Gordon Ritter: Founder, CIO, Ritter Alpha, LP

Gordon Ritter completed his PhD in mathematical physics at Harvard University in 2007, where his published work ranged across the fields of quantum computation, quantum field theory, differential geometry and abstract algebra.

Prior to Harvard he earned his Bachelor’s degree with honours in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Gordon is currently a senior portfolio manager at GSA Capital, and leader of a team trading a range of high-Sharpe absolute return strategies across geographies and asset classes. GSA Capital has won the Equity Market Neutral & Quantitative Strategies category at the Eurohedge awards four times, with numerous other awards including in the long-term performance category.

Prior to joining GSA, Gordon was a Vice President of Highbridge Capital and a core member of the firm’s statistical arbitrage group, which although less than 20 people, was one of the most successful quantitative trading groups in history, responsible for billions in pro_t and trillions of dollars of trades across equities, futures and options.

Concurrently with his positions in industry, Gordon teaches courses ranging from portfolio management to econometrics, continuous-time finance, and market microstructure in the Department of Statistics at Rutgers University, and also in the MFE programs at Baruch College (CUNY) and New York University (both ranked in the top 5 MFE programs).

He has published several articles on modern portfolio theory in top practitioner journals including Risk, and academic journals including European Journal of Operational Research.

Terry Benzschawel: Founder and Principal, Benzschawel Scientific, LLC

Terry Benzschawel is the Founder and Principal of Benzschawel Scientific, LLC. The former Managing Director in Citigroup’s Institutional Clients Business. Terry headed the Credit Trading Analysis group which develops and implements quantitative tools and strategies for credit market trading and risk management, both for Citi’s clients and for in-house applications. Some sample tools include models of corporate default and recovery values, relative value of corporate bonds, loans, and credit default swaps, credit portfolio optimization, credit derivative trades, capital structure arbitrage, measuring and hedging liquidity risk, and cross-credit-sector asset allocation.

After six years of post-doctoral research in academia and industry and two years in consumer banking, Terry began his investment banking career in at Salomon Brothers in 1992. Terry built models for proprietary arbitrage trading in bonds, currencies and derivative securities in Salomon’s Fixed Income Arbitrage Group. In 1998, he moved to the Fixed Income Strategy department as a credit strategist with a focus on client-oriented solutions across all credit markets and has worked in related roles since then. Terry was promoted to Managing Director at Citi in 2008.

Terry received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Indiana University (1980) and his B.A. (with Distinction) from the University of Wisconsin (1975). Terry has done post-doctoral fellowships in Optometry at the University of California at Berkeley and in Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was a visiting scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center prior to embarking on a career in finance. He currently serves on the steering committees of the Masters of Financial Engineering Programs at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles and Carnegie Mellon University’s Computational Finance Program.

Terry is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events and has lectured on credit modelling at major universities. In addition, he has published over a dozen articles in refereed journals and is author of CREDIT MODELING: FACTS, THEORIES AND APPLICATIONS. In addition, Terry has been the instructor for courses in credit modelling for Incisive Media and the Centre for Finance Professionals. Finally, Terry has taught a course on credit modelling at Russia’s Sberbank in Moscow.

James Baker: Product Manager, Suite, LLC

James Baker is the Product Manager at Suite, LLC, the provider of the ALib fixed income analytics library. James has worked in quantitative, risk and IT roles, at both banks and vendors, in New York, London and Paris. He has a Computer Science Masters from London’s Imperial College, where he focused on Artificial Intelligence. His recent work on Machine Learning has investigated the scope for uncovering useful insights from news reports.

Cristian Homescu: Director, Portfolio Analytics Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Cristian is part of the Portfolio Analytics team within Chief Investment Office, Global Wealth and Investment Management division Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He is developing and investigating quantitative solutions in areas such as investment strategies, goals-based wealth management, asset allocation, machine learning and big data analysis, factor-based investing and risk factor models, portfolio risk and attribution, stress testing and scenario construction. He is very interested in application of state-of-the-art algorithms and numerical methods in wealth and investment management, and in high-performance computing. Prior to joining Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Cristian was a front office quant for Wachovia and Wells Fargo. After supporting interest rate trading desk, he was the lead quant for FX and Commodities trading desks. He has a PhD from Florida State University in computational and applied mathematics, and MSc degrees from University of Paris XI and University of Craiova.

 

Jos is the co-founder and CEO of Yields.io. Prior to his current role he has been active in quantitative finance both as a manager and as an analyst. Over the past 15 years he has been working with leading international investment banks as well as with award winning start-up companies. He is the author of multiple patents applying quantitative risk management techniques on imbalance markets. Jos holds a PhD in superstring theory from the University of Leuven.

Robert Almgren: Co-Founder and Head of Research, Quantitative Brokers

Robert Almgren, co-founder and Head of Research at Quantitative Brokers, providing agency algorithmic trade execution and transaction cost measurement in US Treasury notes and bonds, as well as a broad range of futures products. Until 2008, Dr Almgren was a Managing Director and Head of Quantitative Strategies in the Electronic Trading Services group of Bank of America. Before that, he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago and the University of Toronto, directing graduate programs in financial mathematics at both. Dr. Almgren holds a Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University. He has an extensive research record in applied mathematics, including papers on optimal trading, transaction cost measurement, and portfolio construction. He is a visiting professor at Princeton University, where he teaches a course on High Frequency Trading.

Quantitative Brokers         http://www.quantitativebrokers.com

Ivailo Dimov: Quant and Data Science Research, Bloomberg LP – Adjunct Professor, NYU Courant Institute

Ivailo Dimov is a senior quant at the Bloomberg L.P. CTO Office, where he provides quantitative and data science solutions to management, external and internal clients. He has worked on both traditional derivative, risk and alpha modeling as well as alternative data research. At Bloomberg, he has led projects on market consensus, broker-algo selection, recommendation systems, automated news and news topic modeling. Ivailo is also an Adjunct Professor at the NYU Courant Institute, where he teaches Data Science in Quantitative Finance.