The trading floor at SDI Partners looks nothing like the chaotic scenes from Wall Street movies. Instead, rows of supercomputers hum quietly in a London office, processing 200 quadrillion calculations per second while algorithms execute trades faster than human reflexes could ever manage. When David Rosenberg, Andrew Katz, and Amit Iyer founded this quantitative hedge fund in 2022, they weren't just starting another investment firm; they were betting that artificial intelligence could outmaneuver an entire industry still dependent on outdated manual processes and paper-heavy procedures.
Their gamble paid off spectacularly. In February 2025, Preqin featured SDI Partners' Accredited Partner Fund as one of the top-performing equity strategy hedge funds in 2024, delivering a staggering 387.18 percent return. With assets under management approaching $1 billion and flagship funds returning 338.06 percent and 831.42 percent since inception, SDI Partners has achieved something remarkable: they've proven that a small team of mathematicians and computer scientists can consistently outperform Wall Street's giants.
The Digital Revolution That Traditional Firms Missed
While established hedge funds continue wrestling with legacy systems and bureaucratic onboarding processes that can take weeks, SDI Partners eliminated these friction points entirely. Their platform allows global clients to open accounts in minutes using instant credit-reference verification, deposit and withdraw funds digitally, and track performance in real-time through a proprietary interface that puts traditional investment platforms to shame.
"We differentiate ourselves through a forward-looking, innovation-driven approach that challenges the traditional norms of asset management," SDI Managing Partner David Rosenberg explains, "while many firms still rely on outdated and manual processes, we've built a seamless, digital-first infrastructure that empowers our global client base." This technological advantage extends beyond user experience; their AI-powered trading systems analyze millions of data points continuously, using deep learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning algorithms to identify patterns and execute trades at optimal pricing.
The firm's rapid growth from a commodity options trading outfit to a multi-asset class powerhouse serving 280 clients across North America, Europe, and Asia demonstrates how quickly markets reward genuine technological superiority. Their success challenges the assumption that size and history matter more than intelligence and agility in investment management.
Performance That Speaks Louder Than Marketing
Numbers don't lie, and SDI Partners' track record tells a compelling story. Their proprietary trading strategy achieved an independently verified 9.4 percent average monthly return in 2024, while their Basic Partner Fund and Accredited Partner Fund have delivered returns that dwarf both market benchmarks and established competitors. These results weren't achieved through reckless risk-taking; the firm maintains disciplined risk management protocols with significantly lower drawdowns and higher Sharpe ratios than its peer group.
The firm's risk management philosophy permeates every aspect of its operations. Partner funds are held with insured custodians and segregated from corporate activities, while a dedicated team of risk professionals ensures compliance with strict regulatory guidelines. Their four core risk domains, market risk, operational risk, automated trading risk, and compliance, have earned them a "safe and regulatory compliant with moderate risk profile" rating from independent auditors as of December 2024.
What sets SDI Partners apart isn't just their technology or returns, it's their investor-friendly fee structure. Unlike traditional hedge funds that charge hefty management fees regardless of performance, SDI Partners charges no management fee and only takes a performance fee on actual returns. This alignment of interests reflects their confidence in their ability to deliver consistent results.
Building Tomorrow's Investment Infrastructure Today
The firm's expansion from three founders to over 150 employees in less than three years reflects both their success and their ambitions. Their team includes mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, and engineers from prestigious institutions like Oxford, UCL, and MIT, all working to refine trading algorithms that can adapt to changing market conditions in real-time. SDI Partners' supercomputing infrastructure enables them to act as market makers and liquidity providers across equity, commodity, foreign exchange, and fixed income products globally. Their algorithms don't just react to market movements; they predict them, using 20 years of historical data to identify patterns and optimize trading decisions.
Each trade generates new data that feeds back into their machine learning models, creating a continuous improvement cycle that traditional firms struggle to match. "Our ambition is to become and remain the best-performing investment management firm of all time," Rosenberg states, "we strive to identify the most optimal uses of capital to generate sustainable above-market returns for professional investors who bank on us around the world."
This bold vision reflects their understanding that they're not just competing with other hedge funds, they're redefining what investment management can become when freed from the constraints of legacy thinking and infrastructure. As traditional investment firms scramble to modernize their operations and adopt new technologies, SDI Partners continues building on its early-mover advantage. Its success suggests that the future of investment management belongs not to the largest or oldest firms but to those willing to rebuild the entire industry from the ground up using artificial intelligence as its foundation.
