A typical day involves taking care of trading and research to identify new trading opportunities.

The day starts off with a quick look at any major global/Indian events which might impact the market for the day. After understanding how the market might behave at the opening, a quick set up of the trading systems and the necessary parameters for trading follows.

After preparing for the market opening (which could vary from being a sedate opening to a very volatile one), I make sure the market is stabilised and our trading is working as expected for the next few minutes. Any irregularities which might need our attention or any unusual action which might need a fine tuning of the parameters will be adjusted accordingly.

After ensuring the trading is going on smoothly, I turn my attention towards research to improve our existing models or to identify new trading alphas. This would involve data crunching, building statistical and machine learning models, backtesting of the models, etc. All this is done in parallel to trading, in order to ensure proper risk management.

After the market closes, several reports on the day’s trading performance are studied to identify potential improvements to the strategy.

Having a strong interest in math and finance, I find the role very intriguing. The research work typically involves working with large sets of tick-by-tick data to identify profit-making patterns using complex models which keeps challenging me constantly. Constant exchange of ideas with colleagues and learning new things everyday from the actual market data and various research papers make the work very intellectually rewarding. To keep up with the pace and volatility of the market, we have to sometimes take very quick decisions during trading which makes the job very exciting. I remember the period when the Russia-Ukraine turmoil was taking place, where there were large price jumps which needed very quick actions. It was both a challenging and exciting phase to trade, giving immense satisfaction.