In this episode of Connect With Purpose, the host speaks with Alan, a recruiter specializing in high frequency trading (HFT), about what makes HFT hiring different from traditional finance.

Key Takeaways:

- High frequency trading recruitment significantly diverges from traditional finance recruitment, emphasizing engineering and real-time game theory.

- Candidates aspiring to enter high frequency trading must possess strong coding skills and advanced mathematical abilities rather than merely academic accolades.

- Contrary to popular belief, a PhD is not a prerequisite for success in high frequency trading; practical coding skills are often more valuable.

- The recruitment process in high frequency trading is profoundly impactful, connecting exceptional talent with life-changing career opportunities.

- Successful candidates in high frequency trading are characterized by their emotional regulation and ability to adapt under pressure.

- India is emerging as a global hub for high frequency trading, reflecting a shift in talent dynamics and market activity.

00:00 Welcome and Introductions

01:14 What Makes HFT Hiring Unique

03:14 Traits of Elite Quants

05:10 Common HFT Hiring Myths

07:25 Why Smart People Fail

09:24 Recruiter Responsibility and Impact

11:03 India as an HFT Hub

13:18 Staying Motivated in Recruiting

15:46 Advice for Top Performers

17:55 Purpose and Closing

Welcome to another episode of Connect with Purpose.

Today I am joined by Alan, who is a colleague of mine and he specializes within the high frequency trading space.

We thought it would be really useful and really interesting for people within this industry to see a recruiter's perspective on the space and to see and learn things that can help you get ahead in your career and things that maybe you should be looking out for.

So welcome Alan.

Thank you, Augusta.

Thank you so much for having me in this podcast.

I'll give a small brief about myself before we head in the questions.

So I've been working for almost 10 years now.

Previously all my job roles were kind of associated with engineers.

All my life I've been either selling to engineers or consulting with engineers.

And now, now it's been three years that I'm consulting and recruiting in this space of high frequency trading.

And yeah, it's a great opportunity to talk to you right now about what's going on the market and everything else.

Amazing.

So let's get, let's get right into it.

So for someone outside of finance, you know, for their understanding what makes hiring within high frequency trading completely different from other traditional recruitment and traditional finance recruitment.

So see, high frequency trading recruitment is fundamentally different from traditional finance recruitment because it operates on an intersection of extreme engineering and I'd say real time game theory, which is a part of math.

Whereas traditional banks might hire for a relationship manager fundamental analyst, HFT firms hire for people who optimizes things in nanoseconds.

So that itself is a big difference.

And the skill set for traditional finance recruitment people would be mostly on the financial modeling and sales side.

Whereas a high frequency recruit as a high frequency recruitment.

I can guarantee you that people look into low latency C and advanced math as a primary skill.

Right?

And even performance metrics is also different.

They have a long term P and L based system where at the same time in high frequency it's a real time alpha and almost feedback is millisecond based feedback that you get.

Right.

So the hard truth is most of the candidates believe being the smartest person in the room at a top university is enough to crack into an HFT firm.

Which is absolutely wrong.

The truth is many elite firms don't care about your CGPA as much as your ability to kind of translate abstract math into high performing code under extreme pressure is what they want.

And if you can, and then if you can't handle being wrong 49% of the time, you would not survive this industry.

How do you know when you've Met an exceptional quant or quant researcher.

Like, what do you notice almost instantly when you, when you, when you see someone exceptional?

Everybody is exceptional.

But like, an exceptional quant trader developer would kind of look like.

See, the most striking trait that I look into when I speak to people are the mental horsepower.

I would say the ability to kind of process complex multidimensional problems almost instantly.

However, the truth is the goal lies between the balance between raw intelligence and a very specific mindset.

Do you want me to elaborate on, like, the concept that I have on intelligence, mindset and all that?

Yes, why not?

Perfect.

So according to me, a raw IQ is kind of an entry ticket, but probably the mindset is the winner.

Right.

If you don't have a mindset that keeps you in the game, even the elite talent can't survive.

It's similar to that of curiosity and technical skill set.

So if you find, you can find a lot of people who are extremely technical, technically savvy on C, but people who won or people who make a lot of money in this space are people who always are curious about what's happening in the market.

Why is this happening like this?

People who question the mechanics of the world.

You can find these people often having hobbies like playing poker or chess or competitive programming and all that.

So, yeah, people who are curious, people who have a very strong mindset.

And like, as I said, the mental horsepower is high and able to crack complicated and complex problems is kind of what an elite talent looks like in this space.

Interesting.

And what, and what do you think is the myth around?

You know, candidates think this is what's going to get them hired, when actually what firms are looking for and what will get them hired is different.

So maybe I'll uncover three of the myths that I've heard a lot.

So I, I used to set up calls with fresh, fresh graduates every weekends.

Like, I used to sit with few people who are just graduating.

And I have the, like, it's, it's like a hobby where I connect on a Saturday with few people.

So I talk to.

I, I get these three questions quite frequently.

One, they asked me whether you need a PhD to kind of survive in quant.

So my, I used to tell them, see, PhDs are very common in quant firms.

Yes.

Like, all the top peer names have PhDs or they hire like, quant researchers who are PhDs.

True.

But as an undergraduate or a graduate coder, if you can build things faster than a PhD can theorize, definitely you are 100% will be part of an HFT in the future.

Right.

Second question that I got, I used to get a lot is like do you need to know a lot about finance?

So many firms actually prefer candidates with zero finance background.

Mostly they want people who are pure problem solvers.

A physicist or a mathematician or a computer scientist.

These are the people they want to hire and they know they have the capacity to teach them how to solve market or like how to work on markets later once they are hired.

Right.

So that's another myth I would like to crack and another funny myth that I've heard people asking me, does this quant office or does it look like a Wolf of Wall street movie?

Is that something that happens?

I want to say that it never.

It's.

It's not like that.

Most of the modern high frequency trading firms kind of look like Google or OpenAI, the ones that I've been to.

And they are very quiet.

They are quite data driven.

They prioritize over intellectual humility, over bravado, for sure.

So I think these three myths I'll

crack today like that for sure.

Obviously you speak to incredibly smart people all the time.

Why do you think that certain incredibly smart people don't succeed in this industry?

Saying incredibly smart people, people fail is common, especially in HFTs.

And this often stems from a lack of emotional regulation and adaptability.

That's what I would say.

Like it can also be called as an ego trap.

Like highly intelligent people are used to being light all the time.

And in HFT markets the ultimate arbitrator is the market.

And if your model says to buy and your market goes down, the market is right.

People who can't admit they are wrong and cut their losses find fall instantly for sure.

That's one reason.

And another reason is the pressure tolerance.

So there is a unique psychology of today.

Millions of dollars.

See, you see millions of dollars kind of move in front of you, lose that money in front of you.

So if you don't have a.

Or if you are someone who lacks pressure tolerance and you freeze at these moments, I would say this would lead to a catastrophic error.

I've seen people losing 4 crores INR in 5 seconds right in front of their desk.

So if these things happen and you can't contain it, and if you're scared to kind of work on this, then yeah, I would say that's the reason why smart people fail to survive in HFTs.

Yeah.

So ego essentially.

Ego is ego.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that's happening.

Just to come off the back of that, I think that's happening more and more where firms are becoming more collaborative and they don't want these huge egos.

They want people who are humble.

Yes, totally.

People who are ready to learn, listen and improve.

And improve.

Yeah.

You sit between life changing opportunities and talent.

How seriously do you take that responsibility?

So recruitment in this space is for me it's far from transactional.

It is deeply purposeful for me and I'm sitting between a life changing opportunity and a world class talent.

Right.

So response like I bring in two variables.

One is the responsibility that I have towards a client.

Like I feel like hiring a single hire can basically unlock new markets or a strategy for the firm and that can generate tens and millions of dollars in revenue.

Right.

Similarly, a bad hire can disrupt the entire delicate culture of a elite pod.

So I have to be super responsible when I send somebody to again to a client.

At the same time, the responsibility for me towards a candidate would be like, see for a candidate, an HFT role.

I would not say it's just a job.

It's an entry where you get into the top 0.1 percentage of global earners.

Right.

And that along with that, it's a chance to kind of solve world's hardest technical puzzle.

So I take this responsibility very seriously.

And I always don't want to call myself a headhunter, rather I would call myself a career tech.

Helping people build their careers in the space and helping clients obviously to get the right talent.

I think what you're saying is really important.

It's about working with top talent and working with the clients and actually helping people work out if that is the right opportunity for them and also for the client is the right person for them.

So I think, yeah, I think that's very important.

Obviously India has been a lot in the news over the last few years in regards to being obviously coming up massively within the HFT space cities like Mumbai Gagao.

Obviously India is changing the global HFT landscape.

I think for talent.

Like are you seeing that?

What are you seeing?

I can see the rise of India, especially Gurgaon and Mumbai as a global HFT hub, which is like it's quite significant.

And you can see that in the last decade, right.

The advantage is within NSE and BSE we can see record volumes.

India is no longer a back office.

It's the primary theater for sophisticated, sophisticated option strategy.

Like there's a lot more momentum, lot more volume in the option strategies in India.

Right.

And another point to this is the talent export and import.

So previously, if you look into it like the best Indian talent had to move to New York, Chicago or Singapore or London.

Now firms like Jane, Street, Tower, Citadel, everybody are aggressively hiring for myits and they are also building offices in Mumbai and Gurgaon.

Right.

So these two things.

Another advantage also like India and Global would be that I see that SEBI is getting, trying to get things regulated in the space more so that more and more strategies in the high frequency space can come in and more and more algorithms can run and it's getting, the regulation is getting way more clearer.

So yeah, it will be better eventually, like in maybe in the next one, two years it will be much, it will have much better clarity.

That's what we are hoping for.

Yeah, makes sense.

And in terms of the recruitment industry in general, obviously people are normally motivated by performance metrics and by money.

What do you think keeps the best people motivated long term in this industry?

See in the recruitment industry, as I said, like everybody, everything is sometimes perceived transactional.

And I would say what keeps a top tier quant recruiter motivated long term isn't just the commission.

It should like an impact that you create on someone.

Right.

I have again three angles to this.

One would be the strategic matchmaker mindset that I have.

See beyond fulfilling roles.

An elite recruiter is driven by intellectual challenges.

Identifying if some candidate kind of goes there and it's like a jigsaw puzzle basically.

Right.

So identifying if this particular candidate is part of the puzzle piece they want will and that and closing that gives that feel of being a strategic match makeup.

So that's something that I like about this.

That's one, the second point that I like or the second important thing that I have is building relationships.

The long term motivation stems from having trust with these people.

Good candidates, feeling that I'm a career architect for them.

They feel like I've helped them across different areas of their life and help them along their long, long term career trajectory.

Helping them in getting things done, having quick placements and advising and also advising them to not take up roles which are not truly a fit for them.

So building relationships is something important.

And finally the information and the knowledge that I get from the quants and quants in the space, like I, as I said, I myself is a analyst from past and I'm always excited to know what's happening in the market and these people are the front runners in this system.

And having friends who are really good at this helps a lot.

Like it helps me to make money from markets as well.

Having understanding these people.

Yeah.

And I think hft is the hardest, one of the hardest areas of recruitment because it's obviously, as you know, it's such a long term game and some, sometimes you have to stay in the industry long enough to actually to do well out of it.

And it's one of those industries where you have to build relationships up over a long, long period of time.

Because it's not a transactional space, it's a space which is built on trust.

And I think that's obviously what you're highlighting, but I think it's a really powerful point.

What advice would you give to anybody who is operating at the top 1% of performance environments?

You can talk about recruitment, but what advice would you give?

I'd say the difference between candidate who builds an extraordinary career and those who are into a learning or self correction mode.

Basically the top performers are not just technically brilliant, they are relentless and curious about their own blind spot.

They actively seek feedback, they follow a process.

They're willing to pivot their skill set when it's needed in the direct right path.

So see, as a, I'd say a very good profile or a very good candidate or a very good salesperson or anybody is someone who understand their values not to be static and functional.

And it's about continuously adapting to new things and making sure that they are following a process and making sure that you stick to the process that is defined to you that really helps to be the one person in any industry.

I think the process is also really important.

I know we speak about it a lot, but it's that ability to learn a process and stick to it.

Even after years of being in a, in a sector and going back to basics sometimes.

What's your, what's your purpose?

What's your purpose in work?

Alan?

Like why do you, why do you do this?

In simple terms as a recruiter in the industry I would want to be the advisor and a strategic partner to who I connect most.

It is all brilliant minds with the idea to kind of get into a good firm and for a client.

I want to ensure that the clients kind of get the best people.

So as I said, this business is purely karma based.

You make money helping people is what I feel.

So as I said, you be a good consultant, you be a good career architect, talk to the right people, tell them what's best for them, tell them what's not good for them.

It's also at the same time like not bringing someone who's bad or like who does not match the same energy of a POD or culturally not fit to a company, I make sure that that's there.

My purpose is to kind of build those relationships and build everything for them and give them the highest possible achievement through my expertise.

That's my purpose.

Amazing.

I think this is.

I think this is incredibly useful for a lot of people watching this.

If you're within hft, if you are.

If you are within this space, Alan is definitely someone you should be connecting with for now or for the future.

And I hope you all enjoyed the episode today.

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Thanks, Alan.

Thank you, Alista.

Thank you, Alistair, so much.

Thank you for the opportunity.

I hope.

Yeah.

Let's have the best year ahead and make good connections this year, too.

Perfect.

Thanks.

Hello.

Thanks.

Bye.

Bye.