What We Do
Oak St. is an invitation-only global quantitative and securities hedge fund employing mathematical, statistical, and computational methods across global financial markets. Our objective is to build an investment engine that can compound capital across generations: systematic in its design, evergreen in its signals, and simple enough to explain.
Investing begins with understanding how markets work: why they rise and fall, what they are for, who takes risk in them, and what those participants are motivated by. Answer those questions in plain terms and the persistent biases in markets become clearer. Those biases, where they are strong and durable enough, are the raw material for our signals.
Investment Management
Our goal is easily stated and difficult to earn: investment strategies durable enough to survive the states of the world, reliable enough to be run the same way in bad years as in good ones, and patient enough to compound across a lifetime.
Approaches
We seek to identify risk premia and persistent behavioural biases, and to express them through systematic, factor-based, and market-neutral strategies. Every strategy must have a logical economic rationale, an intuitive and explainable process, and the support of empirical evidence.
Systematic Strategies
Our strategies are systematic by construction. We distance the investment process from the daily flow of news, much of which is noise that is difficult to separate from signal in real time, and place more weight on what the historical data shows. We do not need to explain every market move to learn from how markets have behaved; we need signals that have persisted and that we understand.
Portfolio Oversight
Models propose; people remain accountable. Those who oversee the portfolio understand why each model behaves as it does, set the risk it is allowed to take, and review its behaviour against what was expected of it. The process should always be intuitive, logical, and explainable by the people who run it.
Capabilities
Our investment activity is organised into four broad categories:
Futures
Systematic strategies in listed futures on equity indices, government bonds, short-term interest rates, currencies, and commodities, traded on regulated exchanges around the clock.
Equities
Statistical strategies in liquid single-name stocks and exchange-traded funds, built from many small, diversified positions rather than a handful of concentrated ones.
Currencies
Systematic trading in the major and the more liquid emerging-market currency pairs, where deep and continuous markets suit models that trade often and size carefully.
Cross-Asset
Forecast-driven portfolios that combine the firm's signals across asset classes, allocating risk where the evidence is strongest and netting the exposures that offset one another.
Technology Development
We remain curious about new technology and new data, without losing sight of the basic inputs that often reveal most of what matters: expected returns, volatility, price changes, liquidity, and correlation. New datasets have to earn their place in the process. More information is not automatically more signal, and information alone is rarely a durable edge when so much of it is shared.
Generative AI can transform research productivity, data management, data cleaning, and the operational work around a portfolio, and we use it there. Our investment process, however, is deliberately rules-based, and the models that make decisions must produce dependable, intelligible outputs. AI is an excellent supporting tool; it is not the investor.
The team building it is small and growing; the roles we are hiring for are listed under How To Join.
Proprietary Systems
Oak St.’s research and operating software is proprietary and developed in house, built around the firm’s research process, data architecture, portfolio construction, risk controls, and execution requirements.
Simplicity is an asset in anything meant to scale and endure. We build systems that the people who rely on them can understand, inspect, and explain.
Risk Management
Breadth is central to how we think about risk. A large number of genuinely independent positions can reduce idiosyncratic risk, and a more diversified portfolio may have a more robust overall risk profile. That leaves a deliberate choice about how much aggregate risk to take. Diversification does not remove the possibility of serious losses, and concentrated, high-risk portfolios can be especially vulnerable.
Volatility matters, but it is not the same thing as the risk of permanent capital loss or ruin. We design every strategy with the aim of surviving its worst environments, with limits on exposure, concentration, and liquidity set before it trades. Some strategies will struggle for a period and may later provide important diversification when others do not; we size and judge them with that in mind.
We write about how we think about drawdowns and diversification in our Research.
Capital & Partnership
Our investment strategy comes before our fundraising strategy. We are building something that works for the investors already committed to it, and we intend to keep the core mandate intact even when a prospective investor decides it is not right for them. Capital offered in exchange for lower fees, special rights, or unusual liquidity terms may be expedient today and costly to the mandate tomorrow.
Liquidity terms should match the underlying assets and the expected horizon of the strategy. When investors can redeem on short notice, a manager may be forced to sell at precisely the wrong moment, regardless of the investment thesis. Longer commitments and carefully designed redemption terms can reduce that mismatch, but they also limit investors’ access to their capital, so they must be disclosed clearly and agreed in advance. Neither terms nor diversification can ensure a fund’s survival.
What we ask of our partners is a common understanding of the mandate, the risk, and the investment horizon. A shared horizon is what allows a long-term strategy to remain one.
Research & Impact
Our industry is increasingly competitive, and launching a new manager demands more infrastructure, more oversight, and more capital than it once did. We believe a new firm must earn its place with an approach that is genuinely distinct, and ours is built on durable, explainable signals and a long horizon. Our research agenda is meant to deepen over time, from fundamental sources of risk premia to new markets, other forms of bias, portfolio optimisation, margin efficiency, transaction costs, and execution, without abandoning a disciplined, empirical method.
Compounding capital over a long period can also create resources to improve society. We intend to approach that with the same deliberation we apply to investing: thinking carefully about where those resources can make a meaningful difference, rather than writing checks without a considered approach.