How this came together.

I went to the University of Florida for chemical engineering, in the honors program. Pretty quickly I felt like I was in a box with the path. While my classmates were taking notes I had a coding tutorial open on the other half of my screen, and on Saturday nights I'd sit in the library teaching myself how to code. I built a lot of small apps in those years. They were projects that allowed me to learn through building and experience.

A semester abroad in Australia gave me the time I needed. I did a lot of learning with a beautiful view at a Starbucks overlooking the Sydney Opera House. The summer after that I joined Ohana, a housing and sublease startup co-founded by my brother Jacob and his EKC camp friend Ezra, and built the listings map. At the time it felt like a huge technical feat. I rejoined a year later after their seed round as the first full-time employee and the first in-person hire, helped open the office, built the desks, and stayed for two years. We grew the product past a hundred thousand users and into New York, San Francisco, Boston, and London.

At Ohana I worked on almost every aspect of the website: the landing page, the SEO structure, the listings flow, the search page, the pages property managers use to manage their inventory, chat, the internal tools the team uses every day, the partnerships software companies like OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, and Morgan Stanley use to track and onboard interns and new hires, and the CRM the team uses to bring property managers and their listings onto the platform.

Subletters on Ohana recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent each day, and millions per week in the peak season of April and May. I was a serial user myself: in one year in New York I stayed in five different sublets. It is a beautiful company that creates far more value than it captures, and my time there was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Systematic trading and machine learning had been part of my self-teaching well before I ever joined Ohana full-time, and markets had been a long-running interest of mine. I kept working on the strategies on the side through my Ohana years. About two years ago I started running real market simulations on my own, began developing live-tested strategies shortly after, and went live with capital roughly a year ago. Leaving Ohana in May was when I could finally do this full-time.

The first version of my live work was a single momentum strategy: Momentum Leaders. Own the strongest growth names while they're trending and the broad market is healthy. Across the combined paper and live testing period in 2025 the strategy was up about 90% at its peak. From there it had a normal pullback of about 20 percentage points to roughly +70%, the kind of drawdown this strategy regularly has. Because I hadn't had my capital fully in since the start of the paper testing, even that felt painful.

What I'm doing now is leaning into rigor and scaling thoughtfully. The three intraday systems on this site all run with beta close to zero. Each has its own profile of when it wins, uncorrelated to the broader market.

My personal goal is to develop ten strategies that each have their own edge. The validation pipeline is here ↗.

I don't know exactly where this leads. Right now it might just be me running these for myself, my family, and eventually friends. I'd really like to help people though. I'd love for this to become a way for people who aren't already wealthy to get a real return on their capital and to make life a little easier.

The strategies also aren't the last thing I'll work on. I have other business ideas I'm excited about, and I wouldn't be surprised if I pursue some of them in parallel.

— William Halbert