Fund Prospectus: The Alternative Desk ($ALTD)
Alpha, anywhere
Welcome to the alternative desk, and thank you for giving me your time. Genuinely. There’s a lot of finance and finance-adjacent content out there online, much of which in my opinion leaves something to be desired in terms of content quality and honesty. As exciting as it is to be told that there are 0DTE options strategies which will generate 100x returns and daytrading strategies which are surefire wins, it can tend to blend into a homogeneous blob of aggressively cut videos, lacking the detail and transparency that would make it worth engaging with. Not to mention the aesthetically violent AI-slop content that exists solely to maximise engagement and curry favour with the algorithms. Attention is all you need, after all.
Over the past several years I’ve found much more enjoyment ignoring almost all of this content, and trying to find edges outside of the current in-vogue ideas, which has led to a number of failures and some notable successes. But working on these experiments consistently around a full-time job meant progress was always difficult. My background is in financial analysis and reporting, paired with a curiosity about the investment-grade end of finance that never quite turned into a career in it. As a combination it’s nearly enough to put someone off equity investing; analyse enough financial statements and you’ll realise an unqualified opinion is often an unfortunate double entendre. And just to be clear we’re not here for investment-grade finance anyway.
It’s from this difficulty to make progress that the idea of the alternative desk was born. Instead of a random walk through different experiments, why not attempt to fix the parameters and really see if there’s any value to be had? Why not start with a fixed amount of capital and fixed accounting rules, and attempt to make some genuine money? And why not document it for the wider world, which keeps things honest and imposes some deadlines? But there’s a second reason too. I can’t find anyone doing these experiments. And I’ve tried; mainly because it would’ve been very useful to me over the previous years of building. So in addition to finding out whether there’s money to be made, you get to see everything. The method, execution and outcome, with results reported quarterly, so you can follow the journey.
The desk starts with £5,000. Not a bankroll likely to intimidate, but enough to benefit from scale and afford some fixed costs to implement strategies as effectively as possible. The aim of the fund is the same as almost all funds even if the methodology will be on novel ground; maximise returns within an acceptable level of risk. It’s worth mentioning that this is entirely my own capital, and this project isn’t open to outside money (and yes, this is education and not financial advice). Inevitably, there will be some losses and some unprofitable ideas that end in defeat, but such is the cost of transparency and I hope you’ll appreciate me sharing these with you.
So the natural next question: what actually makes a good strategy on the alternative desk? The traditional financial markets are too efficiently priced and the transaction fees too big for a pot this size to make a return there beyond buy-and-hold investing. The job of the desk is to hunt for edges in alternative markets which are smaller, weirder, and frankly too much effort for the institutional players to bother deploying capital towards. To do this, we’re going to explore one universe per quarter; once an edge is found within it, an appropriate slice of the capital is allocated subject to expected edge and variance, and the strategy is then actively monitored to verify the returns are in line with expectations.
Spinning £5,000 into something meaningful comes with its own practical constraints. The first is time: strategies have to lean algorithmic and automated. For the fund to reach a meaningful number of strategies my role has to remain limited to building, deploying and monitoring. Otherwise the workload will increase unsustainably and the fund won’t be able to scale. The second is what to do with any excess funding. For now, the plan is to keep any uncommitted capital in a money market fund, especially early on, when 0% of it is deployed. Avoiding an equities-based fund also dodges the embarrassment of being the only alternative investment fund in history with a beta of 1.
Now the guidelines above have been set, the overarching approach is simple. Explore the chosen universe over each quarter, find the edges and algorithmicise them into a positively returning strategy and continue. Over several quarters the desk will have numerous strategies running in different universes, all providing a source of uncorrelated returns. And of course, each one will be set out in detail as it happens.
So how does the desk keep score, and what do you as a reader actually get each quarter? Every quarter you’ll see total return, sharpe ratio, max drawdown, as well as a split of returns by strategy, both gross and risk-adjusted, to ensure the aim is being met and returns aren’t simply the product of variance. Everything is accounted for clearly, including the costs of things like VPSs and data feeds. There are of course certain other costs involved in bringing you this content such as domain names and platform fees. These are kept separate so the fund’s numbers reflect the real cost of running strategies independently. Concretely, here’s what you’ll get each quarter from subscribing to the alternative desk:
Mark to Market: The quarterly results, including the breakdowns and analysis that inform the capital allocation strategy for the next quarter.
The Research Desk: Where the experiments live, including the method, execution and outcome.
First Principles: A deep dive format into quantitative topics going from the theory to how they can be exploited.
Finally, let’s set the starting position clearly. The date is August 1st 2026. There’s £5,000 seed capital. Currently 100% in money market funds. Zero novel strategies, which admittedly is quite a low bar to improve from content-wise. Onwards.
The Alternative Desk
Still a going concern