we could hire from. That's a real structural shift in the industry, but it's not something we engineered or bet on. We're not claiming credit for a wave we happened to be standing in.

Staying in Hong Kong

Plenty of firms in this space have operations elsewhere, where costs are lower. We haven't, and the reason is simple: the talent available to us in Hong Kong is better suited to what we're building than the cost savings would justify giving up.

Hiring for Grit, Not Pedigree

We don't hire for polish. Most of the people on this team weren't industry leaders when they joined; they were trained here, inside the firm, not somewhere else first. What we actually look for is harder to put on a resume: grit, and a genuine interest to be good at what we do. If someone has that, we can teach the rest. Finding talents who have it in the first place is probably the single biggest long-term project this firm has.

Still Studying, Just Differently

I started a PhD in Information Systems in 2025. The reason was practical: I wanted to understand the fundamentals well enough to actually make our strategies better, not just run them. A few months in, I made a call. The time it was taking was time not spent building the firm, and that trade-off wasn't worth it anymore. So I didn't finish it. I switched into a Doctorate of Business Administration instead. I still wanted to keep studying. I just wanted it to serve the company long term, not compete with it.

Taking What Others Discard

If you want to sound impressive in this industry, you build something that predicts the future: a model, a signal, something that claims to know what happens next. We think most versions of that claim are temporary and very hard to actually achieve realistically and honestly.

So we built the opposite. We look for the opportunities that are simple enough, and small enough individually, that nobody else wants to bother picking them up. One of those on its own isn't worth much. A very large number of them, collected consistently, adds up to something real. That's most of what quantitative trading actually is, underneath the language people use to describe it.

This closes the three-part conversation with Jackson Wong on how Theo Quant thinks, builds, and plans to keep going.