Ex-Asset Management CEO, Madhur Kakkar, bets big on AI in trading digital assets

Madhur Kakkar, former co-founder, shareholder, and ex-CEO of Century Private Wealth has acquired a 50% stake in Dubai-based artificial intelligence-driven digital assets trading platform Quantl AI Ltd as a personal investment.

Quantl offers pre-programmed trend identifiers and alpha miners that can be put together to build a custom strategy along with an extensive library of fully deployable trading bots that can be selected as per investor risk/return preference. The platform boosts of a machine learning algorithm that independently cleans historic market data across financial markets & asset classes, buckets it appropriately and stores it on cloud, this clean market data can be called upon by user for any intervals and time frames. The data helps an investor to back test all the strategies that were either custom built or selected from library before deploying them with real money.

In an interview with Citywire Middle East, Kakkar digs deeper behind his decision to buy a stake in Quantl and how he thinks AI is going to alter the financial market trading.

Why did you buy a 50% stake in Quantl?

This journey, or rather more of a quest, started for me a year back, trying to figure out how the new era of AI is going to dawn upon the financial markets. I have always enjoyed the fast-paced digital asset trading offered through various platforms, so the focus was on identifying solutions to automate trading of financial markets.

Most of the smart money and fund structures around the globe are effectively deploying risk, pricing, and predictive quant models to manage trillions of dollars using AI and machine learning algorithms. However, due to the high cost of infrastructure involved, lack of programming knowledge, complex deployment solutions, and scarcity of trustworthy resources, these AI and ML models haven’t seen popularity among retail and mass affluent clients.

Throughout my career, spread over 18 years with roles ranging from advising on client assets to running teams of wealth managers to spearheading businesses with trading and portfolio management mandates, I have seen a lot of wealth in regional mass affluent and high net-worth client space being managed on a guess work model. The overall advisory still has risks and flaws, coming from a human derived behavioural bias and at times delayed decision making.

My investment in Quantl is a result driven from a series of hackathons with AI engineers, trading champions and programmers from across the globe, to evaluating a lot of global platforms, funds, independent legacy algorithms, and expert advisor bots etc. Quantl’s platform checks boxes when it comes to how data is handled, bucketed and stored on cloud; how various building blocks to a strategy are pre-programmed to help create own unique strategy; how the library of ready-to-deploy trading bots is generated; how the system is independent to any single strategy; and how deployment of these strategies is handled and everything in between.

The Quantl platform, along with its open programming/API solutions is among the first of its kind regionally. The founder Shamaz Khan is an aeronautics and space engineer with a Masters in Computational Mathematics & brings along 15 years of experience working closely with defence departments worldwide, building safety critical systems and handling terabytes of real time data.

What kind of opportunities do you think Quantl will bring to the market?

Post the 2020-21 rally in global financial markets, we have seen a mass acceptability of digitally tradeable assets including stocks, currencies, CFDs, commodities, and cryptos – evident in the region as well, especially the UAE.

However, most of the market participants, both retail as well as high net-worth individuals are still playing the guessing game while trying to beat the markets and earn consistent returns. Clients enter and exit positions on hearsay, without a strategy, sometimes even without understanding the underline. Then there also lies the problem of acting at the right time, which would mean being on a trading platform at odd hours to cover most of these assets.

Quantl provides systematic and automated solutions that allow strategies to analyse any amount of historical data repeatedly, deploy and execute trades without any biases or missing a beat. At Quantl, we will continue to innovate and develop inter-asset strategies, strategies that can identify more tradeable patterns, and random walk simulations using predefined alpha mining equations to come up with better price probability models. For professional users, wealth managers and family offices, Quantl will provide API solutions and data modules to help build their own deployment models, add machine learning models to them, and automate their individual client money management offering, proprietary book management or discretionary portfolio management.

What kind of role is AI playing in disrupting the financial services market?

A lot of major banks and asset managers have dedicated Quant teams which are now becoming a bigger part of their trading desks and playing a major role in actively working on pricing complex derivatives, sophisticated risk models, models to predict asset price probabilities and trade decays. We are already in the middle of an evolutional era which is going to change reality very fast, whether it’s how we think, perceive, analyse, decide, or take action, everything is machine driven now so, it’s in our favour that we learn to adapt. While major smart wealth decisions are already being executed by machines, running a race to execute faster & better, as the cost of financial market infrastructure becomes cheaper thus making cloud based solutions more accessible, it’s high time that individual clients and independent asset managers should start embracing such systematic solutions. We at Quantl are trying to make these advanced automated solutions simpler, understandable, and mass acceptable to provide an enhanced client trading experience.