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When Matt Polyak named his newly launched hedge fund Hummingbird Capital, he knew what he was doing. With the largest brain-to-body ratio of any bird, hummingbirds are uniquely nimble. There is beauty and power in that kind of agility.
After more than a decade at firms including Balyasny, Millennium, and Intrinsic Edge, Matt understood what differentiated the industry's strongest investors.
"It wasn't just the people," he explained. "It was the infrastructure. The best firms have incredible tools that help portfolio managers understand attribution, exposures, and risk from every angle."
If Matt could leverage institutional-grade portfolio intelligence for his new fund, his speed and conviction would be unmatched.
As an equity long/short portfolio manager, understanding portfolio construction is fundamental. Every position changes exposures, every trade influences risk, and every basis point of performance has a story behind it.
Matt needed a platform that could help accelerate his understanding of what was driving performance and where his idiosyncratic alpha was coming from. Legacy tools could answer some of those questions, but they were often painful to use, slow, expensive, fragmented, and cumbersome.
"Some of the older tools were much clunkier and much more time-consuming," Matt said. "I wanted something that gave me institutional-quality analytics without adding complexity."
After seeing Arcana for the first time, the decision came quickly. "Very early in the demo, I thought, 'This is an awesome product.'"
What stood out wasn't simply the analytics, it was the experience. Arcana combined sophisticated portfolio construction, performance decomp, scenario analysis, and risk analytics into an interface that felt intuitive.
"After spending time at firms like Balyasny and Millennium, seeing a democratized version of those risk tools—one that's incredibly user-friendly—was brilliant."
Instead of spending time gathering, organizing, and reconciling data, Matt and his team could begin analyzing it immediately.
In no time, Hummingbird Capital was using Arcana to monitor portfolio exposures, analyze attribution, and review historical performance. Arcana’s team worked closely with Matt to integrate the firm’s portfolio data and ensure the platform reflected Hummingbird’s investment process. Integrating Arcana with Hummingbird’s existing portfolio data was, in Matt’s words, “a huge upgrade."
"I was up and running quickly," he said. "The team was incredibly hands-on and helpful throughout the process.”
Before Arcana Matt was spending hours compiling data for investors ad hoc or manually inputting data.
“The integrations across systems and seamless portfolio manager-friendly interface of Arcana allows me to save hours analyzing the risk of my portfolio in some of the most convenient and detailed ways imaginable.”
One of the biggest advantages of Arcana is perspective. Matt can now better understand how portfolio construction decisions translated into performance and how those decisions could improve over time.
“Having this all in one place was not just a huge time savings,” Matt shared. “Arcana is a great tool for backtesting and for historical analysis of what my business could do better.”
In an environment where capital is increasingly available but scalable investment skill remains scarce, Matt sees tools like Arcana being critical to success.
“That skill, in concert with tools like Arcana, that cuts through the noise and identifies the alpha and the edge, will allow funds to make better investment decisions.”
Today, Arcana is a core part of Hummingbird Capital's investment process by providing institutional-grade portfolio intelligence in a single platform.
“Every professional portfolio manager should apply it to their investment process.”
