Listen!

Quantified cultural intelligence reveals the investment winners of tomorrow.

The people have spoken! They speak passionately about products they enjoy and adore. We map individual posts into trends, trends into scores, map products to tradeables, and invest into these winners.

Our Approach

How we Operate

None of this is investment advice. We are not a formal fund open to the outside world. This is a rigorous academic exercise with only our own real money at stake. We operate publicly to ensure self-discipline and garner public feedback on our methods, so we can continue improving. We use real money to ensure there is skin in the game. The approach is as follows:

  • Curate an index and publish the index. This is a relative return index, where the benchmark is the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index (because we do not want to be skewed by Mag7 technology stocks currently dominating the standard S&P 500).
  • Iterate on the index based on learnings and feedback. It might seem like an actively-managed index at first, but the goal is for it to be quantitative and low-turnover eventually.
  • Use real money to ensure personal alignment. We are using a sleeve on our family portfolio. We use Double to backtest and maintain our portfolio.

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Step 2: Focus on Tradeables

Not every product is from a publicly-traded company. Even if the product is from a publicly-traded company, small wins within large conglomerates will not move the stock. We focus on pure-plays or companies with sizeable bets on buzz-garnering products. What are thresholds for "sizeable"?

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Step 3: Rules for Rebalance

When is the buzz over? When the buzz tapers, has it affected the stock, or would the gains be lagging, and by how long?


When we find a new company with buzz, how much do we de-allocate from the current index to re-allocate to the new company? All this needs to be quantified into formal rules and thresholds.

Follow our Journey

Saif has been CTO at sparks & honey (focused on the Q™ cultural intelligence platform) and SVP at parent company, Omnicom. However, Cultural Capital is completely independent from that work. Cultural Capital is in no way affiliated with sparks & honey or Omnicom.

On this personal journey, Cultural Capital, we'll think out loud because there are numerous decisions to be made. Our investment thesis here is novel, so open discussion is valuable. The views expressed here are solely Saif's own and not those of his employers, clients, or partners.

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