Trata (YC W25) @trytrata

Our paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2606.03918

Lastly, we at Trata deeply believe in the value of human judgement. In a future where LLMs continue to improve, our aim is to augment human capabilities and enable a fairer playing field outside of just the largest asset managers. Based on our findings, Analysts - your jobs are very, very safe.

Today, Trata is excited to present Hedge-Bench, the world’s first benchmark focused on evaluating open-ended reasoning in the finance domain. We curated 102 tasks derived explicitly from the reasoning traces of professional hedge fund analysts working with relevant information sources. Most benchmarks are geared towards evaluating naturally deterministic tasks (e.g. updating spreadsheets, calculating formulas). The result is a blind spot on the frontier labs’ part to the competency that matters most in the finance industry: reasoning. No frontier model scores above 16% on Hedge-Bench. We observe Claude-Opus-4.8 actually regresses relative to the last generation of Claude-Sonnet. We see hallucination rates go as high as 82% for multi-step reasoning. These implications extend beyond just the finance domain and into other domains where trust in agent reliability is equally critical (e.g. law).

Hedge-Bench tasks are built from real world traces given our proprietary data flywheel and network of actual industry practitioners. No models have seen our solutions during pre-training. Prompts are deliberately short to reflect the communication style of actual professionals. Tasks are divided into themes and further de-composed into sub-themes to reflect the multi-step, open-ended work Analysts do when decomposing a topic into chunks of actionable reasoning.

Which models should our users be leveraging for non-trivial reasoning work? Some quick experiments, graph made in 4 minutes with @Lovable

$GS, 1.22.26 Analyst 1: "I started my career at Goldman. Then we ventured out and did a spin-off for a few years." Analyst 2: "I also started my career at Goldman. I was there before and during the financial crisis. Lots of interesting stories got thrown in there. I was a banker, but I remember at the time bigger and bigger analyst classes. This was the heyday in terms of prop trading. It was pre-Volcker Rule." lol

$MDB, Bull/Skeptic 1.20.26 Analyst 2: "I was thinking more of @MongoDB Atlas as the system of record. It's a weird application of the classic economic hoteling cost. If I have data sitting in there, there's a cost to calling an @OpenAI API to compute my embeddings. But if your Voyage thing inside Mongo does it locally for me, that's great. I don't need to worry about my data being used by OpenAI in certain ways, lower compliance, or Mongo not being approved. So that flywheel is reinforced. I don't need to leave the Mongo universe to achieve my outcomes. As a result, Mongo becomes the system of record. Analyst 1: Is this your view that it increases the legitimacy of being a system of record? Analyst 2: It seems that way to me as I think about it. I think that's what they're going for. They're talking about being a NoSQL data platform, emphasizing their important role in data readiness, and acquiring a capability or technology for generating high-quality embeddings within their ecosystem. They've already got great vector data-based tools. So when it comes to agentic AI, which requires vector search and data sitting in vector DBs for inference, you've got that in place. To me, the pieces of the puzzle that you're laying out sound like they're trying to be a system of record in an agentic AI future. That's the bold view. Of course, someone might say, "It's not going to integrate, and it's going to come down like a house of cards.""

$BME.L "Alex Russo was a D-tier CEO. Everyone looked great in 2021-2022, but it became clear in November 2024, when I was seriously considering the stock for the first time, that he wasn't running the business with long-term performance in mind. He was making decisions based on his instincts, going by vibes, rather than using data to inform his decision-making. So, pretty negative on Alex. It remains to be seen regarding the new one. He's a private equity CEO, who had mixed success in his position. Part of that was his fault, and the rest was due to external factors. That's one yellow flag, but his prior role was in a fundamentally different business, so I'd be careful to extrapolate his performance there too much. We've done reference checks on him, and it seems generally positive-to-somewhat of a mixed bag."

"It was a really frustrating outcome. I sold after the announcement. When I saw the initial headline, I thought there’s no way that was the true value they had sold the company. You looked at the publicly traded comps, especially with the IPOs of American Integrity and Aspen. I commend the activists for getting involved. That's somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory, because you're never going to get over the Maryland hurdle and the insider ownership stake. Today, it’s a cash box, and in the future, they'll invest in similar businesses they’ve seen before. Maybe they'll be the exit liquidity to somebody that's got something hung up, and you can build a platform. I think it’ll be an attractive contingent on that deal being announced. It could be worth a flyer to take a smaller position, and then, once the deal's announced, if you like the economics, you go for it because you're not going back to a holdco structure. That model hasn't worked for many "next Berkshires" other than Berkshire Hathaway, Markel, and maybe Loews and Fairfax." $BRK $MKL $L $FRFHF

Short $ASTS, 1.16.26: "The bigger concern is that by the time these 72 AST satellites without Ligado compatibility are launched, @Starlink will be on the next generation and fairly ahead. We have yet to hear a fundamentally compelling argument for the next-generation Starlink satellites having structurally worse technology than AST. We appreciate that they have a launch advantage and a launch-cost advantage at this point, and maybe to a greater extent in the future, depending on how excited you are about Starship. Generally, it's less of a tech concern and more that they're just not going to be able to keep up with a very robust competitor like @SpaceX . We've seen continued delays with their satellite launches, which doesn't give me a ton of faith that they're going to be able to get those 72 birds, or even 30 to 45 birds, out in short order. The biggest concern is more competitive.

The bear case for $MNDY, 1.13.26: "For a company like Monday, it's very important for them to keep adding new customers to the funnel. What I expect to happen is basically you're going to have so many competitors flooding into pretty much every software category, the same way that happened with PowerPoint, which was untouched for 30 years. I expect it to be disrupted by things like Gamma, but PowerPoint is protected by the Microsoft bundle in a way; it's not its own company, and it's definitely not trying to add massive numbers of new users every year that it has to compete with other platforms. ...That's the main way I see risks to Monday specifically: being both an application company built on the old paradigm with much lower revenue per employee and a company that has to win a ton of new customers to continue its growth trajectory. You can argue that, given the current valuation, it doesn't need to win many new customers, but for now, I'm basically arguing whether Monday is still a growth company or should be valued as a secular growth company. It is much more debatable right now." $MSFT @GammaApp

@BillBrewsterTBB Brewing some business!

$CRWV "The underlying assumption is that they can lease them out at approximately 75% of the original contract price... That's a pretty aggressive estimate. That example is built on a pretty aggressive assumption. It doesn't seem feasible when comparing current H100 pricing to what it was when those chips were brand new"

Overheard on Trata, $CBRL: Analyst 1: "...I don't mean to talk really negatively about the company for this whole call, but the CEO kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit. I mean, she's obviously a big spender. She's spent tens of millions of dollars of consulting fees, $650 million CapEx, and then she uses a lot of very flowery language. The strategic transformation plan and all these different consultant buzzwords and stuff like that. If I'm a shareholder, and I've seen my stock go from $150 to $60, I don't want someone quite so happy. And she's always very cheery. I mean, is that silly, or do you get the same impression?" Analyst 2: "...I mean, let's just talk about the CEO and her background, right? I mean, obviously, she's generally an accomplished restaurant executive. She was at Taco Bell. Before that, she was at Sprinkles Cupcakes, which if I were to draw a Venn diagram with overlap with Cracker Barrel on brand identity and general customer demographic orientation, that is not one that would be high up on that list, right? There's also Starbucks, for which you could probably say the same thing about, right? Consumer names like this are always difficult for us because judging consumer behavior. I mean, there are some things that you can predict, right? Consumers are going to gravitate towards the highest quality, lowest cost option. But as far as positioning a brand and some of these more subtle things we've been talking about, it's harder for us externally to make a judgment on that. But just superficially, you would think a person with her profile - while I'm sure she's a successful restaurant executive - probably is not the first one that springs to mind to tackle some of the unique challenges that these guys have. I don't know. She had Taco Bell, so she knows something about cost-effective food, I guess. But again, it's still a bit of a different value proposition. And I agree. She's spending a lot of money just across the board, like, running through G&A and also CapEx, and it does not seem to be bearing fruit. I would be surprised if there aren't some rumblings around this to go in a different direction. But all I can say is that she obviously inherited a difficult position. I think her results so far don't exactly inspire a lot of confidence. I'll just put it that way."

Bear/Skeptic debate on $CBRL, 6.25.25 trytrata.com/cbrl

Trata (@trytrata) is now on FinTwit. We host anonymous buyside to buyside conversations via voice calls. We work with 125+ funds (vs. 10 in March) and receive 25-30 human-to-human calls weekly. We compile these conversations into a library of investment research. EX: Fund 1 is bullish and Fund 2 is bearish on $OPEN, they ask each other questions they want answered surrounding the key debates for anywhere between 30-60 minutes. The average fund on the platform: ~$200-400mm in AUM, 3 investment professionals, fundamental research focused. These funds use tools like Bloomberg and third-party expert networks, and have regular access to management teams. To the qualified lurkers and anon accounts of FinTwit: Request a call on any ticker (bull or bear). If we pair you, we’ll give you: 1. Access to that transcript and any transcripts on that ticker published through the end of 2026 2. Airpods

And if you're interested in the $CLBT interview on @trytrata mentioned on the pod, you can find it here: trytrata.com/clbt