High-frequency trading, billions of turnover on exchanges and memes as an instrument for sourcing employees. The Onederx foundation story.
I was denied by a fund, therefore, I decided to make my own
In 2014, by the end of the last year at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology I had understood that science (at my homeland or abroad) was not something I would dedicate my life to. Having thought about the areas where my knowledge could be of use I tried to get an internship at two hedge funds but they denied me; I had to scramble on my own.
My MSU friend and I wrote a simple connector to Moscow Stock Exchange and using its historical data we developed a tiny ML model and signed an agreement with a broker, this is how we became algotraders. Soon our venture started to yield fruit — we no longer wanted to live in a dorm.
At first, we had no name but we soon realised that it was hard to employ people to a no-name company. Thus, in 2014 Wunder Fund emerged. However, employing people was still a challenging task.
How we learnt to employ people
In algorithmic trading you need two types of people: developers and so-called quants. The latter analyse data, do machine learning. Their models serve as a foundation for trading algorithms, which make dozens of thousands of trades a day (that is pretty chunky).
We learnt to find and hire good developers. There are very rarely tasks in development which cannot be done: most likely you will find a way to do the right thing. Maybe further on everything else will take longer to do and will work more slowly, but still one way or another the work will be done.
Quants are very hard to hire
With the quants everything is much harder, we found out that in order to create some trading strategy a person should have some secret sauce. You can be a winner of all mathematical olympiads in the world, an expert in machine learning and finances (although the latter is not at all necessary) and still not be a good quant.
On top of that, research work is ‘a road leading from failure to failure accompanied by growing enthusiasm’. 99% of attempts to make a working strategy end up in a failure: most of the time you spend losing. It is very hard and discouraging for many people.
At first, our main method of hiring quants were paid internships, which we offered to students in their final years, graduates and postgraduates. But the effectiveness of such method was low: as a rule, after two months we said good-bye to the intern.
Meanwhile, the number of candidates willing to try their skill was growing fast. In order to save time and energy, we started to make additional filters — to apply for the internship people had to solve a problem, it helped us filter out those who were coming by mistake. Then we added other problems. But the flow of candidates was still too big: we once had to do 30 interviews with applicants in one week, and they were only the ones who made it to a face-to-face interview.
All the people that we hired were very strong at solving logical problems, were good at integrals and were overall very clever people, but 9 out 10 did not write a single working strategy. But that remaining one sometimes did everyone else’s work.
It appeared that it required some special mindset, readiness to delve into the smallest technical details and intuition. And luck too.
How we made a playground exchange for interns
We thought if we needed to develop trading strategies why not let our applicants practice making them at their internship. But the development of a strategy is a complex and voluminous task and we wanted to understand faster whether the intern would prove useful or not.
For this reason, we decided to create a playground exchange with simpler mechanics, we created a toy instrument — a futures contract for a meme index. It is a futures contract like the ones for the RTS, Dow Jones and S&P500 indices, it only had memes from the top of r/memes and Reddit instead of equities of top companies in it and instead of money a special currency — loys.
- The Founder
links : trade.Onederx.com
jon telegram - https://t.me/onederx
Topic: OnederX: How we Hired Employees Using Meme Futures - Meme Trading ! (Read 77 times)
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