The work
Market makers stand ready to buy and sell all session, earning the spread between their bid and ask while trying not to be caught holding a position when the price moves. Each team quotes 108 of QTE's 180 stocks and ETFs on $30M of capital, head-to-head with two other teams in every name, and must keep a two-sided quote in each for at least 85% of the session. Nobody can do that by hand across 108 names for six and a half hours, so a desk is an automated quoting system designed, built and supervised by its team.
Running a live desk
Choose bid and ask prices, displayed size and inventory adjustments. Test fair-value signals, monitor live quotes and investigate which trades retain their edge after the market moves. Tight prices can attract flow, but stale quotes and unwanted inventory can turn an apparent spread into a loss.
Teams must meet published requirements for two-sided quoting, spread and size while staying within position and loss limits. Automation and live supervision are central to keeping the desk reliable.
Tools and development
QTE’s shared platform provides market data, trading interfaces, risk displays, a strategy runtime and a backtester. Trading-team developers build the desk’s own signals and quoting algorithms, starting from a reference quoter the exchange publishes. Test partial fills, rejected orders, stale data and recovery as carefully as the trading idea itself.
How performance is measured
The term score combines risk-adjusted returns (35%), one-minute edge retention (25%), market share (25%) and inventory discipline (15%). Net profit and loss is reported but carries no direct scoring weight. Books reset each term, and the annual result averages the three term scores.
Who this suits
Students who enjoy probability, statistics, programming and understanding how prices form. The work combines research, engineering and decisions under changing market conditions.
Team structure
5 teams · 7 members per team · 35 members total
- Head of Desk — 1 per team
- Quantitative Trader/Researcher — 4 per team
- Quantitative Developer — 2 per team