The Voleon Group

The Voleon Group is unusually frank about not fully understanding its own trading: its founders have called the machine-learning systems black boxes, models trained on terabytes of price data that the firm trusts without being able to fully explain them. It is one of the few large quant funds to bet entirely on machine learning rather than hand-built models or human discretion.

The Berkeley address is no accident. Michael Kharitonov and Jon McAuliffe founded the firm in 2007 after meeting at D. E. Shaw, planting it next to UC Berkeley's statistics and computer science departments for the talent pipeline, and McAuliffe still holds an adjunct statistics professorship there while serving as co-CIO. The strategy is long/short statistical arbitrage in global equities, run over horizons longer than the HFT crowd's.