Why Intercept is a podcast project from Bridge Alternatives that aims to explore new ideas in modern investment alpha.  Through conversations with portfolio managers, institutional investors, academics, authors and others, we seek to gain clarity on how and why certain types of alphas exist in an ultra competitive investment landscape.

Bridge Alternatives, a financial services firm specializing in investment advisory and derivatives brokerage, announced today that Chris Gorman has joined the firm as a Partner. Chris will bring his expertise in the commodity and macro space to the Bridge Alternatives platform as they look to enhance their offering.

I came across this Scientific American article in August and was struck by its relevance to a number of conversations we were having with investors. Without going into great detail, we were discussing a couple of investment opportunities that could be classified as esoteric or “off the run.” In many of the initial conversations, investors were trying to dig deeper into the opportunity in order to find an analogous thread that they could follow back to a previous investment or experience. While this is extremely valuable in helping suss out the types of risk inherent in any possible investment, what if the exercise misses the mark completely? What if we are applying our past experience incorrectly, neutering our ability to assess something that is truly novel?

Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz recently wrote this piece discussing Web 3.0 and why a decentralized internet is important for future innovation.  This is a topic that will be explored in depth by Olaf Carlson-Wee at our upcoming time Summit event in April.

Renewable energy and low carbon-technology are coming at an increasing rate and may have a serious impact on the underlying fundamentals in the capital markets.  This recent article published in the March / April 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs touches on China’s role as a leader in renewable energy and will be a topic of conversation at our upcoming time Summit event in April.

When engaging institutional investors on the topic of cryptoassets, the discussion usually centers on Bitcoin and its promise as a digital currency or digital gold.  Given Bitcoin’s longevity and status as the “poster-child” of crypto, this shouldn’t be a surprise.  However, stopping at Bitcoin misses out on the extreme number of disruptive projects being developed on the Ethereum blockchain.  This conversation usually requires one to deploy new mental models for thinking through updated business models and economic incentive structures that will pervade these networks. Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts.  A smart contract is a piece of code that is executed on a blockchain and transfers value between parties conditional on a set of defined parameters.  To date, this function is usually handled by a trusted third party.  Those developing products on smart contract platforms leverage the distributed, censorship-resistant features of Ethereum to deliver new solutions. We believe this technology will disrupt a myriad of industries where rent seeking inefficiencies currently exist.  When one starts to think about the form and time horizon in which this will take place, it is necessary to spend time on individual projects that are looking to disrupt established enterprises.  Each project is embedded with a series of structural decisions and tradeoffs that will impact it’s ultimate success. Kyle Samani’s recent essay, Models for Scaling Trustless Computation, addresses the tradeoffs between various consensus mechanisms on computational blockchains such as Ethereum.  He focuses on three properties: Scalability: the number of transactions that can be process in a specified unit of time Decentralized Block Production (DBP): the number of block producers Safety: the cost of an attack on the blockchain that would have a deleterious effect on the order of transactions or liveness of the network. Kyle posits that blockchains where each node processes each computation and provides consensus about the order of those computations has to decide which two properties they want to feature.  He provides detailed examples of how these tradeoffs work across a variety of different projects and consensus mechanisms. Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain of Multicoin Capital have written seminal essays on a variety of cryptoasset topics.  We are thrilled to have Kyle at this year’s time Summit.  View Kyle’s speaker page.