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Welcome to this exclusive episode with Nitish Mani, Chief
Strategy Officer at World Quant Founded in 2007, World Quant is
a leading global quantitative asset management firm with over
$7 billion in assets under management.
In this conversation, we dive into his journey from consulting
to quant trading, the biggest misconceptions about the
industry, and why creativity matters just as much as coding.
Netish shares how the firm is reshaping talent pipelines
through initiatives like World Quant Brain and the
International Quant Championship.
So if you're an aspiring quant or just curious about markets,
this one is for you. So let's get started.
Hello, Netician, Really, really excited for this conversation
because it's not very often where I get to talk to someone
in your role as a Chief Strategy Officer, someone who works for
World Quant and it's kind of ties to the hedge fund space.
So really appreciate your time and the insights I'm sure you're
going to share. So for any listeners, the three
areas that we're going to cover are going to be and the Tish's
background and his career path, which has been particularly
interesting because wasn't always quant finance, which
we're we're about to find out. And then the evolution of
quantitative finance and how it's changed and interested to
get your views to Tish about where it's heading.
And then finally, world quant, yes, a lot of people would have
heard of world quant, but not everyone.
And there's this amazing competition you run that's just
global and off the scales, off the charts.
And I'd love to find out more. And there's lots of other
resources as well that I know this is a growing space of
interest for for students and young professionals, which I
know you're going to share. So, yeah, welcome.
And perhaps you could take us back to the beginning and a
brief summary of your your background from your childhood
student days up to what you're doing today in your new role.
Thank you, Anthony. So I'm currently based in
Connecticut, US, but I was born and bought up in Punjab, India,
which is in North India. And then I trained myself for
the competitive exam in India, which is called IIDGE, which is
required to, you know, you need to pass and get a good rank in
that exam to, to go graduate to go to one of the Indian
Institute of Technologies, the IDs in India.
So I was born and brought up in Punjab.
Then I went to IIT Kanpur where I studied an integrated
undergrounds and masters in in economics.
After graduating from the university, I joined McKinsey
and Company. I was very interested in
business strategy, spent some time there, but then change
company moved to World Quant, which is much, you know, over a
decade now, 13 years at World Quant as a researcher out of the
India office in Mumbai. And then back in 2016 got an
opportunity to move to US as a portfolio manager.
And then a little over five years ago, I was offered to work
with the CEO of World Quantity, Gorzinski to build the vision
and strategy of the company. And that's what I'm doing right
now as a part of my strategy officer rule.
I, you know, identify the key strategic initiatives that World
Quant should run, come up with a short, medium and long term
plans for our initiatives, decide on how we want to
allocate resources of the firm across these initiatives.
Then I also manage the capital allocation across various
portfolio managers at the firm and across these initiatives.
In addition to that, we are big on creating opportunity for the
talent globally. So in my role, I run initiatives
like BRAIN and International Quant Championship, which we'll
talk about later today to make this opportunity of quant
finance available to talent across the globe.
Wow, so there's already a whole bunch of questions you're you're
explaining that, but but the first one I actually jumped to
mind was that I guess places like India and I wonder
elsewhere in say Eastern Europe, I've heard as well.
Is there is it a normal thing for for a student from those
locations to then move to the US?
And is that is that a common move or is it or not?
Yes, so. If you're talking specifically
about quant finance, then I would say quant finance was
considered a very niche industry where you have to be in one of
the big financial hubs like US or London and you know then
Singapore, Hong Kong. But if you are in other
geographies, this information about quant finance as an
opportunity was not really available.
But lately say as world quant, we are running 27 offices and we
are creating opportunity for the talent wherever they are.
So this opportunity is now global.
So if somebody does not really want to move, it is now being
made available to individuals who are interested in their
locations instead of having to move.
But moving is also an option. Like, you don't necessarily have
to be in your hometowns in your home locations, but you can also
move some of these territories, which are financial hubs, if you
want to gain more exposure of how, say, Wall Street runs.
And also you mentioned McKinsey, you mentioned McKinsey and I
know KPMG as well. And so I just wondered what
drove the decision to pivot because I know a lot of students
kind of tend to think that their commitment very early in their
career will define them. But you've done a kind of
consulting and then switched to quite a different area.
So what? What drove that decision making
for you? Yes, yeah.
So for background, I was interning at KPMG in Germany and
then as my first job I joined McKinsey and company.
One of my deep interests is in business strategy and McKinsey
and other consulting firms offers you a chance to, you
know, really practically execute that scale of designing
strategies and making recommendations to your clients.
But I was doing that role out of Delhi in India.
One of my very good friends, a very intelligent friend,
happened to join World Quant and that is how I actually came to
know about this industry. Quantitative finance.
Who doesn't get intrigued by, you know, the stock markets and
finance? We are all interested about it,
but we also know how technology has made advancements over the
last two and three decades. And speaking to him, I realized
that World Quant was one organization which was starting
their operations in India. It was founded in 2007 and I
joined it in 2012. It was one organization which
was deeply involved with the financial markets, with the
stock market, but was also utilizing the advancement in
technologies with the stock market.
So all of us may have seen how traditional trading used to
work. You pick phones, you call, you
try to place orders. But we all know how finance,
industry and stock markets are growing, the number of IP, OS
that are happening, how global exchanges are coming up, the
market caps are growing. But how much can a human really
do? How many stocks can they
analyse? How many decisions can they
move? So what I learned was
quantitative finance was basically about writing
systematic pieces of code to deploy your ideas across a large
number of stocks. So you can create thousands and
10s of thousands of stock using an algorithm to systematically
execute your idea. So that idea came to me as a
very intriguing idea which I wanted to try, I wanted to test
came across as very future oriented approach, something
that was just starting in India. And fortunately I put myself to
the interview process. It was a nine month long
interview process. I went through 14 rounds of
interviews and I'm glad I I made through.
And the whole idea was to benefit from the growing
advancements in technologies and the growing size of the global
financial markets. And World Quant as a
quantitative management firm was really bringing these two things
together led me to making this decision of switching the
careers. Makes sense.
And on the back of this, then the roles that you you held were
different. So there was a quant research
role and then a portfolio management role.
Couple things then on that. One is breaking down the roles
and the differences of the skills required to facilitate
each. And the second question on the
back of that, do you have to be a researcher before being APM or
or or not? I'm not actually sure how that
works in practice. OK.
So a few questions on that. What is a quant researcher?
A portfolio manager, then skills required and then is 1A prereq
for the other. OK.
When I was first introduced to this role of quant researcher
from outside of old quant, I had thought that I will be sitting
in front of the screen and just coding mathematical models.
But when I joined old quant, I realized that there was such a
big entrepreneurial element and creativity to this role of being
a quantitative researcher. Imagine that you think that you
have an idea and if you will apply that idea to the stock
market, you think that this idea can make money.
And this is 1 idea. Now you can have a second idea,
third idea, and a fourth idea. What a quant researcher is
actually about is to think of those ideas of your own.
And then there are plenty of data sources available out
there. You think using which systematic
data can I actually apply this idea?
You need to have the capability to convert that idea into an
actual execution using some data and writing a piece of code.
And then it is about tracking the performance of your ideas
and continuously coming up with improvements to find more and
more things to be a successful researcher.
So that is a quantitative researcher role.
After doing quant research, you have created so many signals.
A portfolio manager has a few steps in how he does portfolio
management. First, he has to identify which
signals out of the big pool of signals he wants to select to
deploy the capital. Now, after selecting the
signals, he has to combine those signals in an optimal way.
Different signals have different ideas in them.
So he has to decide on what idea do I want to take more risk on
and on which ideas I want to take less risk on.
And then he has to manage the risk which comes with it.
There are some systematic risk factors that exist out there, so
they have to manage how exposed their final combination of
alphas is true to risk. And after all of this done,
there comes final decisions on what stocks and how much of them
do we want to trade in the market.
So as a portfolio manager, you are selecting the signals, you
are combining the signals and then you are taking care of
risks and other trading constraints before making the
strategy go live in the market. So that's what a portfolio
manager does. So the skills required for both
roles are relatively common. You need to have the ability to
think of ideas to be able to write a little piece of code to
implement those ideas. Your ability to be able to
understand the patterns your out of sample performance.
Improvise on your research as a researcher and a portfolio
manager. It's fascinating.
And and can you educate me about is world quant that element
you're talking about about creativity and
entrepreneurialism. Like for some reason, rightly or
wrongly, in my head, I have it that a quant hedge fund might
have a particular strategy and then it's about strategy
optimization, for example. But what you're talking about is
a lot of freedom, a freedom to create, freedom to think test.
Is that normal or is that a unique thing in the industry
context? Well, different funds have
different structures in how they, you know, how they
organize their talent and on what kinds of tasks.
Some organizations may want the talent to work specifically on a
particular kind of a problem and just keep thinking about that
problem to improve and improve and improve just that problem
statement. While there are others which
provide a more broad opportunity to the talent to explore, also
allowing them to go deep. If they choose to go deep in any
particular problem, they can go deep but also provide them the
exposure of the breadth and transparency of the whole
investment pipeline. World Quant fits more in the
second category where we allow the talent to explore various
domains we have and that is where World Quant quantity
approach comes. We have a huge library of data
sets. We believe in the creative
thinking of the talent. If we give one idea to a given
researcher to say, a group of researchers, what we notice is
different individuals will implement that idea in their own
ways and we will get uncorrelated signals even though
the original idea was the same. And this varies within our
geography, but also varies more across geographies.
So that is where we try to attract talent from across the
globe because we get very creative and different thinking
from the talent. Yeah, that makes that makes
complete sense. Thank you.
And let's move on to the, the, the second segment, which is
more about the evolution of, of, of quantitative finance.
You kind of touched on this already so far in the
conversation, but one was about, I think many students or, or
professionals who work in finance, they're interested in
quant finance. But I just wondered, are there
misconceptions because you've, you've talked about kind of
mathematics and programming is that I'm assuming there's other
roles that sit within the spectrum and and other
complementary skill sets as well.
So are there, what are some of the biggest myths about kind of
working in quant finance do you think?
Yes. So I think maybe first touching
a little bit on the evolution of quantitative finance over time
and then demystifying some of these myths that exist out
there. So, you know, going back say a
decade, most of the resources required to do quantitative
finance was not so easily available.
The compute was so much more expensive.
The hardware required to do this wasn't available out there.
The amount of data required to build quantitative signals was
not available. So the ability of the talent to
explore their ideas and do quantitative finance was not so
easily available. But as the technology has
advanced over time, the amount of data has exploded over time
and the number of firms that have risen up across geographies
in this space, like as of December 2023, there were over
400 quant fund funds. I think this opportunity became
more mainstream because there are not easy ways to absorb so
much data and growing stock markets, growing number of
instruments and asset classes out there.
So quantitative finance is becoming like a more important
and a real thing for everybody to do to be successful.
So this this evolution has led to a lot of talent focused on
building themselves and generating the skills required
to be a part of this industry too.
But while this is happening, like you say, there are myths
that do I really have to have a PhD to be a quant?
Do I have to have mathematics and computer science to be a
PhD? So I shared with you in my
introduction that I went through 14 rounds of interviews and nine
month long process because world quant at that point used to hire
mathematics, computer science and physics students and I was
an economist. So a lot of back and forth and
discussions had to happen that how much can we venture out into
other domains. And today at World Quant, we
employ talent from such varied departments, such varied
geographies, such varied backgrounds.
In terms of educations, yes, we have a large number of pH DS,
but we also have a large number of undergrads from various
disciplines who can actually present that they have the
creativity and the scale and the urge to do this.
So you do not necessarily have to have a PhD or mathematics
background to make or be successful on these roles.
Another big myth about, you know, the question that we're
usually asked about quant finance is, is AI going to take
over the humans, you know, in this industry because artificial
intelligence with latest LLM and everything.
Is getting so intelligent that why do we even need the humans
anymore? So the analogy that I really
like to give to answer this question is say we have to walk
from point A to point B. The amount of time it will take
for us to walk on our legs to go from point A to point B.
What says, say if we have a bicycle and we ride a bicycle
from point A to point B, we can be so much more efficient just
because we have a tool, a technology which can make the
human more efficient and be able to do more.
So similar analogy applies in quant finance too.
Yes, there are tools, there is AI, there is machine learning,
but these tools only make the humans more efficient, more
productive to be able to deliver better results rather than being
replaced by them. So that's the myths.
Yeah, that that intellectual diversity makes so much sense in
the formula of the way that World Cron it seems is set up in
that way. So thank you for that breakdown.
I'm going to steal that analogy, if you don't mind, for future
reference. That was great.
OK, so let's let's move on and talk a little bit more about
World Cron. I know you've kind of touched on
it, but anything more colour you'd like to give about the
firm in itself? But then that we'd love to move
on and talk about your your key platform, which is brain after.
It sure, yes, I've been giving you analogy to understand the
quant finance base using World Quant as an example, but to give
a proper introduction to World Quant.
World Quant is a quantitative asset management firm.
It was founded in 2007 by Igor Tulcinski.
We are headquartered here in Old Greenwich, CT, US and World
Quant today has over 1000 employees across 27 offices.
Right from the beginning, our approach has been to create an
opportunity for global for global talent.
We think that different individuals think creatively and
bring very specific kinds of creativity, innovation into how
they approach solving the inefficiencies in the financial
markets. I mentioned we have a huge focus
towards quantity. We think quantity is quality.
We design a large number of signals in our research
ecosystem. We have a large number of
portfolio managers who create thousands of strategies
combining these millions of signals.
So that is a brief introduction about World Quant, our presence
and the way our investment pipeline is is organized.
Yeah. And then and then Brain to start
things off. So there's three things I want
to get out of the rest of our our time together, which is
Brain the platform and then also learn to quant.
I I saw your face on a number of really high quality videos that
have just been released on YouTube and then also the
International Quant Championship.
So perhaps we can start with what is Brain for those who've
never come across it. Yes.
World Quant Brain is our signal crowdsourcing initiative.
So one of the tag lines that we have is that talent is global,
but opportunity is not. And we want to make that
opportunity available globally. So the tool that World Quant has
created to make that opportunity available globally is World
Quant Brain. World Quant Brain allows
individuals to participate by learning skills of quantitative
finance, then deploying those skills on the web-based platform
called Brain to create some alpha signals and prove that
they have the ability or the skill set to be able to do it.
And in return, we offer consulting positions, internship
positions, full time job opportunities.
So as of today, World Quant Brain has over 150,000
individuals from across the globe on the platform.
And the whole idea is that there is so much talent across the
globe. We want to give them an
opportunity to learn about quantitative finance, get them
engaged on the platform and then successful quants at World Quant
run regular trainings, tutorials, classes to educate
the individuals who are on the brain platform.
And so far we have hired over 60 individuals since the inception
of the platform for full time roles at the company.
And it has also become like a very important tool for us to
identify good talent to work full time at the organization as
well. If I was a student then
listening to this, how would exactly would I go about getting
access to welcome brain? So you can search on Google
Worldconbrain. You just have to sign on onto
the platform. It sends your application to be
on the platform. So you go on the platform and
roll yourself. You start reading some of the
tutorials and educational material on the platform.
Start trying some of your ideas using a very simple expression
language. You don't really have to code on
the platform. We have made it much easier to
to implement the ideas on this platform.
And then there are some threshold levels you grow
through. Bronze level, silver level reach
the gold level. Am I too old, in my 40s or?
Everybody is welcome. Anybody who's interested is
welcome. Given how interested and number
of ideas you talk about the financial markets in your in
your podcasts, Anthony, I think it makes you a very creative
individual full of ideas to try this.
You should. So anybody is eligible,
irrespective of age or backgrounds, to to participate
in this. Yeah, that's that's super cool.
I love, I love that tagline of it as well.
So is the Learn to Quant YouTube series, is that like an
onboarding or precursor to get you then into brain?
Would you suggest that's a good route for people to take?
Yes, so we as world quant, we were analysing, you know that
quant finance is definitely becoming important.
Our mission to develop talent who knows about quant finance
and wants to build careers here. But we noticed that there was no
systematic practical series sitting out there which gives a
good introduction to, you know, various individuals who want to
learn what quant finance is and how is it very difficult.
Can I try it? So we thought, why don't we
create say some videos which can small 5 minute videos which can
give them introduction into what is quantitative finance.
Then show them some ideas by using various data sets or some
kind of common approaches that exist out there which help them
implement their ideas. So we did that in those videos
to make them understand that yes, it sounds very difficult
but if you are disciplined, it is doable.
So those videos give them that introduction plus also teaches
them some core skills required to be a quant, like how to
manage risk, how to diversify your pool of signals, and how
quant finance incorporates lots of advancements in data
technology financial market as as an industry which interested
individuals may want to understand as they make their
career choices. OK, for for anyone listening,
I'll save that Google search and I will put all of the links to
everything that's being mentioned in the show notes.
So you just need to go to the show notes to the hyperlink to
get to the learn to quant YouTube channel on the world
Quant channel. But finally, I'd like to know a
bit more about the International Quant Championship because when
I first found out and, and explored this myself, I was
like, wow, this is another level.
It's like, feels like the World Cup of quantitative finance.
So can you explain? Can you just give me some
context of the size of this thing and then talk about its
purpose and how it works? Yes.
So yesterday we launched the 5th iteration of the International
Quan Championship. So like I mentioned for World
Quan Brain, the goal is to reach out to all the talent out there
to help explore. But how do we reach out to the
talent and tell them that an opportunity like World Quan
Brain exists for them? And we thought competitions is a
great way of bringing attention of the talent out there to try
and explore this idea. And there is a little story
behind this. When I was a student back in IIT
Kanpur, I had an opportunity to participate in a global
competition representing my university, my country.
And being on that stage was such a great feeling which I still
remember. And I thought, why don't I
replicate a similar feeling for a large number of individuals
across the globe? That is how we came up with this
idea of International Quad Championship.
It's a three stage event today. The first stage is a university
level where individuals from the university and rules start
competing. The second stage is a national
level. The best teams from the top
universities in Stage 1 qualify at the country round, the
national level to identify the national winner and then there
is a third stage, which is the international round to identify
the international quad champion. So that is where the winning
country teams come compete at the finals.
We've mostly organized it in Singapore.
That is where the finals is is organized and that is how it's a
three stage competition. In terms of scale, last year we
had over 37,000 participants from 5000 plus universities, 180
countries and roll into this contest and there are very
successful stories from participants of of this contest
and the winners. So we are, although we are just
launching the 5th iteration, but we really hope that we are able
to attract more and more people through this competition to try
their hands on this quantitative finance opportunity.
I'm just curious because our audience of this podcast, this
show, they come from a large portion in the UK, in Europe, in
North America, there's some in South Asia.
So in the last four years, is there any patterns of
performance on who tends to perform well from a geography
perspective? I'm just curious.
Yes, I would say the competition is very stiff.
There is not necessarily one country or one continent which
has outperformed. We have continued to surprise
ourselves with the with the show that the talent puts out there
on the stage in the finals. The first iteration of IQC, we
had two women from from Paris, France win the contest.
The following year we had individuals from Taiwan win the
contest. And in the other years we've
seen winners from UK, we have seen winners from US, we have
seen winners from Indonesia and India.
So it's very diversified in the top three ranks.
You will see a very good diversity of talent.
It's amazing. All right, Well, Nitish, it's
been, it's been awesome chatting with you.
Definitely really enjoyed when you were deconstructing,
explaining the roles specifically because you've
experienced them. I think.
Well, quant as a business sounds super interesting in terms of
how it's set up. And yeah, I applaud you and the
firm for putting together these fabulous resources, which I will
put in the show notes. So I encourage everyone to to
check them out. But Latish, thank you for your
time and for talking to me. Thank you Anthony for having me
as well.