DarkPoolKnight

1/ Everyone knows XTX and Gerko. But there’s a whole tier of Russian-rooted trading firms no one is yapping about online. Some are quietly elite, some are cautionary tales. A field guide 🧵

@icmlconf AI forecasting workshop

Workshops! Workshops! Workshops! What are you going to on the last day of #icml2026?

@IndieHedgeFund Swag is good indeed

@DarkPoolKnight Looks like its worth it just for the swag?

At this point #ICML2026 is a quant recruiting fair with some ML papers attached. Trading firms dominate the expo floor.

@bonsaiquant No Anthropic or DeepMind but OAI was there

@DarkPoolKnight No OAI/Anthrophic/DeepMind ?

Fable 5’s safeguards in action: asking about ICML poster sessions is too dangerous. The model knows I’m up to something.

Someone asked @iaindunning about RSI at his ICML talk and I spent a good three seconds wondering why HRT cares about the Relative Strength Index. Turns out the other RSI is the one that cooks us all. Great talk on scaling DL in financial markets. #ICML2026

There's definitely some trend for concentration, but I’m confident more companies will be rising to the top due to these facts: 1/ the market becomes bigger and more fragmented (more niches where smaller firms can make $🔢🔢🔢+ ARR) 2/ people leave big firms to start up their own operations taking alpha with them 3/ big firms don't take all opportunities due to being slow / regulatory risks / low perceived size of the opportunity 4/ compute becomes cheaper

@DarkPoolKnight How confident are you that there is going to be more companies that would rise to the level of XTX or Jump/Jane. It seem like there is the opposite force of concentration (including crypto) especially considering the GPU demand for ML + Infra and how rich current players are.

1/ Everyone knows XTX and Gerko. But there’s a whole tier of Russian-rooted trading firms no one is yapping about online. Some are quietly elite, some are cautionary tales. A field guide 🧵

@wenkafka Nope, I’ll be posting on X for now

@DarkPoolKnight Do you have a Substack? 👀

13/ The pattern repeats: Moscow olympiad pipeline - diaspora - Dubai/Cyprus/Amsterdam - quietly on the other side of your trades, crypto and TradFi alike. Fifteen years ago, XTX didn’t exist and Gerko was just another Moscow State University PhD. The next one is probably somewhere on this list.

12/ DWF. Another mastermind-founder crypto MM. Memecoin degens light candles on Telegram praying DWF doesn’t liquidate them today.

9/ BHFT. Stands for “Better Hand Financial Technologies” and not what you thought. Dubai, remote-first, 100+ people. Rode the post-Covid crypto frenzy, then pivoted to TradFi when volumes dried up. Writes its stack in Rust, poaches senior talent from name-brand firms, reportedly likes hiring sports champions.

8/ FastForward. Nice office in Moscow, and they hired an ex-Kaggle trailblazer to lead quant research. The domestic market still produces real shops.

7/ Spectral Technologies. Quant bases reportedly start at $20k/mo in no-income-tax Dubai - but they expect your soul in return. Sourcing talent from Yandex Data School, a 2-year AI program that arguably outclasses your Stanford stats MSc.

6/ Wunder Fund. HFT since 2014, 50% profit share for quants. Serial experimenters: built Onederx, a crypto perps exchange where takers got rebates and makers paid fees (yes, inverted), later a short-lived meme-trading exchange. Still hunting elite talent via deep learning competitions.

5/ Albert Blanc. Founders’ origin story: winning MOEX’s retail investor competition. Now doing uHFT on crypto from offices in Haarlem and Cyprus, reportedly still finding its footing in ML-driven trading.