Richard Craib
Founder & CEO, Numerai. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@richardcraib ↗LinkedIn ↗numer.ai ↗
Richard Craib founded Numerai in 2015, an AI-run quantitative hedge fund that aggregates encrypted stock-market predictions built by a global network of data scientists. He also created Numeraire, an Ethereum-based token used by tournament participants to stake value on the performance of their models.
2shows
2appearances
48statements
7resolved
5supported
0contradicted
71%fully supported
Everything Richard Craib said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Craib: Uncorrelated mediocre models help Numerai more than correlated good models
“If you make a mediocre model that's very uncorrelated, you can do particularly well. Because of its lack of correlation is actually helping Numeri more than a good model that's correlated with the one we already have.”
Craib: Jim Simons would make no money without leverage
“Jim Simons would make absolutely no money if it weren't for leverage. That's just how, how it works.”
Craib: Numerai does not build or know its models' underlying architectures
“We don't even build the models. Our data scientists do, and we don't even know what they built. Like, they might have used a neural network, or they might have done something else. We don't know.”
Craib: Numerai has more data scientists than any other hedge fund
“And so we have the best modeling talent because we have much more More, many more data scientists working on Numeri than any other hedge fund in the world.”
Craib: Numerai's goal is to monopolize data and money, then decentralize it
“Numeri's mission is to kind of monopolize intelligence and monopolize data, and then monopolize money, and then decentralize the monopoly.”
Craib: Machine learning quant investing relies entirely on theory-free models
“That's, in some ways, the opposite of machine learning, which is a path of saying, we have no idea what patterns are Real or we don't have any theory. We don't have any hypothesis, but we do have a large data set. What can we learn in that data set that will g…”
Craib: Numerai contributors lack traditional quantitative finance backgrounds
“Data science is not quant. None of these people were quants. None of them had any background in quant. They're just the types of people who can solve abstract problems to do with data.”
Craib: Numerai outperforms pros similarly to Google Translate outperforming human linguists
“They just model the data, and that's what, what's happening at Numeri, and just like Google Translate, they can be a lot better than a professional Translator on certain languages, and Numeri can be better than a professional investor.”
Craib: Numerai has paid contributors over $30 million, surpassing Kaggle payouts
“Numeri has created the highest paying data science tournament on the internet.
We pay out more than Kaggle does, and we've paid out over thirty million dollars since we started.”
Craib: Numerai accesses unhireable global talent through crowdsourcing
“So I think it's very clear to me that for right now, Numeri has a very big edge on talent. We have people working on our data that aren't even hireable.”
Craib: Markets require continuous crowdsourcing because they are never fully solved
“With a single model, you can get very high accuracy with that type of image detection. That's sort of like a solved problem. And therefore, why would you need to do crowdsourcing? That's a solved problem. But stock market is never solved. It's a permanent race…”
Craib: High PE returns require less skill than market-neutral quant investing
“If a PE fund makes 40% in a single year because they were actually holding positions that were two times market beta and the market went up, That doesn't have anything close to the investment skill of a quant fund that's making money kind of out of nothing by …”
Numerai fell only 1.5% during the March 2020 market crash
“And you know, for example, in March, 2020, when the market fell 30% in about 20 days we were down one and a half percent.”
Craib: Numerai paid $10 million to data scientists in 2021
“We've even, I think even just last year we paid ten million dollars. So it's so much higher than the rewards are so much higher than the other data science competitions on online by orders of magnitude.”
Craib: Traditional quant funds frequently collapse after one bad year
“What often happens with these quant funds is they have a good year, and then they have a bad year, and then they kind of die.”
Craib: A 0.5% accuracy gain in quantitative finance dramatically transforms Sharpe ratio
“Especially in the finance domain where, let's say you're currently 52% right. If you can go to 52 and a half percent right, It's like a whole different level of performance for the end investor, a whole different level of shock ratio or returns and risk.”
Craib: Numerai hedge fund is closed to all but roughly seven investors
“At the end of this process, we have a hedge fund that is basically closed to everybody except for like seven investors in the world.”
Craib: 55% success on 1,000 assets proves edge better than Bitcoin gains
“If you just put all your money in Bitcoin and for three years it went up, there's something not as good about that as if you put, if you invest in a thousand things and you got on average, 55% of them right.”
Craib: Short-term trading strategies lack the capacity to scale
“If you do short-term trading, your capacity is very low. So if you trade very frequently in very small stocks, you're moving the market a lot, and it's very hard to have a strategy that scales.”
Craib: Numerai pioneered cryptocurrency staking back in 2017
“And that mechanism is something we pioneered back in 2017, long before most people had heard about staking.”
Craib: Numerai's native cryptocurrency is more liquid than some stocks
“In fact, our cryptocurrency is more liquid than some stocks, and so people will earn some of it, maybe they'll earn 10,000 dollars by staking on Numurai, and then they'll go to Coinbase and sell it into dollars, or they'll keep staking it on their model.”
Craib: Numerai operates as an AI-driven version of Millennium Management
“I talk about Numerize being a kind of AI version of Millennium. Millennium, they do not have all the same people they had 20 years ago working at Millennium. They have a totally dynamic system of PMs coming in and out, and that's how year over year they've pro…”
Craib: Numerai user base doubled in 2018 despite token crashing 90%
“Well, there was a time in 2018 when NMR, our cryptocurrency, was down maybe, yeah, more than 80%, maybe 90%. And in that year, our user base doubled.”
Craib: Numerai avoids high-turnover trading signals due to execution limits
“If we stuck a seven day momentum feature into Numerai's dataset, the Numerai users would like it and their models would pick up on it. But coming to trade execution, we wouldn't want to trade that fast. And then we wouldn't actually make any money from that.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Richard's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Numerai | 1 | 29 | 60% 3/5 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
 MADLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Numerai | 1 | 19 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |