A small firm, built deliberately.

Orcas Capital is a proprietary trading firm founded in 2026. We research and deploy systematic strategies in liquid global markets using capital that belongs to the firm and its founders. We do not solicit, accept, or manage external capital.

The firm was started by software engineers and quantitative researchers with multi-decade backgrounds building production systems and trading markets. We chose to build a firm because the work we wanted to do — careful research, owned infrastructure, no shortcuts — is hard to do well inside larger organisations.

Principles

Research over intuition.

Hypotheses are stated explicitly and evaluated against the strictest data we can assemble. We expect most ideas to fail; the cheap way to learn that is in research, not in production.

Owned infrastructure.

Our trading systems are built and operated in-house. We trust tools we understand. Where third-party components are appropriate, we keep the interface narrow and well-tested.

Risk first.

Position sizing is grounded in realised tails, not modelled means. Strategy-level limits and firm-level limits compose. Operational risk receives the same attention as market risk.

Long horizons.

We optimise for compounding, not quarters. The firm is structured to outlive any single strategy, regime, or venue.