Value Investing

David R. “Chip” Kent IV, PhD, is the Managing Partner and Portfolio Manager.

Before founding Cecropia Capital, Chip served as a senior quantitative analyst and portfolio manager at Walleye Trading, a hedge fund that focused on options-market making. He was a founding employee who helped Walleye grow from a start-up to a fully mature and profitable hedge fund.

At Walleye, Chip helped co-author the options market-making systems for U.S. equity options, Korean index options, and Japanese index options. Additionally, Chip served as the head of algorithmic volatility trading. In this capacity, he developed the risk-management models as well as the trading models which determined when to buy or to sell an option. These automated systems traded well over 100,000 option contracts daily with minimal human input.

Before joining Walleye, Chip worked as a research scientist in the high-performance computing environments group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He developed tools to improve the software quality of America’s nuclear-weapons simulations, and he researched the viability of running weapons simulations on novel new computer hardware. While at Los Alamos, Chip held a top-secret clearance (DOE Q).

Chip earned his doctorate in computational chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his bachelor’s summa cum laude in chemistry and physics with a minor in mathematics from Texas A&M University.

While at Caltech, Chip was a Hertz Foundation fellow. His doctoral research on quantum Monte Carlo algorithms won the Hertz Foundation’s national thesis prize for the highest-impact work in the physical, biological, and engineering sciences. Chip has numerous publications in chemistry, physics, computer science, and astronomy.

In his free time, Chip enjoys hiking, fishing, canoeing, gardening, automotive restoration, and electronics.