Kepos Capital

Kepos Capital

Kepos Capital launched in 2010 in New York, founded by Mark Carhart and Giorgio De Santis immediately following the closure of Goldman Sachs' Global Alpha fund. Carhart's academic legacy — the Carhart four-factor model, published in 1997 — established momentum as a formal risk factor, providing the intellectual architecture that underpins the firm's systematic process. The founding team directly re-assembled key quantitative research talent from the Global Alpha platform, continuing a lineage of factor-based investing that marries academic finance with discretionary macro oversight. Kepos pursues a global systematic macro strategy, executing across equities, fixed income, currencies, and commodities. The firm generates returns by isolating persistent risk premia — carry, momentum, value, and volatility — within highly liquid, exchange-traded instruments. Unlike discretionary macro peers, Kepos embeds trade construction entirely within a quantitative framework, though portfolio managers retain the authority to override model signals during extreme dislocations. The geographic footprint spans developed and emerging markets, with particular depth in G10 currency and rates markets. The firm also operates a registered commodity pool, Kepos Capital Partners LP. The firm maintains a deliberately lean structure, consistent with liquid quant shops. Investment operations and research center on a single New York location. Mark Carhart serves as Chief Investment Officer and retains direct authority over portfolio construction, while Giorgio De Santis leads risk management and quantitative research. In May 2024, the firm filed an SEC disclosure reflecting a Form D amendment for its flagship fund, continuing the vehicle's open-ended capital-raising structure (per SEC filing, May 2024). The firm does not operate adjacent philanthropic vehicles or multi-family-office services, remaining a focused systematic hedge fund manager. Kepos occupies a narrow and structurally differentiated lane: a pure systematic macro hedge fund born from one of the most academically consequential factor-research lineages in finance. Unlike multi-strategy platforms that aggregate dozens of autonomous trading pods, Kepos operates a single central research and execution book. That architecture concentrates all risk-taking authority with Carhart and his senior partners, creating a governance structure that reject the pod-shop model in favor of a unified firm-level portfolio — a design that makes the fund's profile meaningfully different from both Citadel and Brevan Howard.