Why I'd Rather Be Boring and Right: Jackson Wong on Building Theo Quant

What drew you to building in this kind of market?

I first touched crypto in 2018, mining a bit of Ethereum at home and converting it to Bitcoin. I lost the wallet password not long after and didn't get it back for two years, which was an early lesson that custody can't depend on one person having it all.

Through 2019 I mostly left it alone. Investment banking and private equity work were taking up most of my attention at the time.

Then COVID hit. I could no longer fly out to sit with CEOs and stock exchanges where those deals depended on, so the work stalled. I suddenly had a lot more time at home and a lot fewer live deals to fill it. I turned that same market experience toward crypto instead. I initially wanted to invest in crypto quant funds, however, that was unsuccessful. So by 2021 I started building my own team to come up with our own trading system. That's really where the current chapter started.

What did the early building phase actually look like?

This was before AI made writing code easier for non-engineers. We were learning how to build the systems ourselves, without shortcuts. Some of what we needed to do could not be done by hand at any scale that mattered, so it had to be systems from the start, not just effort.

None of it started as a company. It began as a way to manage and trade our own assets. We didn't set out to hire anyone. As the work grew, we brought in people we already knew and trusted, and the company formed around the work. We set out to build a disciplined way to manage our own assets. The company came after.

Was there a specific moment you decided to build something of your own, rather than stay in a role somewhere else?

Yes, and it started with rejecting my own first idea. I didn't set out to build a trading firm. I initially considered allocating capital to an external algo-quant manager. To do that properly, you either have to become excellent at performing due diligence on others' strategies, and you almost have to trust someone completely at certain times. Because the alpha is often the gap between traditional finance and decentralised finance. None of those felt like a real plan.

So I spent about a year on that, right at the turn of the 2021 bear market, and never found a fund I was willing to hand my own capital to. That's the moment this became something to build, not something to invest in. Something I build for myself.

Have you ever turned down something exciting, a hot trend or a fast-moving opportunity, because it didn't fit how you think?

Constantly, and it comes down to one belief. I don't think we're wizards. I don't think anyone can reliably predict where markets go next, including us. That's the whole reason we chose arbitrage over directional trading. Arbitrage doesn't ask you to be right about the future. It asks you to be disciplined about the present.

We care more about risk discipline than dramatic predictions. Today, everyone is pouring in capital to predict the future; we decided to stay disciplined.

An impressive backtest is not enough on its own. That's not what we're building, and it never will be.

What do you think people misunderstand about the markets Theo Quant operates in?

I do not think the useful distinction is crypto versus traditional finance. Markets are adopting new infrastructure at different speeds, and the instruments people use are changing with them. What matters to us is understanding how a market functions, where its constraints are, and whether we can operate in it with discipline.

We are not trying to make a grand prediction about which market wins. We are trying to build systems that remain useful as markets change.

Where does this philosophy come from?

The private equity and investment banking work before this had one instinct in common with what we do now: find the gap between two places that don't communicate efficiently, and earn your keep by bridging it. Some of the deals I worked on involved helping companies in emerging markets list on exchanges abroad. Different market, same shape of opportunity.

When I came back to crypto after COVID stalled the deal work, I found that same kind of arbitrage opportunity again, just in a different market. What carried over was not a view on any one asset class. It was an interest in how markets connect, where their infrastructure creates friction, and where disciplined systems can make that process more reliable. The same instinct applied, but the market required systems rather than manual execution. That's where the “quant” in quant trading had to come in, and where the shift from deal-making to building actually started.

If someone who knew you ten years ago saw Theo Quant today, what would surprise them, and what wouldn't?

People tend to assume that once you've picked a lane in your career, you're stuck in it. I don't think that's true. It's mostly in your head.

The surprise, probably, is the field itself. Private equity to investment banking to building Theo Quant is not an obvious line. What wouldn't surprise anyone who knew me back then is the discipline underneath it. That part never changed. Only the market did.

Next in this series: how Theo Quant approaches risk.