Some call him China’s Sam Altman.
Others compare him to Jim Simons, the pioneer of quantitative investing.
Liang Wenfeng shares a lot with both innovators, and his impact might end up being as great. Artificial-intelligence models from China’s DeepSeek, the company led by Liang, have taken the world by surprise, racing to the global top 10 in both performance and popularity. The company has done it with less-advanced chips than those available in the U.S., jolting technology executives in Silicon Valley, politicians in Washington and investors around the globe.
Like Simons, Liang is a math geek who caught the investing bug. He realized that computerized analysis of reams of market data could detect hidden patterns—and open the path to profit. His hedge fund, called High-Flyer, manages some $8 billion, making it one of China’s largest quantitative funds.
Colleagues say Liang isn’t one for the trappings of wealth or fame—but he did once say he wanted the respect of the U.S.-led technology world. It is safe to say he has it now.
Born in 1985, Liang grew up in Zhanjiang, one of the port cities on the southern Chinese coast that have traded with the world for centuries. He was a straight-A student in school and began studying calculus on his own in junior high school before going on to China’s prestigious Zhejiang University. As a student, Liang started writing AI algorithms to pick stocks. In 2013, a few years after graduation, he started Jacobi, an investment firm named after German mathematician Carl Jacobi. In 2015, he founded High-Flyer with two college friends.
It was a pioneer in China in applying newer AI techniques so computers could absorb many types of data—not just market prices—and tease out significant patterns.
Unlike high-frequency traders, who try to get a jump of a few milliseconds on others, Liang and his colleagues have focused on medium-frequency trading where positions can be held longer. Liang drew inspiration from Simons, a mathematician and pioneer in quantitative finance who founded the Long Island hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and was using machine-learning techniques in the 1980s.
Liang wrote the introduction to the Chinese version of “The Man Who Solved the Market,” a book about Simons and his team. “Whenever I encounter difficulties at work, I recall Simons’s words: ‘There must be a way to model prices,’ ” Liang wrote.
Over the past five years, at least five funds High-Flyer managed produced average excess returns of more than 20% compared with market benchmarks, according to financial data provider Simu Paipaiwang. . .
Source(wsj.com)
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