Giant Steps Capital

Giant Steps Capital

Giant Steps Capital was established in 2012 in São Paulo by brothers Flavio and Marco Terni. The firm emerged from Brazil's nascent quantitative finance scene with a research-first culture modeled on Silicon Valley technology companies rather than traditional asset managers. The firm runs fully systematic strategies across liquid futures and equities, applying deep learning and reinforcement learning models to global markets. Asset classes traded include equity index futures, fixed-income futures, currencies and commodities. Positions span exchanges in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The core research process centers on a proprietary machine-learning infrastructure built in-house, with an engineering team led by CTO Otavio Furlan. Giant Steps has historically prioritized capacity-constrained, high-Sharpe strategies over asset gathering and does not offer long-only or fundamental discretionary products. Giant Steps maintains a presence in New York and San Francisco alongside its São Paulo headquarters, placing its research pipeline close to academic and technology talent pools. The leadership team combines quantitative finance expertise with deep technology execution. CFO Rafael Francio oversees non-investment operations. Recent public communications from the firm have emphasized the increasing role of alternative data and compute infrastructure as a competitive moat. In 2023, the São Paulo team expanded its engineering bench to support larger-scale model training for cross-asset strategies. The firm's structural distinction lies in being a Brazil-headquartered quantitative hedge fund that competes globally with systematic managers in New York and London, sourcing machine-learning talent from an ecosystem not historically associated with systematic hedge-fund management. Its fully automated, data-driven execution model contrasts with the fundamentally concentrated, macro-heavy peer set typical of Latin American asset managers.