“Any game worth playing is worth playing right.”

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 was released in the US and Canada in May 2022 and in India in June 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.