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Alex McIntyre: He Called the Dot Com Bubble — and Nobody Listened. Here's What His Algorithm Saw

Hina Siddiqui

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In 1999, while the world was buying tech stocks with both hands, Alex McIntyre's algorithm was telling clients to sell. The dot-com bubble burst anyway. Three decades and a 76.2% hit rate later, Alex is still making the same argument: the biggest threat to an investor's returns isn't the market, it's their own emotion.

What You Will Learn

How a purely quantitative, emotion-free model has called major market turns — including the 2008 financial crisis — three to six months ahead of the curve. Why even sophisticated investors get fooled by a "good label," the same way wine critics are swayed by a famous name on the bottle. What separates a hedge fund's agility from a pension fund's caution, and why that difference matters for returns. How Alex identifies balance sheet red flags that traditional P/E-focused analysts miss entirely. Why he shut down his first hedge fund during COVID — and what's different about the relaunch.

Timestamps

00:00 — Calling the dot-com bubble before it burst
 01:14 — Why clients still want the glossy report over the cold data
 03:16 — The wine critic theory: how labels fool even experts
 06:01 — Spotting balance sheet red flags others miss
 06:34 — How the algorithm was built — and how it found its first client
 18:00 — Why he's raising a hedge fund now
 21:02 — The meeting that triggered the decision to launch
 23:03 — What founders get wrong about hedge funds
 26:18 — This or That with Alex McIntyre
 28:29 — The title of his life story, and why

About the Guest

Alex McIntyre has spent over three decades in quantitative investing, beginning his career in proprietary trading and market making with SG Warburg's and Lehman Brothers in London and New York. He now runs a stock-picking algorithm — originally built in the late 1980s by a mathematician colleague and launched commercially in 1998 — that has served Tier 1 pension funds and hedge funds for over twenty years with a 76.2% hit rate. Alex is currently raising capital to relaunch his hedge fund.

Important Links

Connect with Alex

Connect with Hina

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hinasiddiqui

Instagram: @hinawithwings

YouTube: @thehinasiddiqui

Check out Hina's books: https://amzn.to/3B65Wz7

Production Credit: Produced by @the32collective_ / https://www.the32collective.co/