Since Su Zhu originally retweeted his 2019 post about Alameda’s pitch deck, I’ve been craving to get my hands on it, and Twitter user https://twitter.com/gdont12 was able to come up with it. A huge thank you again @gdont12 for this file.
The original is in image form, for the sake of better readability & searchability I have transcribed it and copied the images. I have made use of Apple’s (usually very good) OCR to assist in this, please comment if there are any errors I’ve missed.
Introduction
Alameda Research is a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm. We are the best crypto trading firm in the United States and among the most serious firms across the globe.
We manage over $55m and trade over $150-300m a day across thousands of products: all major coins, altcoins, and their derivatives. With an established presence in the United States, Japan, and the British Virgin Islands, we have a full-scale global operation with the ability to trade on every market, on every exchange.
With our decades of experience from Jane Street, Optiver, Susquehanna, Facebook, and Google, we’ve built the most sophisticated trading systems in the crypto world and quote tighter OTC spreads than anyone else.
We consistently outperform financial firms operating in traditional markets and long-only crypto funds. Up until now, we’ve maintained a low profile, and are emerging to seek funding; we have capacity for hundreds of millions.
Our Performance
HIGH RETURNS IN ANY REGIME
The crypto market’s high volatility and myriad inefficiencies make it an exciting and dangerous space for trading firms. Alameda is proud to have the highest and most consistent returns of any crypto trading firm we know of. We are extremely confident we beat long-only strategies.
| Returns | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | Annualized |
| Alameda | 7.0% | 8.7% | 9.7% | 6.3% | 6.8% | 6.1% | 6.7% | 4% | 110.6% |
| BTC | -33.6% | 29.26% | -21.40% | -16.09% | 32.47% | -14.79 | -5.87% | -3.0% | -49.8% |
| ETH | -53.7% | 71.5% | -18.9% | -22.0% | -7.1% | -39.9% | -18.8% | -33.0% | -89.1% |
| S&P | -2.69% | 0.27% | 2.16% | 0.48% | 3.50% | 3.03% | 0.43% | -6.94% | -0.2% |
CONSISTENCY
Crypto markets are ever-changing, and only the best firms can show consistent results through all regimes. We are among them:
we haven’t had a losing week in six months
Our services
We have over $50m in assets under management and trade over $150-300 million per day. We provide liquidity on exchanges and service OTC trades 24/7.
ALGORITHMIC TRADING
We make hundreds of thousands of trades a day through our algorithmic, machine learning-driven automatic trading systems. We capture inefficiencies across thousands of markets and tens of exchanges by deploying pure arbitrage and statistically-motivated strategies.
MARKET MAKING
We adopt a market-neutral approach, quoting buy and sell prices for thousands of products and earning the difference when customers trade both sides. We make full use of our capital, deploying over 2/3 of it in open orders at any given time. We avoid making directional bets and never have more than 10% of our AUM in unhedged positions. In maintaining low exposure to market moves and generating returns from imbalances in supply and demand, we thrive in all environments.
Our market making ability hasn’t gone unnoticed by exchanges and stablecoins. We are engaged in market making partnerships with several entities, in which we receive fee rebates to provide liquidity. For some, we maintain spreads 10-20ps wide with 99% uptime on the partner’s most important markets.
OTC TRADING
We are building up our OTC business, providing quotes on all exchange-listed coins. Our US-based competitors do the vast majority of their volume in OTC. We don’t, yet. With our unmatched exchange-based trading, we provide tighter spreads and for larger size than anyone else, and clients are noticing. We currently do $10m in OTC trades per week and will scale this up dramatically as we find more business.
Our Advantage
Plain and simple, we have better trading, engineering, and operational talent than any other cryptocurrency trading firm. We have decades of experience from the best trading firms on Wall Street, including Jane Street and SIG, and the best technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Google and Facebook.
Our experience and expertise lets us outcompete the rest where it matters:
generating idiosyncratic trading advantages with our research, market neutral algorithms, execution strategies, and market-making partnerships
developing best-in-class technology with colocation to guarantee us the best data speeds, sophisticated automated trading systems, and reliable and stress tested risk management systems
establishing our solid operational framework with robust banking, legal, accounting, and exchange-partnership infrastructure
maintaining flexibility across market regimes by analyzing market trends and developing highly expressive trading systems that can succeed in any environment
We combine our advantages in trading, OTC providing, and market making to provide better services in each than our competition can in any.
Investment offerings
PACKAGES
We offer one investment product:
15% annualized fixed rate loans (no lockup)
We can accept both fiat and crypto and can pay interest denominated in either. We can take on another $200m in capital and still achieve returns that beat traditional and crypto markets.
For investors with specific risk profiles, we are happy to discuss custom packages. For investments of $50m or more, we are willing to discuss higher rates of return.
HIGH RETURNS WITH NO RISK
These loans have no downside – we guarantee full payment the principal and interest, enforceable under US law and established by all parties’ legal counsel. We are extremely confident we will be pay this amount. In the unlikely case where we lose more than 2% over a month we will give all investors the opportunity to recall their funds and we will still guarantee full repayment.
Our Team
(this segment uploaded as an image to preserve formatting, bios repasted below)
Our Team
Sam Bankman-Fried
CEO
Before founding Alameda, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies, and equities, and designed their automated OTC trading system.
Gary Wang
СТО
Gary was a software developer at Google, where he developed price aggregation and serving systems for Google Flights. He graduated from MIT, majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science.
Andy Croghan
COO
Andy led operations for Susquehanna International Group’s crypto desk, helping it become one of the first big institutions to enter the space.
He worked on SIG’s floor operations for Options trading for 5 years.
Nishad Singh
ENGINEERING MANAGER
Nishad was a software engineer on the Applied Machine Learning team at Facebook. He graduated summa cum laude from Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Caroline Ellison
TRADER
Caroline was a trader at Jane Street, where she was responsible for index rebalances on the equities desk. She studied math at Stanford and graduated
Phi Beta Kappa.
You can see the original here: https://archive.org/details/alameda_investor_pitchdeck
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