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The Alternative Data Podcast

The Fluid Markets Episode

Feb 12, 2024
Ken Book, CEO and Founder of Fluid Markets, discusses his journey from Goldman Sachs to creating a company that makes KPIs tradable. Topics include working at Goldman Sachs during COVID, fractional ownership and crowdfunding investments, importance of capital and legal paperwork, challenges of retail investor attraction, and discovering the alternative data market.
46:38

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • Fluid Markets aims to make key performance indicators tradable by investors, tightening the relationship between alternative data and the market.
  • Fluid Markets offers a solution that helps investors better understand market expectations and make more informed trading decisions by providing a clear and certain market pricing for specific KPIs.

Deep dives

Ken's founder story and the vision of Fluid Markets

Ken Book, CEO and founder of Fluid Markets, shares his journey from a summer at Goldman Sachs to the creation of Fluid Markets. The company aims to make key performance indicators (KPIs) tradable by investors, tightening the relationship between alternative data and the market. Ken explains the inspiration behind his idea, which stemmed from his experience working in the Corporate Derivatives group at Goldman Sachs, where he looked at various types of securities and structured them. He realized the potential for investors to get exposure to specific areas of investment they're interested in, instead of investing in the entire company. This led to the initial idea of creating a structure that would allow investors to invest in YouTube revenue separately from Alphabet. After several iterations, Fluid Markets settled on a futures contract model that would offer exposure to specific KPIs like revenue and earnings per share (EPS). The company is currently in talks with futures exchanges and market makers to ensure sufficient liquidity and is targeting institutional asset managers and alternative data funds as potential natural users of their products.

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