Marc Malek grew up in Beirut, studied at Caltech where he received a Pentagon grant to model optimal tank placement on a battlefield using artificial intelligence, and was recruited directly from that research into Wall Street. He founded Conquest Capital Partners after a career at Salomon Brothers and UBS, where he led the exotic FX derivatives group before running FX proprietary trading in Europe. Conquest now operates across multiple systematic macro programmes covering 35 markets and 20 time frames.
The Algorithmic Advantage conversation covers Marc’s approach to short-term trend following and regime-based dynamic strategy allocation. His core principle for model design is one of the most useful in the field: if you cannot explain how a model works to a reasonably intelligent person in five minutes in plain English, do not trade it. This is not anti-complexity. It is a discipline against spurious complexity, the kind that backtests well but has no structural reason to persist in live markets.
The discussion also covers the Conquest Risk Index, a proprietary measure for assessing market risk environments that drives dynamic allocation across strategies. Malek’s background in AI and decision support systems under uncertainty gives him a distinctive lens on the problem of regime identification, and he is unusually candid about what replication products do and do not capture from the managed futures return stream.
Related reading: Read: From Impact to Fractal: How Markets Build Themselves from the Bottom Up