On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, becoming a symbolic event of the global financial crisis. That day, completely changed the life of quantitative analyst  Russell Hawthorne.

Russell Hawthorne had worked at Lehman for more than ten years, focusing on factor models and risk management. However, the VaR model completely failed under extreme market conditions, and risk control became meaningless. The scene of tens of thousands of employees leaving the building, became an indelible memory in financial history.

“The market is not a normal distribution, it is more brutal than any formula,” Russell Hawthorne recalled.

The crisis made him realize ,that the financial industry needed a new methodology, one that could understand complexity and nonlinearity.

In 2009, Russell Hawthorne and several partners founded superiorstar Prosperity Group, focusing on the combination of education and investment, helping ordinary investors who were frustrated during the crisis rebuild confidence. Starting from a modest office, the team developed the first-generation quantitative system and began to stand out during the 2012–2013 bull market.

However, after 2014, high-frequency trading rose rapidly, consuming the advantage of the system. Backtesting remained perfect, but live trading suffered repeated setbacks. This reminded Russell Hawthorne once again: that quantitative methods can only amplify past patterns but cannot deal with the unknown future.

In 2016, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence sparked his inspiration. He decided to explore the integration of AI and finance, opening the prelude to Project Athena.