How an AI Native Trading Firm Mines Alpha with Agents — a real factor, walked end-to-end
Most "AI + quant" talks stop at the concept stage, slides full of promise, run by people who've never put real money behind it. This one goes inside the workflow.
Louis Liu, cofounder of Singapore AI trading firm Varsity Tech, breaks down how his team actually uses agents to find alpha: generating factor hypotheses, writing and backtesting them, and deciding what to keep, walked through end-to-end on a real example.
This is not a "let an AI bot trade for you" pitch. It's the research pipeline an AI-native fund actually runs, made concrete enough that a builder can replicate the workflow and a quant can pressure-test the method.
Bilingual talk + live Q&A — bring your own factor ideas, agent setups, or research problems and ask the person who does this for a living. That access is what your ticket buys: not a recording you could find on YouTube, but the chance to ask someone running it.
About the speaker · Louis Liu
Cofounder, Varsity Tech — an AI native trading firm(Singapore)
NUS medical school graduate who pivoted from biomedicine into quantitative trading
Backed by founders of leading crypto and global trading firms
Member of OpenAI APEC startup network
What you'll take away
Where agents actually plug into a real factor-research pipeline — hypothesis → code → backtest → keep/kill → iterate
The agent architecture and prompting behind it (not generic frameworks)
How to tell a replicable method from noise
Live Q&A on your own research agent trading questions
Who it's for
Quant trading research professionals curious how an AI-native fund operates
Finance professionals (funds, sell-side, consulting) bringing AI into their workflow
Anyone with a little techincal experience who want to get started with agent and quant trading.
Format
Online (Zoom) · talk + live Q&A · ~90 minutes
Wed 1 July 2026, 7:30pm Sydney (5:30pm Singapore)
Bilingual (English / Chinese)
Zoom access sent to your inbox after you register
Tickets
Early bird AUD 59 (until 24 June) / AUD 79 after
Online, no seat cap — but Q&A time is limited; earliest questions get answered first
Hosts
Ody Zhou — AI product builder & consultant @ Bridgelines, ex-Microsoft / ex-HSBC. Lets have a chat if you wanna know more about how AI can be used in your business.
NextGenius — our partnering community