I’m Sashwat Jain. I build the systems a regulated financial firm runs on, and I write about how good decisions get made. This is my personal site.
I build internal systems at Munoth Capital Market Limited in Ahmedabad, India. The work spans fund accounting and reporting, trading research, operations and the office network: the unglamorous machinery that decides whether the right thing is also the easy thing.
One of those systems, a way for a small investment team to keep score on its ideas, is written up as an essay on this site. I don’t publish client data, named securities or anything about the firm’s positions.
I studied economics at UC Santa Barbara, where I was a Gretler Fellow and held the Sean S. Weld Scholarship. With Professor Rod Garratt I researched stablecoin depegging events and how holders get their dollars back. I also built software that lets students take part in auction theory experiments.
Before that I interned at IIMA Ventures, screening about 150 early-stage companies, and at Wealth First Portfolio Managers. I volunteered on the web presence of the Blind People’s Association, India, and co-founded a student events platform that didn’t work out. As a teenager I built some fifty electronics projects.
Commonplace collects what I’ve made and thought through: essays on why trust is the new bottleneck and how AI research agents decide when to stop, an explainer on how AI agents pay for things, and interactive lectures on how Indian banking works and whether a quantum computer breaks encryption.
The views on this site are my own. Nothing here is investment advice.