Alex Stickle, a Chicago native, is the founder of Poiesis Capital Management, a hedge fund operating out of Manhattan and Washington, D.C. With a career spanning technology, neuroscience, and finance, Alex brings a multidisciplinary approach to investment management.
Before founding PCM, Alex had already founded a tech consulting company and completed his first distressed debt deal by the age of 13, foreshadowing his future as a transformative leader in finance and technology.
Alex's academic background reflects his kaleidoscopic interests. At Lawrence University, he pursued a triple major in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy, publishing research in neuroelectrophysiology that examined the effects of stimulant compounds on the rodent visual system, and creating AI models of the visual system. This scientific foundation, combined with his upbringing in a special situations brokerage, informs his analytical and insightful approach to finance and technology.
He worked as a proprietary equity trader at a Nasdaq-member firm in Chicago after taking his undergraduate degree, using techniques from the lab and his background in distressed debt to produce outsized risk adjusted returns.
He later founded ARKA Robotics, a startup focused on robotics solutions for inspection and maintenance serving wireless tower owners and turfers. This technology stack was then applied to a second startup, CalvIO, enabling faster flow management for industrial automation and application engineering.
Transitioning into investment management from proprietary trading, Alex joined a Chicago-based investment advisory firm and played a pivotal role in its successful acquisition by a Nevada-based hedge fund. Following this, he relocated to Manhattan with his clients, before partnering with a quant systematic macro hedge fund managing ~$1 billion in assets. He left this fund in early 2024 to found PCM.
At PCM, Alex and the team integrate discretionary macro, systematic macro, and special situations trading with unique litigation finance working with anti-terrorism specialists, blending these approaches into a new type of multi-strat quant hedge fund.
In addition to his professional achievements, Alex has contributed to various entrepreneurial ventures, advising several biotech and robotics startups, academic research labs, DC think tanks, and sits on the board of a DC based film festival, DCIFF.
He is based out of Manhattan, and resides with his fiancée Katherine, a neurobiologist and quantitative researcher.
