Sendhil Revuluri, FRM, CFA – Managing Director of Trading Team Learning & Innovation, PEAK6
Everyone says that it’s the age of Big Data. But what do analysts and data scientists do? At PEAK6, one of our core values is to Approach Every Day With Curiosity, so our analytics team is integrally involved in significant business problems, and they have the data, technology, and resources to make a real impact. Whether it’s finding trends and correlations in equity and option prices, or marrying machine learning with a thorough understanding of the dynamics of volatility surfaces to devise innovative skew models, analytics touches everything we do.
PEAK6’s core Capital Management business is about the ever-changing markets, and this means that there are many interesting, challenging problems to investigate.
“Everything we’re doing is intractable,” says Pat Shively, Director of Analytics. And the analytics team can both define and solve these problems. With petabytes of organized proprietary data — that’s often not yet been analyzed — the analytics team has the resources from human domain experts to state-of-the-art hardware to use data to support high-stakes business and trading decisions. The analytics team gets to see its impact, directly and quickly.
Stephanie Lin, Quantitative Data Analyst, says “It’s great to build models that are designed to make high-stakes decisions every day — sometimes every minute.”
Another PEAK6 core value is to Act Boldly, With Courage. We try new things quickly, whether it’s doing our core business differently and better, or expanding into other markets through our investments —everything from professional sports to mineral quarries and online dating, to name a few. It’s a quick, innovative, fast-paced place to work. For the analytics team, this means close collaboration with trading experts, fast feedback and the opportunity to see the effects of their work quickly. There’s a lot more autonomy and the chance to have an impact and work on bigger problems compared to a large, mature company. Analysts don’t just support projects, but also drive and lead them. On a small scale, our bimonthly Analytics Days allow analysts to depart from their routine work and investigate something new. Think Google’s 20% Time. On a larger scale, our Knowledge Office promotes innovation, refines and combines ideas from across the firm, and structures and executes large-scale strategic projects.
The PEAK6 analytics team’s diverse backgrounds — physics, software development, trading, and more — allows them to bring innovative techniques to the problems they investigate.
“One thing I like about PEAK6 is working with smart people who complement my skill set,” says Karan Ghai, Quantitative Analyst. The analytics team works closely with multiple areas of the firm, embodying another PEAK6 core value to Be Collaborative. The analytics team both collaborates on investigations with others at the company and helps educate them on how to formulate good questions, and best use data to design sound, actionable analyses.
Analytic insights have been essential to PEAK6’s success over the last 20 years, and they are at the heart of our plans for our next phase of innovation and growth. Our growing analytics team will be at the center of all of PEAK6’s exciting and forthcoming projects.
