Author: Matus Kopf, Co-founder & Chief Investment Officer, Wincent
There are large differences in how this looks at different firms – sometimes the title “Trader” means just a last monitoring and risk layer for automated strategies with little alpha generation, while at other firms they are the main decision makers and drivers of ideas and PnL.
At Wincent, a Trader and Quant is often a spectrum. We try to find a sweet spot for each person based on what they are good at and what they naturally gravitate towards.
Trader-y work is trying to make good trading decisions and adjustments NOW (with existing models and infrastructure) while Quant-y work is usually on longer-term projects – new improvements, new models or strategies, new tools which improve our research pipeline.
We are believers in hybrid roles – oftentimes it means working on longer-term projects when the markets are calm and less interesting and then being hands on during extreme conditions.
A big part of Quant research is working on the right things with the right level of complexity and it’s oftentimes difficult to make these decisions without enough hands-on exposure to markets.
From Idea to Production
The speed for going from idea to production is of utmost importance for a successful trading firm.
There is an idea stage, a validation stage with testing on historical data followed by a review and discussion with other researchers and traders. Things which pass this are implemented in production-grade code and shipped into live testing and then production.
Firm Structure
We aren’t a pod shop with teams doing their own thing and sometimes even competing against each other. We aren’t a big and heavy trading firm where everything is siloed off and you work on a tiny part of a big system and have little knowledge about the whole thing.
We bet on heavy collaboration across everything in the company. For example if you need to go talk to an engineer because your specific strategy is at some intersection of Quant and Tech you go sit down at lunch and talk to them, understand how things work and make the right decision with all of the information.
The structure of the firm is flat – it’s you, your team lead and then the CEO.
High-agency
Wincent is generally very entrepreneurial. You are expected to come up with ideas, make things happen, make decisions and challenge things when you think they are wrong.
As we are a smaller company, the impact the right person with strong Quant skills and high-agency can make is large.
To learn more, visit our Quant & Trading page.
