Team Forum Tournament

Numerai has gathered the best data scientists in the world and let them build machine learning models on the highest quality stock market data.

The result is a next-generation hedge fund which is outperforming market neutral indexes and traditional quant funds.

Numerai has gathered the best data scientists in the world and let them build machine learning models on the highest quality stock market data.

The result is a next-generation hedge fund which is outperforming market neutral indexes and traditional quant funds.

 
Numerai One*
 
Aurum Quant Equity
Market Neutral Index

Monthly performance net of fees

Annualized Return -
Annualized Volatility -
Sharpe Ratio ** -
Sortino Ratio ** -
Correlation to S&P 500 -0.04
New fund — Numerai Supreme is now open to investment. Learn more.

Investment Process

1 Regularized Data

Numerai researches and combines a large number of data sources together and transforms the data into regularized features and targets to create a pure dataset for Numerai's data science community.

2 Modeling

Datasets are made available to our community of thousands of data scientists who compete to create the best predictive models in our data science tournament.

3 Stakes

Data scientists stake their best models with our cryptocurrency, NMR. Good models are rewarded with more NMR. Bad models have their stakes burned.

4 Stake-Weighted Meta Model Signal

Numerai creates the Stake-Weighted Meta Model by combining the latest predictions from the tournaments and outputs a signal for each stock in our investable universe.

5 Portfolio Construction

Convex optimization turns Meta Model signal into a portfolio by constraining risk factors such as country, sector and market risk.

6 Portfolio Returns

Numerai's returns are uncorrelated with the market and uncorrelated with traditional quant funds creating a differentiated and diversifying asset for institutional allocators.

Numerai One

Numerai's Flagship Market Neutral Fund

Numerai One seeks to deliver consistent returns in any market environment with a highly diversified portfolio that is market, country, sector, and factor neutral.

Numerai Supreme

The Unconstrained Expression of the Meta Model

Built on the same investment framework as Numerai One, Numerai Supreme1 seeks to deliver higher returns with higher volatility. This is achieved through a concentrated portfolio of the Meta Model's highest conviction selections while remaining market neutral.

Numerai Supreme launched August 2022.

Get in touch

If you're an institutional investor, mail us at [email protected]

Skin in the game incentivizes the crowd.

Numerai uses cryptocurrency staking to incentivize our global network of data scientists to submit the best possible machine learning models which power our global equity hedge fund. We never trade crypto. But we have created an institutional grade market neutral hedge fund using crypto incentives.

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staked AI models power Numerai

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at stake

Team

Richard Craib

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Richard graduated with a degree in pure mathematics from Cornell University. He built a global equity fund powered by machine learning at $15 billion asset manager, Prudential (M&G).

This is where he first developed Numerai’s approach to financial data regularization, a crucial step in applying machine intelligence to the stock market.

Building on this, in October 2015 Richard founded Numerai in San Francisco to build a new kind of hedge fund where data scientists around the world collaborate to predict equity returns using artificial intelligence.

Dan Spier

Chief Operating Officer

As Numerai COO, Dan looks after the day to day functions of the hedge fund with a mandate to support product and asset growth.

Dan's prior role was head of Portfolio Trading at Aperio Group (now Blackrock), a tax optimized, quantitative SMA provider with $50bn+ AUM. In that role Dan oversaw the firm's trade execution and optimization efforts along with related infrastructure.

Before Aperio, Dan was Head Trader of Standard Pacific Capital, a $5B global long/short equity hedge fund where he led the trading function with a specific research focus on TMT, financial, and industrial sectors.

His career began at Morgan Stanley, where he worked in the Private Wealth Management division supporting ultra-high-net-worth individuals and venture capital clients.

Rich Allen

Managing Director

Rich is responsible for business development at Numerai. His focus is on fundraising and investor relations as Numerai continues to scale its hedge fund business and grow its asset base.

Previously, Rich was the COO of Mission Value Partners, a $1B long-only investment manager in Sonoma, CA with a concentrated portfolio of Japanese equities. He managed the non-investment functions of the firm, including trading, operations, finance, compliance, marketing and client relationship management. Assets under management grew by 2.5x during that time.

He started his career at Nomura Securities in Tokyo and subsequently spent a total of eight years in Japan. Rich speaks fluent Japanese. He also previously held FINRA Series 3, 7 and 63 qualifications and the Japanese Gaimuin Shikaku (外務員資格) designation.

Rui Tang

Director of Portfolio Management

Rui joined Numerai in 2022 and focuses on research and portfolio management.

Prior to Numerai, Rui was a portfolio manager at Acadian Asset Management and MacKay Shields, responsible for alpha research, strategy development, and portfolio management in a number of global equity strategies.

Rui graduated with degrees in economics and statistics from Harvard University.

Michael Oliver

Chief Science Officer

Michael Oliver received his PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014.

He continued this work as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley until 2017 when he joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science as a scientist.

Having competed in the Numerai data science competition since 2016, he left the Allen Institute in 2020 to join Numerai full-time as a data scientist and head of research.

Michael Phillips

Chief Data Officer

Michael's focus is on acquiring, enhancing, and delivering all of the data used at Numerai in the Hedge Fund and Tournament.

Previously, Michael served as Chief Data Scientist for an AI Manufacturing start-up.

He was a top performing participant in the Numerai data science competition which is what led him to eventually joining Numerai full-time in 2020.

He graduated from Georgia Tech with a masters degree in Computational Data Analytics.

Learn More

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Numerai?

Numerai is a quant hedge fund built on thousands of crowdsourced machine learning models.

What's in the Numerai dataset?

The Numerai dataset consists of standard financial market data for a universe of roughly 5,000 global equities. We assemble it from several market data providers and consistently research both traditional and unique features in data that's available over a 10-20 year timeframe.

Why give it away for free?

Numerai gives away data so that users around the world have free, hedge-fund quality data to build their machine learning models -- data they would otherwise not have access to. From inception, Numerai has believed that open participation, in the form of readily available data, is a core component in crowdsourcing solutions to significant data science problems.

Why is the data obfuscated for the tournament participants?

Finding a way to share data without revealing it, a solution that allows us to freely distribute a high-quality set of financial data, was also an early, core innovation that Numerai built. We needed a way to secure the value of the data set while simultaneously retaining its unique features for the purpose of building predictive models with machine learning.

How has the data set evolved over time?

Numerai data has significantly expanded over several iterations: the original data set contained just 40 features and a single target variable. In subsequent releases, the feature count expanded to 310, then to 1100 and now sits at more than 2,000 features. We also now offer multiple targets on which to train your models. More data means better model performance.

Why and how do users stake on the models that they submit?

The ability for Numerai tournament participants to stake on the predictive accuracy of their models is another core innovation we designed. "Skin in the game" both rewards accurate predictions and penalizes inaccurate submissions. Effectively, it is a way to align incentives and engender trust between Numerai and those submitting their models.

Staking is done with NMR, a crypto-token Numerai launched in 2017. NMR trades freely on several of the major crypto exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, etc.) and its utility is solely to stake on models in the Numerai tournament. Based on a scoring metric, users receive a fractional payout on their stake for performant models, with a portion of the stake being burned (destroyed) for poorly performing models. Stake payouts and burns occur on a blockchain with no direct financial benefit accruing to Numerai.

What are the basic guidelines of the tournament?

The Numerai data tournament occurs daily; Participants must submit ranked signals for all ~5,000 global equities in the Numerai data set, forecasting performance over a 20 day (four week) period. Only individual stock predictions, and not any actual models nor code are submitted.

While staking is not required, only staked submissions will be incorporated into Numerai's Meta Model which ultimately manages the trading for and the portfolios in the Numerai hedge fund.

As of July 2023, approximately 5,400 staked models have been submitted for the most recent data tournament, with a staked amount totaling $13 million.

What is the Numerai Meta Model?

The Numerai Meta Model is an ensemble of the individual models that are submitted as part of the Numerai data tournament. Crowdsourcing predictive models and then combining those signals at scale is another unique innovation that Numerai has developed.

The concept of a performant meta model is predicated on the idea that a broad and diverse selection of uncorrelated models will more accurately predict the outcome of a complex data science problem. Particularly, in the case of predicting financial markets where high accuracy and low variance (a high Sharpe ratio) matter more, this kind of ensembling exercise is doubly helpful.

Seven and half years of iterating on this concept of meta model supremacy (better than simple regression, better than an individual handful of correlated machine learning models) has proven out. Numerai's ability to design the right kind of targets in our data set and our ability to neutralize the impact of traditional risk factors have also contributed to the growth in performance of the Numerai hedge fund over the past several years.

What are the characteristics of the Numerai hedge fund portfolios?

The Numerai hedge fund consists of equally weighted long and short portfolios with approximately 750 individual equities in each portfolio. The beta of the combined long/short portfolio is close to zero, uncorrelated to broad market movements and also not exposed to traditional market risk factors such as country, sector or market cap groupings.

What accounts for the excellent fund performance during times of significant market dislocation, like in 2020?

Through several years of iterating on things like data, staking and meta model composition, Numerai has been able to consistently construct a market portfolio where 80%+ of the return is derived from true idiosyncratic (stock selection) risk, rather than the usual factors that drive returns. During times of severe market dislocation like we saw in 2020, a beta-neutral portfolio that's also not exposed to traditional factors will significantly outperform both the market and other purported "market neutral" funds.

Building the Meta Model

Learn about the technology behind the Numerai Meta Model
Numerai One Numerai Supreme

Terms

Minimum investment $5mm $5mm
Lockup 1 Month Notice, 1 Month Liquidity 90 Days Notice, 1 Month Liquidity
Fund Capacity $1bn $250mm
Management Fee 1% annualized 2% annualized
Performance Fee 25% with high-water mark (Class A) 20% with high-water mark (Founders Class) 25% with high-water mark (Class A) 20% with high-water mark (Founders Class)

Portfolio Exposures

Investment Products 100% Equities (Across market capitalizations) 100% Equities (Across market capitalizations)
Holding Period 2-4 Months (Weekly trading) 2-4 Months (Weekly trading)

Risk Management

2
Maximum position size < 3% AUM, monitored daily ~ 6% AUM, monitored daily
Trading Monitor for event risk and close or restrict security Monitor for event risk and close or restrict security
Factor Exposure Beta of ~0 with limited exposure to core style factors Beta of ~0 with limited exposure to core style factors
Target Volatility 15% 20%
Industries All except Biotechnology and REITS All except Biotechnology and REITS

Service Providers

Fund Administrator SS&C
Auditor KPMG
Legal Counsel (US) Cole-Frieman & Mallon
Legal Counsel (Cayman) Maples
Prime Broker UBS
Tax Advisor KPMG
Compliance Consultant Waystone Compliance Solutions

Terms

Minimum investment $5mm
Lockup 1 Month Notice, 1 Month Liquidity
Fund Capacity $1bn
Management Fee 1% annualized
Performance Fee 25% with high-water mark (Class A) 20% with high-water mark (Founders Class)

Portfolio Exposures

Investment Products 100% Equities (Across market capitalizations)
Holding Period 2-4 Months (Weekly trading)

Risk Management

2
Maximum position size < 3% AUM, monitored daily
Trading Monitor for event risk and close or restrict security
Factor Exposure Beta of ~0 with limited exposure to core style factors
Target Volatility 15%
Industries All except Biotechnology and REITS

Service Providers

Fund Administrator SS&C
Auditor KPMG
Legal Counsel (US) Cole-Frieman & Mallon
Legal Counsel (Cayman) Maples
Prime Broker UBS
Tax Advisor KPMG
Compliance Consultant Waystone Compliance Solutions

Terms

Minimum investment $5mm
Lockup 90 Days Notice, 1 Month Liquidity
Fund Capacity $250mm
Management Fee 2% annualized
Performance Fee 25% with high-water mark (Class A) 20% with high-water mark (Founders Class)

Portfolio Exposures

Investment Products 100% Equities (Across market capitalizations)
Holding Period 2-4 Months (Weekly trading)

Risk Management

2
Maximum position size ~ 6% AUM, monitored daily
Trading Monitor for event risk and close or restrict security
Factor Exposure Beta of ~0 with limited exposure to core style factors
Target Volatility 20%
Industries All except Biotechnology and REITS

Service Providers

Fund Administrator SS&C
Auditor KPMG
Legal Counsel (US) Cole-Frieman & Mallon
Legal Counsel (Cayman) Maples
Prime Broker UBS
Tax Advisor KPMG
Compliance Consultant Waystone Compliance Solutions
Numerai
San Francisco