Published on September 11, 2025
Watch the full video of this panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel Discussion with Evan Szu (Co-Founder & CEO at Gamma Prime)
Evan Szu, co-founder of Gamma Prime, presents the company’s platform focused on alternative investments designed to thrive in bear markets. He introduces three unique hedge funds: a statistical arbitrage fund, a foreign exchange exotic pairs trader, and a reinsurance fund, all offering substantial returns and minimal market correlation. Evan emphasizes the importance of genuine diversification and regulatory compliance, highlighting Gamma Prime’s proprietary technology and expertise in finding high-potential, non-correlated funds. The presentation also explains how the platform accommodates diverse regulatory environments and offers investment opportunities to a wide range of investors.
Evan Szu (Gamma Prime)
We come to the animal portion of the presentation. My name is Evan Szu. I am one of the co-founders here at Gamma Prime.
Thank you for coming to the event. As you guys, if you were in ETH Denver, you know I tend to do things a little strange. This I want you to meet is Styopa.
He is a fully grown male grizzly bear. It’s not AI. This is really him.
And these guys weigh about, I don’t know, about 400 kilos. So I would say that’s like maybe the four of us, me, dog pile together, right? It’s a thousand pounds for you Americanos.
What do you know? Do you guys know what they eat? Just shout it out.
Meat. What do bears eat? Fish.
Yes, they do like salmon. Anything else? They just eat fish.
Honey. Anything else? Well, this is their favorite.
That sauce is a blend of retail investors, meme coins, and all of the hype, kind of hype-seeking. Yeah, it doesn’t taste very good. You can see him like, yuck.
It’s a little bit in the bloody side. So this is a fun way to say, hey, you know, Styopa, his favorite thing to do is to wake up in the middle of a bull market and just go to town. He starts chowing down on all these hypey meme projects, right?
He ends up going after investors who think they’re geniuses in the bull market. But when he comes to town, now you get to see who’s swimming naked.
What we built at Gamma Prime is designed for the bear market. We are a platform for alternative investments that most of them are bear-proof.
So this is our time, and I want to share with you what we’ve been up to. Let me tell you about some of the funds that we have on the platform.
Okay, so each of these is a hedge fund, which is, in case you don’t know what a hedge fund is, it’s essentially just a pooled investment, right? So you end up getting a bunch of people together, and then you have some manager who does some sort of trading or investment for you.
VCs are doing exactly the same thing, but most of these funds are liquid, meaning you can get in and out of them pretty quickly, right?
These are not our hedge funds. These are funds that have come to the platform to help to get what it is that we offer.
So fund number one is a statistical arbitrage fund. This is the same thing that Citadel does. You guys have heard of DeepSeek. They are not originally a large language model AI. They were actually a hedge fund, and they did statistical arbitrage in China, but they can’t do it in crypto because they’re in China.
And Citadel does StatArb in the U.S. in stocks, but they can’t do it in crypto because they’re in the U.S. So this fund does StatArb in crypto. Returns are 28 to 35 percent.
PPINGOFR just means, you know, past performance is not a guarantee of future results, but that’s pretty much about as good as you can go off, right? Correlation to the market is minimal.
I just had lunch with a guy that trades this. I asked him, how have you done, right? Markets tanked 21 percent. Crypto has been up and down. He’s like stable as a calm breeze, like on a sailboat.
This is something that’s completely orthogonal to the market, right? It’s truly delta neutral or truly market neutral.
Fund number two is a foreign exchange exotic pairs trader. This guy is known as the boy genius in Southeast Asia, right? And he manages money.
His returns are 33 to 38 percent. I just checked in with him. He said, so his annualized returns are 35.8 percent for the last five years. So if you compound that up, that’s like 400 percent, right? And he’s doing this in a way that’s consistent. He’s not gambling. He’s really good at trading, right?
And I just asked him, I was like, how are you doing, right? Been a bear market. He said, I’ve already passed this for the year, and it’s not even May yet. Same thing, completely uncorrelated. He’s trading the Great Britain pound to the Japanese yen. That’s sort of like completely separate from tariff craziness, right?
Fund number three, reinsurance. This is what every insurance company needs to back up their insurance. It’s a favorite thing of Brookshire Hathaway and Lloyd’s. We have a fund, returns 20 to 42 percent. Same thing, completely uncorrelated to the market.
They all have risk, but the risk is not just going to get dragged down by the stock market. The risk for fund three is, you know, too many wildfires or something like that. This guy’s here. He’s at the conference right now. We can introduce you to him. And these two other funds, they’re all friends of ours as well.
So, what we do is we find funds that are unusual and hard to find. So, all this stuff, my guess is it’s pretty weird. Like, you wouldn’t, I wouldn’t know where to go to get film finance. Now, it’s our job, so we go and do, you know, the research to hunt it down.
But the key thing is, all the funds on here are lean and mean, meaning they can still generate outsized returns. Once you get the BlackRock size, you can’t have a 38 percent return.
The other thing is, it’s genuine diversification. A lot of people say, oh, I’m diversified because I own, you know, Citibank and IBM and Microsoft. You’re not. You just have the same position on three times because stocks, they’re about 70 to 75 percent correlated with the actual underlying index.
And when things tank, people sell things indiscriminately and correlations go to one. So, what this allows us to do is we can solve a problem, which is, how do you generate returns with less risk?
So, if you have something that’s truly not correlated with the market, let’s say you’re an amazing stock trader, right? You get 28 percent already because you’re a genius, right?
Well, if you just take half your portfolio and instead of doing it in stocks, you stick it in fund number one, your risk goes down 30 percent because it’s not correlated. So, you had 100 units of risk, now you’re down to 70. You split it into quartiles and you put it in all three funds, your risk goes down 50 percent.
So, exact same returns, half the risk because alpha averages, beta cancels, right? That’s the entire driving impetus behind Gamma Prime. But what you need for that is you need to be able to find funds that are still early and growing and so have a lot of opportunity that are genuinely diversified.
By the way, some like 70 percent of hedge funds out there are just U.S. equities, long short. So, if you just go find a small fund, you’re not diversified. You’re back in the same bucket as everyone else. You’re just buying stocks. Don’t pay somebody 2 and 20 to buy your stocks for you. It doesn’t work.
90 percent of those funds underperform the market after fees because a 2 and 20 fee structure is a huge hurdle to hit when the underlying stocks have the 70 to 80 correlation with each other. What you want is film finance. What you want is reinsurance. What you want is stat arb that’s not available to most people. That’s the way you get diversification.
So, how do you find this stuff? It’s hard to find. That’s our job. Our background is this blend of technology and trading. I’ve been in markets for 32 years. Many of us have run hedge funds before, but we’re also technologists.
So, you may have heard earlier, I’ve done machine learning for 28 years, which is about 24 years longer than the current craze. I was one of the first people to try to model prices, and I know it doesn’t work, right?
And we use machine learning. We also have multiple guys, Uniswap as well, that have the background on technology. So, we take these funds and use our expertise to scour, bring them together, vet them, because not all small funds are equal, and not all non-correlated funds are necessarily good for your portfolio, and then we bring them to you with technology.
That’s essentially us. So, I always tell people, we use machine learning, but we’re not an AI company, and we use Web3 because it’s a great tech stack, but we’re not a Web3 company either.
We like it because it’s got all sorts of stuff built in, like stablecoin payments, distributed ledgers, but all of our hedge funds are also fully regulatory compliant. So, we don’t just rely strictly on Web3 as our gatekeeper, so to speak, and some people are like, oh, you know, Web3 should be always permissionless, and stuff like that.
Yeah, FTX and Anchor Protocol and Terra Luna, they were on chain too, didn’t prevent that. But what would have prevented that are Web2 safeguards. Every one of these funds is fully regulatory compliant. It means that they’ve got an auditor, they’ve got a fund administrator, they have proper segregation of money.
It’s like, that money doesn’t belong to you. It was given to you as a custodian. There’s not that concept in Web3.
It’s kind of crazy. People are like, here’s just some money, and I hope that you don’t go and spend it on your mom’s house or a Lambo, right? So, what we have is the best of both worlds.
Now, when it’s fully reg compliant, it means pretty much everybody here could invest in them. So, if you’re in the US, you have to be accredited. Probably most of you guys are.
If you’re in the UAE, the regulations are very different. Probably all of you could qualify for it. So, the other thing we solve for is that kind of matrix.
Okay, where are you from? Where’s the fund located? And therefore, what can you qualify for?
And the idea is you come to our platform, and you do your KYC, which is the one thing you do need to do, because it is reg compliant. And then we say, okay, well, you’re from this area with this stuff. You qualify for these funds, and we show those funds to you.
And from the fund side, it works the other way as well. Because funds are like, I want to get access to that one guy in Malaysia. But it’s not worth it for me to figure all the regulatory stuff out just for that one check.
However, somebody else does that technologically, happy to take the money, right? So, that’s essentially the offering.
So, yeah, we love a bear market. And I hope this isn’t rude, but the way we see it is, you have three choices. You can get involved with the funds. Because if you want to, let me just show you these teams.
These two guys are here as well. Korath and Chan, they’re running the event. So, you can feel free to talk to them.
There’s also a couple, anybody with a Gamma Prime shirt, and they can tell you how to get involved with these funds. We’re pre-launch from the platform side. But what these physical events are, is a way for people to actually meet the hedge fund managers and actually do the investments face-to-face.
And some people prefer that. So, this helps you run with the bears. But something to keep in mind is, these funds do just as well in a bull market too.
So, fund number one has a three-year track record. And fund two, as I told you, has a six-year track record. That goes through all the bear and bull markets as well.
So, it’s not like you’re short the markets and hoping only for a bear market. It’s like, well, look, you become essentially all weather.
Second thing is, yes, of course, I want to introduce the CAP platform to you. You can own a piece of the platform, people that want to invest and get involved.
There’s a saying you’ve probably heard, which is don’t mine gold, sell shovels. Well, this is a San Francisco thing because all the gold miners went bust. But the people that sold the shovels, they made the money. Well, the people that are selling the shovels, that’s the hedge funds. We are the port.
So, own a piece of the port, right? The gateway, the platform. Or just be bear chow, if that’s your thing.
All right. Thank you. I’ll give a couple minutes. Any questions?
Spectator
So, you mentioned the regulations, right? And I heard one of the founders is Canadian. And you mentioned that the regulations here are different. But you’re here promoting Gamma Prime. So, how, like, what’s the, how will you integrate in an unregulated market?
Evan
So, all of our funds are full hedge funds. Meaning that they are regulatory compliant, they’re domiciled somewhere. So, the guiding law about regulations is essentially where the investor comes from.
So, the fund itself is, unless you’re in the US, then the fund is also kind of screwed. But for instance, if you’re a UAE resident, the requirements for investing in hedge funds are like, it’s your money, go ahead, right? In the US, it’s like, well, you have to be accredited, which means you need at least $300,000 of income, or a million dollars, or blah, blah, blah.
And then, it can only take 99 of these guys, or some regulatory law. So, we take care of all that. That’s part of the appeal of the platform, you don’t have to think about it.
You come in, you’re like, I’m from Canada. Okay. In Canada, there’s a lower form of accreditation. We take all the information, we go, okay, do you qualify for these funds?
Right. So, some of those funds are crypto funds, but they are fully regulated. And I think that’s really the niche around family offices. Because family offices are often crypto-curious, but they do not want to get caught with an FTX, right? They don’t want to get a Terra Luna up there onto their books, and then suddenly they’re just screwed.
Reg compliance helps to mitigate that risk. Any other questions? Just to warn you, I’ll be doing another one of these again in a few hours.
But it’s because I love that bear. He likes getting scratches. That was his thing. And just so you know, bears smell totally fresh. You would think that, like, it’s a big stinky dog. No, he’s like, you can’t smell anything. You scratch him, and it’s like, wow, you smell cleaner than he probably thinks I smell. Let’s put it that way.
Any other questions or thoughts? Thanks for coming out. Glad you guys could make it. We’re also going to be in Cannes, France, and then also in Singapore as well. And again, you can get in touch with us, any of the team members with Gamma Prime gear.
All right. Thank you.
