It is now old news in some circles that loops are pretty much the heart of meaningful agentic engineering. After a trillion tokens spent on building a cutting-edge institutional investment process (@openforage) with nothing but agents, here are some thoughts about "agentic loops" and how to reason about and efficiently utilise them.

Up until not too long ago, the modal way of preserving a moat in quantitative finance was to operate in absolute secrecy. This was in part because the traditional quant edge was a secret, a signal you found, that little to no one knew about, and was now yours to guard. I strongly believe that the importance of "absolute secrecy" will rapidly drop in the coming times. In the long tail of AI commoditising intelligence, the final frontier of competitive advantage is some form of distribution and a business with an ability to scale in effectiveness on compute. This article is mostly written from the perspective of a business in the field of quantitative finance, over numerous discussions about @openforage. However, I think the central argument applies to any firm whose talent (know-how, experience) and IP have traditionally been primarily the moat.

Introduction