Citadel Securities is a market-making firm, which means that we always stand ready to buy and sell a range of financial products including stocks, options, and bonds from customers to help financial markets operate with confidence. I work in a small team within our options trading group that identifies and executes trades using analytical tools that make us more efficient and help us manage the associated risk.
We also utilize our expertise to support the options trading group. Through complex data sets, human expertise, and Citadel’s robust analytical capabilities we draw conclusions about how a given corporate event will ultimately impact that company’s stock price and its associated options, enabling the team to offer the best prices to end investors. My day generally consists of data analysis to better predict the impact of corporate events. I work with many people to help model and fully understand a particular event from every possible perspective, including financial, structural, and regulatory. We also think about longer term project management to help expand the range of financial products that we are able to trade.
I grew up in the United States in New Jersey, and I spent most of my free time playing board games and card games, ultimately travelling all over the country to participate in tournaments for a card game called Magic: the Gathering. I attended a school that prepared students for a career in medicine, but I soon realized I was more interested in math and economics than medicine. I split my early college time between engineering and finance, eventually realizing that I was most interested in economics, finance, and philosophy, and I was fortunate enough to be able to pursue a degree that combined these three interests.
Through the friends I had met in Magic: the Gathering, I learned about careers in trading and discovered that many of the problems the traders are tasked with solving closely aligned with the skills needed to be good at board games and card games. I spent six months working at a smaller options trading firm that confirmed my interest in the career path, as I learned that so much of the job was about solving puzzles, using quick mental math, and quickly identifying patterns over short time horizons – all things I loved. During my senior year, I applied to larger firms that traded more unique products with a diverse set of strategies, in order to put myself at a company where I’d have the opportunity to learn as much as possible, which led me to Citadel Securities, where I’ve now worked since September 2018.
While the job does require a strong quantitative foundation, a wide range of backgrounds can be successful in trading. A lot of trading is about being able to apply a new perspective to a data set or picking out interesting patterns over short time horizons. Having a unique background enables you to do these things in ways that others can’t. It’s important to be able to do quick mental math, have a basic knowledge of calculus, probability, and statistics, and equally importantly, to be humble and capable of breaking down your own opinions and ideas in a productive way.
I love working with the vast resources that Citadel Securities offers to its employees. This includes large data sets, advanced technology, and incredible human capital. The people I work with have deep institutional knowledge that enables me to learn and to trade situations where data alone does not suffice. My teammates are passionate about sharing their expertise and guiding new traders. I also like that when we apply these resources to solve a problem, the market provides fast feedback as to whether our ideas are good, making it so we are constantly iterating and improving.
The biggest limitation is navigating the complex legal and regulatory structures both within Citadel Securities and in the broader financial world. A large firm like Citadel Securities needs to operate in compliance with many rules and internal controls. This means that ideas that require trading new strategies or products must go through a rigorous approval process. Even for smaller ideas that don’t require as many approvals, you’ll often need to work closely with order traders to sanity check your idea before applying it to your trading.