We believe ideas are currency in this business; sharing polished, high-quality analysis can open doors in unexpected ways. It worked for Byrne, who parlayed his online writing into a role at SAC Capital/Point72 (without a college degree!)

Our aim with the investment challenge is to give the next generation the chance to share the quality of their thinking—and get noticed by some of the best in the field.

• Exposure: Winners in each category will be featured in an edition of The Diff, which is read by 50,000+ influential investors, executives, and entrepreneurs from firms and companies like Citadel, Coatue, Viking, Greenoaks, Point72, Tiger Global, Palantir, OpenAI, Stripe, Google, Meta, and Ramp

• Access: As a part of the challenge, participants can express interest in 20+ single manager L/S hedge funds through a single portal–this is an unique opportunity to connect with hard to reach funds that often hire via word-of-mouth.

1. Choose a category that suits your best idea.

1. Micro & Small Cap: < $2B market cap–we’re judging these mostly based on potential absolute return (the biggest players in this space tend to avoid the market-neutral model).

2. Mid Cap / Large Cap: $2B – $50B

3. Mega Cap Pair Trade: Both stocks > $50B–here’s your chance to bet on correlation rather than pure direction. We’ll be looking at this from a more risk-adjusted perspective, so cases where two companies move in lockstep but are about to diverge (or vice-versa) are great.

4. Ex US: Company domiciled outside the US

5. Special Situations: Hard catalyst required; we’re open to ideas that might need a little leverage to get interesting (we’ll share more details on the submission page)

6. Macro/Misc: Is there a rates convergence bet everyone’s sleeping on? Mispriced FX volatility? Is there some critical mineral that’s going to 10x in two years, or lose 90% of its value? (Just to keep things actionable, please restrict your trade to something that someone could do through IBKR.)

2. Submit your writeup through our forthcoming portal (we’ll share a link soon).

3. Our panel of judges will evaluate and provide feedback on each submission.