Chip Kent
David R. “Chip” Kent IV, PhD, is the Managing Partner and Portfolio Manager.
Before founding Cecropia Capital, Chip served as a senior quantitative analyst and portfolio manager at Walleye Trading, a private investment fund that focused on options-market making. He was a founding employee who helped Walleye grow from a start-up to a fully mature and profitable private investment fund.
At Walleye, Chip helped co-author the options market-making systems for U.S. equity options, Korean index options, and Japanese index options. Additionally, Chip served as the head of algorithmic volatility trading. In this capacity, he developed the risk-management models as well as the trading models which determined when to buy or to sell an option. These automated systems traded well over 100,000 option contracts daily with minimal human input.
Before joining Walleye, Chip worked as a research scientist in the high-performance computing environments group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He developed tools to improve the software quality of America’s nuclear-weapons simulations, and he researched the viability of running weapons simulations on novel new computer hardware. While at Los Alamos, Chip held a top-secret clearance (DOE Q).
Chip earned his doctorate in computational chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his bachelor's summa cum laude in chemistry and physics with a minor in mathematics from Texas A&M University.
While at Caltech, Chip was a Hertz Foundation fellow. His doctoral research on quantum Monte Carlo algorithms won the Hertz Foundation’s national thesis prize for the highest-impact work in the physical, biological, and engineering sciences (thesis available here). Chip has numerous publications in chemistry, physics, computer science, and astronomy.
In his free time, Chip enjoys Olympic weightlifting (collegiate champion, state record-holder, 9-year national championship competitor, and high-performance Olympic weightlifting coach), restoring vintage cars, fly-fishing, woodworking, faceting gemstones, gardening, and microcontrollers.
Brooke Kent
Brooke L. Kent is the COO of Cecropia Capital.
Fluent in Spanish, Brooke received her bachelor's summa cum laude in history, policy studies, and Spanish translation from Rice University.
Brooke's strength is helping others to communicate and to cooperate effectively. While studying in Argentina, she won a Boren Award for International Study for pin-pointing what led not-for-profit organizations in Buenos Aires to succeed or to fail as they interacted with the city government.
Additionally, Brooke interviewed several White House chiefs-of-staff for the White House Transition Project, a non-partisan initiative that facilitated the transition between President William J. Clinton and President George W. Bush.
After graduating from Rice, Brooke worked as the director of operations and marketing for the Mixtec Group, the leading executive recruiter in the produce industry. She later served as the executive writer for the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Additionally, Brooke ran her own ghostwriting business, which served corporate and governmental clients.
In her free time, Brooke enjoys canoeing, hiking, fly-fishing, yoga, classical music, gluten-free baking, paleo cooking, and reading.