George Kailas Wants You to Invest Like a Pro, Without Pretending to Be One
Slice of Finance Team
11/14/2025
Introduction
Most retail investors never get a fair shot. Wall Street's complexity, insider knowledge, and high-frequency trades leave little room for the rest of us. George Kailas saw that divide early and decided to do something about it.
What Prospero.ai Actually Does
Prospero.ai distills institutional-grade financial data into 10 simple signals, helping retail investors make better decisions without needing a finance degree. Think of it as a translator between Wall Street’s chaotic language and everyday strategy. From net option sentiment to dark pool ratings, the platform simplifies what the big players are doing and shows users how to act accordingly.
And it's not just theory. Prospero’s paper trading portfolio has outperformed the market four years running, with an average return of 67%.
From Hedge Funds to Helping Everyone Else
Kailas’s career started precociously, working with Columbia Business School’s Bruce Greenwald at just 16, then teaching himself accounting at 17 to get into his first fund. But even as a pro, he noticed something troubling: smaller funds and individual investors were playing a rigged game.
So he turned to AI. For 15 years, he’s been experimenting with using algorithms to uncover relationships in market data. That passion eventually became Prospero.
Why It Stands Out
Most platforms promise to make investing easier. Prospero actually does by doing the hard math in the background and surfacing intuitive insights upfront.
A standout example? Kailas’s invention of the “net option sentiment” signal. After struggling to teach a friend how to read an options chain, he thought: what if I just told them what the market likes or doesn’t? That frustration led to Prospero’s most powerful feature, a clean, visual cue that’s helped users navigate major moves, like dodging Alibaba losses in 2022 or anticipating the March 2023 downturn before it hit.
A Customer Story
Kailas points to a newsletter dated March 30, 2023—"Don’t Trim the Hedges"—where Prospero warned users about imminent market risks based on collapsing sentiment in SPY and QQQ. When the downturn hit days later, those who followed the signals had hedged their portfolios just in time.
Who It Helps
DIY investors who’ve been burned by bad advice. Beginners intimidated by financial jargon. And seasoned traders who want to layer smarter signals into their process. Prospero’s tools are especially valuable for users who don’t have Bloomberg terminals or analyst teams but still want to make informed moves.
Where It’s Going
The app is currently free, and that’s by design. Kailas calls this the “trust-building” phase. The long-term play is to build a public data utility. Something that could, for example, crowdsource health data to model pandemics in real time. Instead of senators quietly shorting the market based on private hospital reports, Prospero would make that information public and actionable.
Next up: paid in-app alerts, generative AI features, and eventually asset management powered by a unique stream of alternative data.
Conclusion
Prospero isn’t promising magic bullets. “There are none,” Kailas says. But if you use the tools—especially their flagship sentiment signals—you’ll get better. That’s the only promise he’s willing to make. And so far, no one’s come back to tell him he was wrong.
For those curious, the company is also raising through Republic, allowing users to become owners of the very tools they rely on. As Kailas puts it, “We want people to say, not only do I use this product, I own it too”.
