Kairos

Bio

Founder & CIO

Dr. Ramon Verastegui is the Founder & CIO of Kairos Investment Advisors, a quantitative hedge fund manager established in New York in 2020, specializing in derivatives and volatility trading across both tactical and systematic strategies.

Prior to founding Kairos, he was a senior portfolio manager at PSP, a Canadian pension fund with more than $300bn AUM, where he headed the Quantitative Strategies team within the Internal and Absolute Return Strategies group and launched the risk recycling strategies. He also served on the Public Markets Investment Committee and led the firm-wide initiative to define PSP’s quantitative ambitions across all investment teams, from data science to AI strategic initiatives.

Before PSP, he worked for 13 years at Société Générale in New York, where he was a managing director. He ran the Flow Strategy and Solutions group — a multi-asset strategy team advising hedge funds, asset managers and institutions across global macro, volatility, risk premia, quantitative investment strategies and tail risk hedging. He previously led the global structuring and strategy groups in the Global Equity Flow division, focusing on pricing and developing new quantitative strategies and bespoke client solutions.

His team earned multiple top industry rankings, including recognition from Greenwich Associates for best trading ideas for options, most innovative swap and solutions, most innovative new product ideas, and best US ETF research, as well as best US research house and global volatility house of the year by Global Capital Derivatives. In 2017, Ramon was inducted into the Volatility Investing Hall of Fame by EQDerivatives, and in 2024 he was selected as one of the leading practitioners in volatility & systematic investing for 2023.

Education & service

Ramon holds a Ph.D., M.Phil and M.S. in applied physics and mathematics from Columbia University in New York, a Master & DEA in engineering from CentraleSupélec in Paris, and his undergraduate degrees from ICAI in Madrid. He has been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and an invited lecturer at Columbia and Cornell Universities.

Ramon also served on the Columbia University Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing from 2015 to 2018, contributing guidelines and recommendations for Columbia University’s endowment that led to the creation of the Columbia Climate School. He is regularly cited in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and IFR, and is a frequent panelist at leading derivatives conferences including Cboe’s Risk Management Conference, EQDerivatives, and Talking Hedge.

He is the founding president of the Columbia University Club of Spain, a board member of the Advisory Board of the Mathematical Finance program at Rutgers University, and NY Ambassador of the University of Comillas. He is an elected fellow of the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País (RSBAP), and served on the board of managers of the Columbia University Engineering Alumni Association (CEAA).

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