Mid-Semester Update
Over the past month the Smith Investment Fund has had the chance to meet hundreds of students throughout UMD at our interest meetings, first look fairs, an ACES event, and DRW’s information session. We weren’t exactly sure how recruitment would go due to COVID-19 restrictions, but it surpassed all of our expectations, and we thank every one of you for showing your interest and supporting SIF. It has been incredible meeting so many new faces and encouraging to see more students interested in quantitative finance every year. Though, it did make recruitment harder than ever before with an unprecedented 98 applications to the quantitative team. It was difficult to decide amongst the many clearly sharp, motivated, and curious candidates, but we are happy to add 12 new members to our team. This concludes our recruiting cycle and we are excited to shift our focus back to education and research, with more motivation than before thanks to your support. We are thrilled to continue our mission towards of providing hands-on investing experience for students with our new members:
Shahnawaz Khalid (PhD Candidate), Joshua Batkhan (‘23), Koby Adu-Bonnah (‘24), Kwabena Aduse-Poku (‘24), Aadria Bagchi (‘24), Daniel Choi (‘24), Bryan Houlton (‘24), Lalitha Kasi (‘24), Amanda Liu (‘24), Rishabh Misra (‘24), Abhinav Modugula (‘24), Rohan Uttamsingh (‘24)
On September 23rd, we co-hosted an event with DRW, a prominent quantitative trading firm. Together we hosted two current DRW employees, a quantitative researcher and the Head of FICC Options Trading Technology. They both discussed their roles within the company and provided valuable insight into what goes on within one of the most successful trading firms. They covered the two most important parts of Quantitative Finance, the research side and technology side. It was particularly interesting to hear about how these two roles intersect and collaborate. The event had great turnout and once again we were delighted to see such interest in Quantitative Finance. We are excited to host more events like these and introduce more amazing companies to the UMD community.
With recruiting coming to a close, we will be heavily shifting gears to focus back on developing our internal trading infrastructure and conducting novel quantitative research. On the infrastructure side, we have two main goals for the semester. The first is to create an official pool of trading signals hosted on our server. Once a trading signal is added to this pool it will update every strategy with new data and provide valuable out-of-sample performance metrics. Secondly, we will set up automated testing infrastructure that will allow researchers to rigorously backtest their signals asynchronously on our server. These are ambitious goals for the semester, but we believe our team will continue to break our expectations, and follow through as always. We also will work towards developing our automated execution so we can begin to manage our live portfolio. This is a huge step for us and we are excited to see it all come together. Additionally, as shown in the roadmap, we are continuing to expand our research tooling with machine learning capabilities. This new package, SIFInsights, will give our researchers the ability to apply machine learning techniques to their investment strategies. While this will not be the main focus for this semester, we are eager to continue developing tools that will enable us to further our research.
