Quantitative Researcher for a prop trading shop

Quantitative Researcher

As a Quantitative Researcher, your focus is on identifying trading opportunities, but you can add even more value with strong quantitative skills and some coding proficiency to accelerate the innovation process and help others leverage your work.

By working on a variety of projects with different collaborators over a six-month period, you’ll gain new knowledge and insight into the fundamentals of market dynamics, trading strategies, and our proprietary research platform. We’ve stripped away the boundaries of what you can access and touch internally, so while you learn the intricacies of our industry, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to contribute and directly affect our bottom line within your first few weeks on the team.

While interest in trading is key, a background in finance is not required. Our team is primarily composed of academics — professors, postdocs, PhDs, and undergraduates — not from other trading firms. We seek mental diversity and add a select group of academics each year from a wide range of disciplines.

Over the past year, new associates have joined our research team from Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, IAS, Penn, UChicago, Columbia, and Oxford.

COMPENSATION – Competitive salary, plus quarterly bonus based on individual performance and contribution towards the success of others and the firm.

Qualifications

We’re looking for highly analytical individuals (backgrounds in math, physics, computer science, statistics, electrical engineering, etc.) who want to help build the research-driven trading firm of the future. The qualities we seek include:

• Persistent Drive to Improve – Do you have an innate desire to reach the next level, even after significant accomplishments?
• Creative Problem Solving and Probabilistic Thinking – Enjoy learning and implementing new concepts quickly, combining knowledge from different domains, and taking a data-driven, probabilistic approach to testing and implementing ideas.
• Team Mindset – Understand that 1+1 > 2 and are committed to making the team better through sharing ideas and collaborative effort.
• Mental Flexibility & Self-Awareness – Able to adapt based on new data, results, and feedback on trading ideas and performance.
• Orientation for Making Money – Focused on value creation for the firm, with a pragmatic, hacker’s approach to testing ideas and dropping projects that do not yield high upside.

Research / Quant Trading Strategy Skills

• Strong intuition and deep thinking with data sets – Ability to design new alphas, understand complex systems, and identify starting points for analysis.
• Proficiency in quickly exploring data for empirical relationships and deciphering noise or signal.
• Familiarity with classical statistical methods and the ability to apply them rigorously; eagerness to learn new statistical techniques.
• Persistent questioning of finance/trading data and motivation to seek answers despite often finding no correlation or signal.
• Experience in setting up research frameworks and executing projects.
• Understanding of financial products, market dynamics, and microstructure.
• Proficiency in low-level programming languages such as C++, Python, Java, etc., with an awareness of strengths in particular languages and problem-solving nuances.