About Kamal Gupta
Kamal Gupta is a highly successful money manager, a professional blackjack player, and a consummate negotiator.
He is the author of Play It Right, a memoir that chronicles his journey from India to America, from computers to gambling, culminating in a quarter-century on Wall Street. The book is expected to be released in the US and Canada in May 2022 and in India in July 2022.
HEDGE FUND MANAGER
Kamal spent twenty years (1999-2019) managing money for some of the largest hedge funds in the world (Millennium, Brevan Howard, ExodusPoint). During that time, he achieved the extraordinary feat of 103 consecutive months of positive returns coupled with a nine-year Sharpe Ratio of over 5, quite possibly the finest long-term track record produced by an individual in hedge fund history. In 2018, he helped raise eight billion dollars for the largest hedge fund launch ever, ExodusPoint Capital.
Although Kamal’s arrival on Wall Street was accidental, his survival was anything but. His long tenure was made possible by an investment methodology developed painstakingly over seven years and decades of careful money management.
PROFESSIONAL BLACKJACK PLAYER
Bored in the tech world earlier in his career, Kamal devoted two years of his life (1990-1992) to the single-minded pursuit of becoming a professional blackjack player, growing his bankroll to thirty-two times its original size, and getting barred from several casinos in the process. In an extraordinary turn of events, his gambling abilities earned him a job on Wall Street. Kamal didn’t know it then, but his time spent battling the casinos of Nevada was the perfect training for a career in high finance.
NEGOTIATOR
Over the last two decades, Kamal has negotiated on behalf of scores of individuals as they struggled against large companies. In today’s world, where the playing field is heavily tilted in favor of corporations, Kamal’s assistance gives the individual a fighting chance in the contest. In virtually every situation that he was involved in, David triumphed and Goliath was none the wiser. Despite the string of successes, Kamal has never made a penny from any negotiation. His reward was simply knowing that he had played the game well. Kamal is working on a book that takes readers inside the high-stakes dealings and details his negotiating philosophy.
PERSONAL
Kamal earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi — entering the elite institution after only completing eleventh grade — and received a master’s in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in just eleven months. He lives in the New York City area with his family. He is a passionate cook on a quest to make the perfect dosa.
Kamal believes that a life is defined by experiences and the stories that emerge from them. A teller of stories for decades, he has finally put them on paper in a memoir.
Where to find Kamal Gupta
Play It Right: The Remarkable Story of a Gambler Who Beat the Odds on Wall Street
A real-life underdog tale of one man turning the tables on the casinos and Wall Street without selling his soul to the devil.
All around the world, the words “Wall Street” conjure up a powerful image. For some, it is the center of America’s capitalist system and the engine of its economic growth. For others, it is the home of rapacious bankers and reckless traders whose greed would lead to a global financial crisis. For an Indian-born blackjack player, Wall Street represented something else entirely — a chance for him to play in the largest casino in the world.
Kamal Gupta’s improbable journey, from a wide-eyed Indian immigrant to an ultimate insider in the rarefied world of investment banks and hedge funds, is a uniquely American story. Nowhere else would it have been possible for a scrawny computer scientist to enter the world of high finance solely on the basis of his gambling abilities. After spending seven years creating an investment methodology, Gupta went on an incredible run, generating an unprecedented 103 consecutive months of positive returns while managing money at large hedge funds. His success did not go unnoticed, and he found himself under constant pressure to take bigger risks to make even more money. He refused and always played it right, knowing that there was such a thing as “enough” money, something very few, if any, of his Wall Street peers understood.
Much like Maria Konnikova’s bestseller, The Biggest Bluff, Play It Right isn’t so much about money as it is about the human condition and beating the odds, whether at a casino, on Wall Street, or in life itself.