The work
Market Taking teams develop ideas and execute their own orders on QTE’s equity and ETF books. Strategies can be manual, systematic or a combination of both, covering directional views, relative value, news and order flow. Options sit within the separate Options arm.
From research to a trade
Build a clear case for each strategy: what creates the opportunity, when to enter, how to exit, how long to hold and how much risk to take. Test ideas on recorded sessions and evaluate them after spread, fees and other trading costs. Live orders face finite liquidity, partial fills and delay, so an attractive backtest needs a credible execution plan.
During a session, monitor positions, compare results with the original hypothesis and decide when to resize or retire a strategy. Manage correlated exposures across the whole book, as well as the risk in each instrument.
Tools and development
QTE supplies the shared trading interfaces, risk tools, strategy runtime, backtester and recorded sessions. Trading-team developers turn research into signals and order logic, testing position tracking, sizing and recovery. Manual and automated trading both follow the published registration and risk rules.
How performance is measured
Teams compete against the other Market Taking teams on whole-book performance over each term:
- 70%: annualised Sharpe ratio, measuring risk-adjusted returns.
- 30%: net profit and loss.
Both metrics are normalised across the competing teams before being combined. Results account for trading and carrying costs.
Each term starts with a fresh book. The annual result is the equal-weight average of the three term scores.
Who this suits
Students who enjoy testing hypotheses, analysing data or interpreting market events. Systematic research and development benefit from programming, while manual strategies also demand clear evidence and disciplined decisions.
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