Had a good chat on Friday with my hedge fund contact on a path forward. We both agreed that now that I know more specifically what they are looking for, it makes sense for me to "build to suit" and restart the evaluation. So for 2020, I am going to work on building a strategy portfolio that is orthogonal to long equities and have them evaluate it. Assuming it passes their evaluation, we will do a walk forward where I FTP entries and exits to them as my strategies execute against a SIM account, thus allowing me to keep this experiment separate from my live trading. For those that are following this thread, this hedge fund has a group whose job is to acquire third party alpha. If anyone reading is in a position where they have a quantifiable edge and are looking to monetize it beyond their own trading, let me know and perhaps I can make an introduction. I can't speak to what a deal would look like in terms of compensation, but this hedge fund is in the top five in the world in terms of size so they definitely have some money to throw around.