-Ricardo Viejo
Career Exploration Assignment * Describe the culture of the company/department in which you worked
The overall culture of the company is very laid back. The department in which Brandon worked in took care of the emerging market trading. They focused on emerging markets as Russia, Poland, Korea and Taiwan. The trading floor was isolated from everyone else in other departments. He had his own office and everyone in the floor was a trader or someone related to trading. Most of the traders were laidback young guys that liked to joke around. Even though they’d like to joke all day the environment was hard working and intellectually stimulating. Co-workers were friendly with each other and everyone was willing to help network. GMO is on of the buy side. The main founder, Grantham, had his office three doors down, really close to Brandon’s office. People did not wear suits, but business casual and liked to socialize on hallways. Good advice to fit in is to show your interest in learning and they’ll help you learn. * What were your responsibilities? Were your responsibilities generally routine or project based? * (Included) Describe a typical day.
Routinely, during most times of the day Brandon took care of the confirmation of trades. He would go early in the morning and start handling the confirmation of every single trade. Trades would get executed in Bloomberg. Brokers helped investors find trades. The trades were updated into a program called Long View and into the CTM broker matching system. Brandon would verify that all the trades in Long View were the same as those in CTM. Aspects to take into account were, trade date, commission, taxes, price, quantity, settlement date and net amount. Once the trades were confirmed they were all matched up. Once the trades were matched they would be uploaded to BBH.
On a daily basis the times he operated the markets were as follow:
ASIA from 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM depending on how many trades
EMIA from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM
AMERICAS 4:00 PM on
Days with more trades, took more time.
Every month the company would rebalance all the funds they had. They modified a model that gives insight to brokers regarding investment opportunities. During the first and second weeks of rebalance there would probably be 1000 trades. Towards the end of the month the trades would decline to 40 trades a day.
Brandon’s position changed mid-way into quantitative trading. Basically, research analysts project the market microstructure, which are little details of the markets. The regulations in emerging markets are different from those in the US. Brazil may allow short selling while Taiwan does not. This information empowers traders when it is uploaded into the info wiki.
He would normalize trade qualifier data to determine a standard list across all markets. This would give insight to traders, and determine internal trading, or if a broker stole a trade. The normalizing of a cross-trade would be used by comparing its TICK data, a one basis point movement, .00001 percent. Every trade would be one tick data and Brandon would analyze what the trade qualifiers meant, then normalize and determine all the qualifiers and find those that were different.
To recap, the first three months he worked in the confirmation of trades. The last months he worked on data management. He would pull data from IBC with a program called Q and verify the exchanges data matched Bloomberg’s and the data vendor’s data. The data vendor was going to use that data to write algorithms. Sometimes there would be one thousand rows of data and he had to confirm that the tick data was the same. Usually he wouldn’t analyze more than three stocks over a couple of days, depending of medium, high or low liquidity * How did your role contribute to the overall department’s/firms objectives?
Work developed on his first three months:
The trade conference was purely to help traders in showing them that there