Kamal Gupta’s improbable journey, from a wide-eyed Indian immigrant to an ultimate insider in the rarefied world of investment banks and hedge funds, is a uniquely American story. Nowhere else would it have been possible for a scrawny computer scientist to enter the world of high finance solely on the basis of his gambling abilities.
Bored in the tech world, he devoted two years of his life to the single-minded pursuit of becoming a professional blackjack player and grew his bankroll to thirty-two times its original size, getting barred from several casinos in the process. In an unexpected turn of events, his gambling exploits brought him to Wall Street.
Kamal has spent the past twenty years managing money for some of the world’s largest hedge funds (ExodusPoint, Millennium, Brevan Howard). During that time, he once achieved the extraordinary feat of 103 consecutive months of positive returns. Kamal’s journey peaked in the spring of 2018 when he was hired by a startup hedge fund and asked to help raise money for the venture. Without any experience in marketing, Kamal sat across from entities that managed trillions of dollars and set about persuading them to invest in the newly-formed company the only way he knew how. He told them the story of his life. Investors sat transfixed as he recounted his experiences as a professional blackjack player and how the game had brought him to Wall Street, twenty-five years earlier. He then walked them through the seven years that he had spent creating an investment methodology and how he had used that system to manage money for the past two decades. The encounters were so successful that the hedge fund’s marketing head dubbed him the closer, and repeatedly scheduled Kamal as the last meeting of the day, just before the money-men (and women) headed out to make their final decision about investing.
On the first of June 2018, ExodusPoint Capital opened its doors with eight billion dollars under management and became the largest hedge fund launch in history. This experience opened Kamal’s eyes to the power of a good story and set him on an irrevocable path towards writing this book.