Trader

Matilde started as an Intern at Lind Capital in the autumn of 2021 in team Quantitative Analysis. Afterwards, she continued working in the company as an Assistant Analyst in team Finance. After graduating, she took over yet another position in Lind Capital; this time as Trader Graduate, and today Matilde is employed as Trader in our US team.

My time as an Intern at LC

During my internship, I learned a great deal about how quantitative trading works, which is a lot different from what most people think – including myself when I first started. Apart from that, I became a lot better at coding in Python and SQL, which I think was one of the greatest advantages of my internship.

Being an Intern in team QA, you typically work on larger projects with timeframes ranging from weeks to several months. Most projects in team QA are individually driven but usually in cooperation with our technology team and a Trader, and I would describe the work environment as immersive as I spent most days coding from morning to evening.

My time as an Assistant Analyst at LC

It was sort of random that I ended up in team Finance. During my internship, I was assigned a project from our CFO at the time (now CEO), which I worked on for several months at the end of my internship. Afterward, I was offered a student position in the team, which I gladly accepted as it is really important for me to continue to learn. I saw the student job as a good opportunity to expand my knowledge in other areas of the company, which turned out to be very useful later. During my time on the Finance team, I got a good understanding of capital structure and risks, which can be quite complex in a trading company as you trade margins with different brokers, in different currencies, and all over the globe.

The decision to work as a Trader

Before I applied for the internship in team QA, I had a pretty good idea that I wanted to be a Trader. However, I was a bit torn because I also really enjoyed programming and working on quantitative analysis and wasn’t sure if a job as Trader would be “quantitative” enough for me. Of course, I quickly discovered that it wasn’t the case, and the competencies needed to be a Trader are much more quantitative and technical than most would think. That made me certain about my decision.

A great deal of my time as a Trader is spend on quantitative analysis, i.e., business development, tuning strategies to match the market environment, etc., which is in alignment with what I like to do. Though, I have to say that what I like the most about the job are the days when you go off strategy and must make purely discretionary decisions because the market is extremely volatile. On those days, you are busy trading from market open to close as there are a lot of big opportunities throughout the entire day, where you can usually make (or lose) a lot of money in a very short time. I believe that type of excitement is difficult to find in other jobs.

One of the main reasons I wanted to start my trader career in LC is that there is a very social and young environment, which I highly value. It just makes it more fun to work. Throughout my time in LC, I have always gotten a say in what I want to do and what I want to learn, which is one of the most important things for me.

Trader Graduate at LC

When you first start as a Trader it is a whole process of understanding the statistics behind the trading strategies, understanding market structure and regulations, learning to use the systems, and of course becoming an expert in every ticker and product we trade. During the first weeks, the team sort of “paces” you, i.e., asking you questions about the underlying math and statistics or market dynamics that you must answer whilst being busy making trading decisions. I think it is a great approach because it teaches you to calculate the attractiveness of a bet while being able to do other things at the same time – such as hedging, monitoring trades you already put in the market or making OTC trades.

I trade the US equity market which is open from 15:30-22:00 CET, which means that my workday looks different almost every day. In the team, we divide the evening shifts between us based on what fits everyone best from week to week. On a day shift, a typical workday would include working on projects, ad hoc analysis, dealing with operative problems in cooperation with the team Finance, Risk, and Operations, dealing with technical issues in cooperation with the Technology team, meetings with brokers, and keeping up to date with macro and company specifics news. On an evening shift, you would typically meet anytime between 10 AM and 3 PM depending on the amount of work you have at the moment and how much is going on in the market. If it is a quiet day, you usually have time to do some analysis next to trading and if the market is busy, you spend all your time trading.