Today’s Sponsored Insight is from Richard Craib, the Founder and CEO of Numerai, a machine learning-based hedge fund launched in 2015 that crowdsources models from data scientists around the world to predict stock returns, incentivizes participation through cryptocurrency, and centralizes portfolio construction and risk management.  Our conversation covers Richard’s background, some basics of data science, and the Numerai thesis. We discuss the firm’s idea generation, incentive system, quantitative modeling, portfolio construction, and team. We close with investors’ reaction to the product and research and development on the horizon. Show Notes (1:43) Richard’s background (6:01) Building a machine learning model (8:17) Forming and testing a hypothesis (9:27) Founding Numerai (12:53) Crowd-sourced inputs for models (17:09) Compensation for participants (24:04) Features in models (26:13) Portfolio construction (32:21) Numerai’s team (34:43) Numerai’s competitive advantage (42:18) R&D (44:03) Closing questions Learn More​ Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn​ Subscribe to the mailing list​ Access Transcript with Premium Membership​