Harvard Economist and Tech Entrepreneur aim to Deepen DeFi Adoption in Latin America — Set Social Trader Spotlight

Published in

Set Labs

5 min readJul 9, 2020

Welcome to the Set Social Trader Spotlight Series. In these posts, we give you insight into exciting new traders that are on the Set Social Trading platform. If you want to get primed on Set Social Trading, you can click here.

Today, we‘ve got an interview with MoonQuant Capital, a new trader on the platform and creator of the Set of Sets Trailblazer Fund, for all of you to enjoy.

MoonQuant Capital’s Sets are currently live on TokenSets — you can check them out here.

Hi MoonQuant Capital, nice to have you. Your team has quite a deep background in finance, economics, and technology. Can you give us an intro of yourselves and what you do?

Alfredo: Hey. It’s great to be in this space! I think it’s one of those symbiotic combinations that kind of work out from moment zero! We got together for this enterprise bringing very complementary backgrounds, and many common interests and passions, on and off-chain! I am an Economist that very early on turned into a central banker. First in the economic research area, but later I specialized in banking regulation, and coincided with the development of the Basel II standards (in which I got to participate representing the Argentine CB). That gave me a deep understanding of financial systems from a rather broad point of view, which in turn then helped me prepare for my next career evolution developing and implementing risk models now in the private sector. I also developed an academic career, teaching a couple of MBA courses in banking regulation and risk management. As many people do, I had been trading my own equity portfolios for a long time, being close to its evolutions, and testing some algos, in line with the better outcomes they were producing. But I fell in love with Blockchain, Cryptos, and the new paradigm they represent, almost as soon as I started studying them deeply. As a former regulator, my first impression was of caution and disbelief, but early into Satoshi’s whitepaper first read I started to see the deep side of this world. And never left since! Trading crypto is like riding a rocket 24/7! It’s hard to think you’d have such a thing as market hours… it’s Investing 2.0!

Rodrigo: I had quite an eclectic trajectory, but always felt a profound devotion and fascination with technology. I focused on technical analysis and futures trading for many years before I discovered bitcoin in 2012. It was love at first sight — a technological innovation that could be traded.

In 2018, I co founded cripto247.com and the C20.io — the largest spanish crypto conference in the world. I strongly believe that crypto is unstoppable and will transform the meaning of markets.

Can you go into more detail about that Set and its strategy?

A MoonQuant “Set of Sets” (SoS) is an investment strategy where signals from several top-performing Sets are combined and aggregated into a single Set. Similar to a fund of funds, we created a “set of sets”. As for now, sets only allow for 2 assets, so we had to think of a way to aggregate the data off-chain, and pick up on the construction for the rebalancing signals and portfolio allocation from the available information. It was a challenging construction, but we love it and are very eager to see it work out!

Investors increase diversification of their portfolio and limit the risks of a single Set strategy. The benefits of diversification reduce Set volatility while maintaining average returns. The efficiency of investing in a SoS also implies a savings in rebalancing, streaming, and performance fees.

What is unique about the crypto scene in LATM?

LATAM is a great region for crypto! First, we have so many young developers who are, simply put, brilliant! We can name a few, at the risk of leaving some great ones out. Our good friend Sant Siri, founder of Democracy.earth and a well known figure in the space, is Argentine. Of course Wences Casares founder of Xapo, Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar from RSK/IOV Labs, and Mariano Conti, head of smart contracts for Maker Dao are good examples of brilliant people from the region!

LATAM has a very active crypto scene. Many DeFi groups and fora are filled by literally thousands of developers and enthusiasts. Also, sadly, one of the reasons also for crypto being so hot in the region is that some countries have high inflation rates, and very stringent capital controls, and anti-investment policies. Creative people tend to turn away from that, and into the freedom and potential of crypto.

As a previous central bank economist for Argentina, what is your opinion on Central Bank Digital Currencies? How do you feel about cryptocurrencies being a complement to fiat currencies?

There is a lot coming crypto’s way at the moment. Many countries in the region are seriously studying CDBCs. It’s all logical. Many of LATAM’s currencies have been devalued at some point in time. We believe the improvements that Blockchain technology brings to traceability and circulation, financial inclusion decentralization, and desintermediation will be great tools for policy makers. Moreover, at the University I am leading a group of students that are doing a research project for Smart Monetary Policy, based on smart contracts and not discretionary politicians. An incredible topic to research!

Where can people find you online?

At www.moonquant.capital

MoonQuant Capital discord channel

info@moonquant.capital

Anything else you’d like to tell us or your potential followers?

We loved the idea and concept of Tokensets from the minute we discovered it. It was funny, but Rod and I were chatting before a meeting, and I remember him telling me there was this protocol I needed to check, that he thought was the “future of investment.” And I immediately said: I just saw Tokensets online. Yes! That one! It’s funny how it came up! So we are very excited to be able to now be part of this space. And also to contribute to the Spanish version of the site - helping to bring these great instruments closer to Latin America.

We have big plans already in the pipeline, which we’ll be disclosing in more detail soon. We have more sets on the way, too. MQSS, MoonQuant’s Set of Sets Trailblazer fund, is a medium risk option. We want to provide our followers with a more aggressive strategy, based on WBTC as the riskier asset, and an interesting combination with it. Just stay tuned!

We’re also developing a concept that will be very suitable to Latin American Investors seeking to maintain, or securely invest, their dollar savings. For them, we are creating a set that alternates stablecoin income, in a way that it will never go red against USD, as the principle of stablecoins allows. It will be a low return set, but with positive return guarantee, featuring hack and smart contract insurance. This could be a very competitive instrument for Latin American investors that want to maintain a very liquid asset (token) that they can redeem instantly and that can offer some near to fixed passive income. We are very excited to present this in the very near future, so stay tuned also for that!

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed reading this interview! You can view MoonQuant Capital’s profile here. If you’d like to be notified of any future product updates, head here to sign up to email notifications!

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