Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich. Well. Maritas is a company
Speaker 1: and app founded by two Wall Street veterans. The aimed
Speaker 1: to a democratize Wall Street recruiting and more. The platform
Speaker 1: simulates the experience of working at a fast paced hedge
Speaker 1: fund on your mobile device. At least that's what the
Speaker 1: company's website says. So we want to find out more.
Speaker 1: We welcome Neil Dotta, chief executive officer at Maritas, joining
Speaker 1: us via zoom in New York City. Neil, um, good
Speaker 1: to have you here. Tell us a bit about your
Speaker 1: company and what you guys do. Hi, Carole, Mike, thank
Speaker 1: you for having me so. My my background is I've
Speaker 1: been an institutional allocator to hedge funds for last fifteen years. Um,
Speaker 1: really having exposure to some of the most well known,
Speaker 1: best performing hedge fund managers in the space, and uh,
Speaker 1: over the course of that time, you know, it became
Speaker 1: abundantly obvious that the folks that are in the position
Speaker 1: of making investment decisions and managing money for folks that
Speaker 1: are you know, whether they're they're firemen or police officers
Speaker 1: or institutional investors like myself. It's not necessarily the people
Speaker 1: that have the most talent, but a lot of times
Speaker 1: it's the folks that had the best resumes and found
Speaker 1: themselves in the position to uh manage that capital. And
Speaker 1: really what we wanted to do with Maritas was to
Speaker 1: kind of create a platform that democratizes this access that
Speaker 1: forever has been limited to folks who have specific resumes,
Speaker 1: came to specific schools, um So that's the platform in
Speaker 1: a nutshell, and really what we do is we extend
Speaker 1: this access to folks regardless of their ability to financier
Speaker 1: trading or their actual education. So it's a free app
Speaker 1: that you download that allows you to simulate working at
Speaker 1: a at a hedge fund and trading equities and crypto,
Speaker 1: and your experience generates an alpha score and we take
Speaker 1: that alpha score and we allow you to apply for
Speaker 1: jobs on Wall Street with that score. So it's really
Speaker 1: bringing that experience to to everyone through their mobile devices.
Speaker 1: It amost like the journalism tests we have to take
Speaker 1: to get into the part you do it for hedge funds,
Speaker 1: like it gives you a chance to kind of play
Speaker 1: a little bit right and get a score. So people
Speaker 1: can evaluate you. Yeah, exactly. And one thing that was
Speaker 1: kind of you really obvious to me was that you know,
Speaker 1: for I've been managing large pools of capital and my
Speaker 1: my co founder Gabel as well, and we realize that
Speaker 1: even at the scale and scope that we invest, even ourselves,
Speaker 1: we don't actually own our own track record. And it's
Speaker 1: a rare thing to be able to own your own alpha,
Speaker 1: to own your your investment experience. And this is what
Speaker 1: we think we should do to everyone and give everyone
Speaker 1: the opportunity to. You know, whether you're you're a junior
Speaker 1: analyst at a bank and you want to leverage your experience,
Speaker 1: most of the time, your employer owns your actual ideas,
Speaker 1: and we give folks like that and the ability to say, hey,
Speaker 1: this is why I'm talented, and this is why you
Speaker 1: should hire me based upon my talent, not what based
Speaker 1: on my resume says. It's pretty fascinating stuff, Neil, So
Speaker 1: let me let me make sure I'm picturing this right.
Speaker 1: So I log in and I basically can start doing
Speaker 1: some paper trading, and you'll be able to track my
Speaker 1: p and l UH and sort of rank me among
Speaker 1: other traders. Um, what happens if say, my strategy is
Speaker 1: some algorithm, you know, fast twitch type of thing. Uh
Speaker 1: am I able to sort of input input a automated
Speaker 1: strategy into this thing as well. That's a great question,
Speaker 1: and the answers, no, actually, and we we take the
Speaker 1: view that you know, being allocators into these strategies, so
Speaker 1: I know, the folks that you can think of that
Speaker 1: are kind of at the forefront of high frequency and
Speaker 1: systematic trading. We take the view that it's very difficult
Speaker 1: for a typical person to compete against a big ten
Speaker 1: billion dollar hedge fund. So really we're meant for fundamental investing.
Speaker 1: We're meant for people that do you know, research and
Speaker 1: individual companies and take views on things like market share
Speaker 1: and earnings and growth potential. We're not focused on kind
Speaker 1: of day trading or systematic trading because the thinking is
Speaker 1: that that's not a game that at the person can
Speaker 1: succeed that. You know. It's interesting we just talked um Neil,
Speaker 1: Mike and myself about how hedgephones are pushing the sec
Speaker 1: um are are the sec excuse me, is pushing hedge
Speaker 1: funds to share more of their strategies essentially make them
Speaker 1: more transparent. In general, just creating more transparency within the
Speaker 1: hedge fund industry. That would be a good thing in
Speaker 1: terms of individual performances those who work there, and just
Speaker 1: kind of understanding a little bit more of what goes
Speaker 1: on behind the scenes. Sure, it's it's a great point.
Speaker 1: You know, transparency is almost always a good thing. The
Speaker 1: only way I would caveat that is if you go
Speaker 1: back a year and a half to you know, the
Speaker 1: meme stock rally and game stuff. Um, you know something
Speaker 1: that was kind of the byproduct with that was folks
Speaker 1: that were involved in those trades they just made a
Speaker 1: decision that they're not going to do those trades publicly anymore.
Speaker 1: So there's ways to express shorts on companies that you
Speaker 1: expect to fall, but you do it synthetically. So it's
Speaker 1: what's called staying off the tape, so it's not hitting
Speaker 1: thirteen filings thirteen thirteen G filings. And this was actually
Speaker 1: the source of the information that the folks on read
Speaker 1: and used to you know, at tax or and hedge funds.
Speaker 1: So really, I think what what it did was it
Speaker 1: forced these managers to kind of circumvent the public reporting
Speaker 1: that you know, theoretically is and everyone's best interest. YEA
Speaker 1: So now I'm wondering how Maritas makes money off of this.
Speaker 1: It is a free app. I'm guessing the the users,
Speaker 1: the traders get to use it for free and then
Speaker 1: maybe the hedge funds pay for access to to see
Speaker 1: who's doing what. Yeah, exactly, So we're effectively a recruiting platform.
Speaker 1: So the way I like to think of us is
Speaker 1: we're kind of like the n C double A for
Speaker 1: Wall Street, where you you join our platform, you showcase
Speaker 1: your skills, and if your skills happen to match UH
Speaker 1: an employer who finds that valuable, then they'll reach out
Speaker 1: to you directly, and then we'll get paid on the
Speaker 1: recruiting fee that the employer will pay us. Hey, new,
Speaker 1: how does this maybe help create more diversity when it
Speaker 1: comes to financial firms hedge funds specifically, because that is
Speaker 1: certainly something we've talked about a lot over the last
Speaker 1: couple of years, and well, there's progress being made, there's
Speaker 1: a lot a long way to go. So how might
Speaker 1: what you guys are doing help with that? Can you
Speaker 1: make it kind of color blind, um, sex blind? Like
Speaker 1: can you or gender blind? Can you do that so
Speaker 1: that we may be up the up the diversity anti sure,
Speaker 1: great question. And if you think of the way recruiting
Speaker 1: is done at hedge funds and big banks, it really
Speaker 1: hasn't changed in the last hundred years. Um. It's effectively
Speaker 1: a network of who you know and how well you're connected,
Speaker 1: and those are the metrics that typically place people, particularly
Speaker 1: in most highest income roles like portfolio manager and analysts.
Speaker 1: So we take the view that it should be a
Speaker 1: democratized system that should be based solely on your talent.
Speaker 1: So through us, we don't care what you look like,
Speaker 1: We don't care what your resume says, we don't even
Speaker 1: care where you to school. We only care about your ideas,
Speaker 1: and those ideas can can potentially get you paid or
Speaker 1: get you recruited. So it actually does level the playing field.
Speaker 1: And what I think about is, you know, whether you're
Speaker 1: you know, as we've heard many times, you know, certain
Speaker 1: folks are steered towards sales and marketing roles, and certain
Speaker 1: folks are steered towards for fullio management roles. If you're
Speaker 1: if you're you know, a marketing associate and you happen
Speaker 1: to have great trading ideas, you can prove you have
Speaker 1: ideas and then leverage that into your next role. All right,
Speaker 1: next time you come on there, we're going to find
Speaker 1: out about the custom score that you got generated. I'm
Speaker 1: assuming you did a test and we'd love to hear um.
Speaker 1: Keep us, uh, stay in touch, let us know how
Speaker 1: this is going. Kneel Data the chief executive officer Maritas,
Speaker 1: joining us via Zoom in New York City