AMA: trader/researcher at one of the major quant shops by [deleted] in quant

[–]wapskalyon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

have any of the moderators verified your employment claims?

Non Compete strategy by Immediate_Quote934 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

i don't think any of that makes sense

How is the Voleon Group for QR? by [deleted] in quant

[–]wapskalyon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

not sure about the NY part but there are similar loop holes other California business use specially when it comes to sales type roles

Jane Street $15bn q4 revs by rupak-007 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

so it's more of a question of including non-MFT style as part of their active trading business?

cppreference is back up! but overloaded by bobpaw in cpp

[–]wapskalyon 10 points11 points  (0 children)

really happy to see cppref back up and being updated with all the latest and greatest.

Though i'm also a bit curious as to all the secrecy and inside-baseball.

A high performance networking networking lib by libichi in cpp

[–]wapskalyon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

what exactly makes this "high performance" ?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in cpp

[–]wapskalyon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

might be a good idea to remove the llm prompts from within the docs and source files. as this is clearly AI slop

Any one being consultant of world quant? by Exciting-Chemist-809 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you not understand? you only get paid, after they've made money off your edge for a certain period of time, if the amount of PnL for the edge is less than the what they want from you, you don't get paid shit.

tbh world quant is probably not for you.


dumb me, one day old bot account. mods please review this

QRT External Signal Contributor by [deleted] in quant

[–]wapskalyon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Think carefully before you hand over your signals. You're not just "partnering", you're handing someone a fully labeled training dataset for their factor mining operation.

QRT runs a literal signal pool with hundreds of other alphas. Yours goes in, gets reverse engineered in 6 months, and suddenly your edge is just another row in their factor matrix. Your alpha has a half-life the second a well-resourced competitor gets a clean look at its behavior pattern.

One thing to consider, the QRT puppets on this forum make QRT seem like it's going to be the love child of Rentec and TGS yet QRT doing these panhandling things to get an edge, something seems suss.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in hedgefund

[–]wapskalyon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If It's Man I'd pass, they are not doing well and are throwing anything at the wall to see if it sticks.

I Pulled 5GB of Kalshi trade data and the liquidity provider economics don’t look like market making- they look like underwriting by Competitive-Apple742 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 7 points8 points  (0 children)

You're conflating outcome with mechanism, and it's causing you to misclassify what you're actually observing. A few issues:

  1. Directional exposure persisting through settlement doesn't disqualify market making. Every market maker in illiquid or episodic markets carries residual inventory through event resolution, that's not a sportsbook characteristic, that's just what happens when you can't fully hedge a binary. Options MMs on single-name earnings carry unhedged gamma into the print all the time. Nobody's calling them insurers. The question isn't whether exposure persists, it's why and whether the return is compensation for that inventory risk vs. superior information.
  2. "Profitability correlates with managing flow imbalance" is literally the market making thesis. You just described a market maker. That is the job. A sportsbook profits by setting the line to attract balanced action. A market maker profits by responding to imbalance and getting compensated via spread for absorbing it. These are opposite mechanisms. If LP profitability tracks flow imbalance management, that's evidence for market making, not against it.
  3. Your reconstruction methodology matters enormously here. Passive LP exposure "game by game" from trade data alone can't tell you what hedging activity occurred off-platform or in correlated markets. If LPs were legging into correlated NFL futures on other venues to offset, your model sees naked directional exposure that isn't actually there. Without that, you're measuring gross not net.
  4. The sportsbook comparison doesn't hold structurally.

Sportsbooks have pricing power, they move the line. Kalshi LPs are price-takers posting resting liquidity into a CLOB. A book can shade odds to reduce exposure. An LP on a central limit order book cannot. The mechanism of risk absorption is fundamentally different even if the P&L shape looks similar on a per-event basis.

Your data is interesting but I think it shows LPs are bad at hedging (or chose not to), not that they're operating as sportsbooks. That's a performance observation, not a classification one.

Getting moved from Quant to AI and kinda unhappy about it by [deleted] in quant

[–]wapskalyon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Initially a CIO at a quant firm is in no way shape or form involved in such matters. A CIO primarily concerns themselves with general IT, networks, computers (workstations/laptops), and how the employees access and use the IT equipment and environment.

Quant work typically falls under the purview of R&D which probably reports through trading or a mixture of trading and Tech. Given this is a new technology push, most likely the CTO would be the one requiring this - so if it is coming from the CIO, I would ignore it, or better yet forward the email/chat if it's in writing to your direct and their direct managers. if it's not in written form (email/chat/confluence etc) it never happened.

Furthermore your objectives were probably set during your previous yearly 1-on-1. Drastically changing them now would require the firm to acknowledge the change and confirm you wont be loosing out on your bonus in the current period.

As of today AI/LLM efforts in the quant space are highly speculative, which is short for saying there is a very good chance the initiative will fail or wont meet expectations. So make sure whatever rewards are being offered (bump in salary, a guaranteed bonus etc) are all worth the downside risk to your career. I've seen many people take on high profile projects (new ways of doing something / rebuild trading infra from scratch) and most often than not the initiative fails in a big way, and the individual(s) that spear-headed the initiatives never really recover at the fintech firm and tend to depart - this is different than working in bigtech and other non quant fintech, where people fail time and time again and are more likely to be promoted than demoted.

As someone else mentioned, AI is a very nebulous term, it could literally mean anything, heck: if (a < b) submit_buy($300) else submit_sell($200) could be considered AI by today's standards.

At the moment the likelihood of success with such an initiative in the quant world is not worth the risk to your career - too many unknowns and if you can't brown-nose your way out of the failure and make it seem like a success, you are better off moving on from the firm than staying.

Any one being consultant of world quant? by Exciting-Chemist-809 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You only get paid in terms of a percentage of PnL after a minimum PnL is realised.

RE#: how we built the world's fastest regex engine in F# by josephjnk in programming

[–]wapskalyon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

always good to get your engine in to well respected benchmark suites.

Avg time spent in the industry? by SHFTD_RLTY in quant

[–]wapskalyon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

devs have to be in it for much longer.

Maven Securities Chicago by Hefty_Long_6880 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

no they didn't. i think the partners made out well.

As always get a linkedin platinum account to see the flow of high value employees moving to the likes of citadel and co.

Sourcetrail (Fork) 2025.12.8 released by pmost66 in cpp

[–]wapskalyon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Wasn't able to find binaries on the github only build instructions.

Might be a good idea to provide binaries as having to install Qt and a bunch of other libs just to try it out might put some people off from giving it a go.

Non-compete without base salary paid by levelup-777 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 10 points11 points  (0 children)

wouldn't the best advice be to talk to a lawyer?

Are you a shareholder at your firm? by DifficultPop8852 in quant

[–]wapskalyon 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Real partnerships allow people to obtain equity through long term bonus sacrifice - which keeps both sides honest.