If It Trades, Alpha Fades: One Man’s Quest to Discover New Assets

Rishi Ganti argues there is a meaningful alternative to investing in tradeable markets — but it’s not easy.In this episode of the podcast, Julie Segal talks to Rishi Ganti, a veteran of J.P. Morgan and Two Sigma and co-founder of Orthogon Partners, which invests in untraded or esoteric assets. Or what might be even better described as investments that require discovery, a process Rishi calls magical  — it’s finance essentialism, bringing ideas and money together.Julie and Rishi also talk about the seemingly endless stream of college graduates who make their way to Wall Street every year to work in markets that are designed to eliminate exactly what they came for — alpha. People choose to forget what they learned in Economics 101: the law of competition. Rishi, who chose instead to invest in untraded assets, talks about the challenges of finding these opportunities, building structures so they can be invested in, and convincing allocators of the rewards.For more on Orthogon and the problems with modern finance, read ⁠II’s story⁠ from 2020.