Mao Ching Foo: Running Quant Funds, Data Science & IQ vs. EQ - E96

Mao Ching Foo is the Co-Founder at RealVantage, a property co-investment platform bringing access and enables users to easily own investment grade properties without the traditional hassles of being a landlord.

Previously Mao was the CTO & Chief Data Scientist of Funding Societies | Modalku, leading and growing the technology and data teams while working closely with the business teams to scale the platform for users. Prior to Funding Societies, Mao founded QVantage, a startup empowering equity traders to make smarter decisions using professional quantitative insights. He has also served as Chief Data Scientist of Paktor, a technology startup with presence in 8 countries in the region, and over 5 million users. In this role, he set up the full data science infrastructure and pipelines, built up a team of data analysts, scientists and conducted various studies / models to advance Product & Marketing metrics lift.

Before the world of startups, Mao was a quantitative equities trader / portfolio manager in Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco, and subsequently at Ronin Capital, a proprietary trading firm in Chicago. In these roles, he managed all aspects of a market neutral quantitative equities long-short global portfolio. This included researching alpha signals, constructing country specific Barra-type daily risk models, automatic sub-hourly portfolio optimizations, automatic trade execution algos & T-Cost analysis. Trade execution was through a Java OMS on FIX connectivity to DMA destinations. Market exposure was 100 x 100 mio long short with consistent after cost IR performance of 2+ on the overall global portfolio.

Mao graduated from Stanford with a MSc. and a MComp, BComp Hons in Computer Science from National University of Singapore. He has publications in top ranked journals, refereed conferences and book chapters. He is a strong believer of building technology startup ecosystems and is an angel investor and mentor to several startups in the region.

Show notes at: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/mao-ching-foo

You can find the community discussion for this episode at: https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/mao-ching-foo

This episode is produced by Kyle Ong.