Stylus Capital builds upon decades of accumulated research and know-how in traditional asset classes.
Since 2018, we invest in digital assets using systematic investment strategies, proven across asset classes in traditional finance, to help investors get rationally involved in this nascent asset class.
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CO-FOUNDER & CIO
Burak has 15+ years experience in financial markets and has a 10+ year track record in public markets and systematic investing. Burak began his career at JPMorgan’s London office, where he worked throughout the 2008 crisis on Synthetic-CDO2 risk and pricing. He went on to spend two years in Oliver Wyman’s Financial Services practice before launching Stylus Capital. He is a graduate of Bogazici University, Electrical & Electronics Engineering.
CO-FOUNDER & CTO
Onur has 9+ years experience in software engineering. He worked in Palantir Technologies for six years, mainly on orchestration, scheduling and observability for large scale distributed systems. He designed and implemented an open source scheduler for Apache Spark jobs to run on Kubernetes clusters. He is a graduate of Bogazici University, Electrical & Electronics Engineering
RESEARCH ADVISOR
Until 2013 Robert worked for AHL, a large systematic hedge fund, part of the Man Group. He was responsible for the creation of AHL's fundamental global macro strategy, and then managed the funds multi billion-dollar fixed income portfolio. Prior to that Robert worked as a research manager for CEPR, an economics think tank, and traded exotic derivatives for Barclays investment bank.
COO
Charlie began his career at Morgan Stanley, working from 2000 to 2006 in operational roles across fixed income and equities. He went on to spend over 10 years in COO roles for various London-based investment management firms, with board seats on several Cayman Funds and Irish UCITS companies. During this time, he established three investment management firms and managed the operations of 14 Cayman funds and 2 Irish UCITS companies
We do not take discretionary investment decisions. The systematic nature of our strategies help us use the techniques extensively tested across other asset classes.
Our operational setup replicates the best practices of traditional hedge funds — a non-trivial task for crypto asset managers.
The crucial infrastructure for implementing the necessary checks and balances in crypto were slowly built up over the years and only recently reached levels that would satisfy institutional investor requirements.
Crypto assets have unique risks that go beyond just the more obvious counterparty risks, which require close management.
Since 2018, we have successfully navigated the turbulent market conditions and protected our investors against extreme market events.
Our firm was launched on the core insight that crypto is arguably the ultimate momentum asset, due to its total lack of intrinsic value anchors to stabilize the price, combined with its scope for social-media fuelled hype and despair cycles.
Digital assets have unique properties which make them hard to understand and prone to waves of narratives. Their similarity to many different assets (e.g. commodities, currencies, artworks…) can lead to incorrect comparisons, and cause waves of enthusiasm.
This complicates the allocation decisions to digital assets. For example, as fiduciaries, institutions may struggle to justify holding digital assets, since it is unclear whether buy & hold is a positive expected return strategy in crypto, unlike other risk assets such as equities or bonds.
Bringing the right investment styles to this nascent asset class can help investors side-step this complexity, and offer rational ways to get involved in this often irrational asset class even for - or especially for - the sceptics of the underlying technology.
Stylus Capital investors span a broad range of individuals and firms globally, including the executives and founders of some of the top hedge funds, venture capital firms, investment banks and technology companies.
Jul 2023 - On Top Traders Unplugged podcast, Robert Carver tells the story of how and why he became our research advisor, despite being a crypto sceptic.
Jun 2023 - Robert Carver and Burak Yenigun discuss momentum strategies in a crypto context, the unique properties of crypto as an asset class, and its expected returns.
Oct 2022 - Stylus Capital wins the Best Digital Assets Fund award in HFM Performance Awards 2022 (details here)
Mar 2022 - Burak Yenigun joins Tommy Martin on Beyond the Ordinary podcast to discuss momentum strategies in a crypto context, as well as the founder shortage thesis.
Jan 2020 - Burak Yenigun joins Erik Torenberg to talk about the founder shortage thesis, and how the thesis was inspired by the price trends in financial markets.
Stylus was the writing tool used by Sumerians at the invention of writing, in Mesopotamia near modern Turkey, where Stylus Capital was originally founded.
We named our firm Stylus Capital as an expression of our firm’s origins and our research orientation.
The cuneiform symbol ‘𒀀’ in our logo represents the ‘a’ in Sumerian syllabary, symbolizing our search for excess returns, often referred to as ‘alpha’.
