Richard Craib teaches machines to trade in the stock market. At the helm of Numerai, the young founder has devoted the fledging hedge fund to his two core areas of interest: pure mathematics and data science. In practice, Craib’s fund works less like an automated army of quants and more like a collaborative AI research project; while machines make the trades, Numerai’s sprawling community of anonymous data scientists compete to create the best trading algorithm. (He even created his own crypto-currency, dubbed the Numeraire, to compensate the most prolific contributors.) His ultimate goal for both Numerai and the Numeraire is to introduce more of an open source approach to Wall Street. Before he was teaching machines the ins and outs of investing, Craib was a data scientist at an asset management firm with $15 billion under management.

Hedge Funds, Data Technology,