Execution — Head of Execution

Arm: Execution · Places: 1 per team · Team size: 6

About QTE

Queen's Tower Exchange is a financial-markets simulation for Imperial College London students. Teams learn how investment and trading decisions work in a market driven by live data and simulated capital.

Responsibilities

• Assign each order ticket an owner and coordinate the desk's workload.
• Review difficult orders and prioritise competing demands for trading capacity.
• Monitor delivery, execution costs and communication with originating teams.
• Coordinate manual execution, provided schedulers and your team's algorithms.
• Lead responses to failures, desk stops and authorised fallback handovers.
• Use weekly scorecards and session reviews to help the team improve.

What success looks like

Every assigned ticket has an owner and receives disciplined execution. The desk controls child orders but cannot amend or cancel the original parent instruction. Scoring weights delivery-adjusted cost savings at 80% and delivery at 20%; leaving difficult shares unfilled limits the score.

• Strong organisation and clear communication.
• Comfort with numerical information and making decisions under time pressure.
• Experience coordinating a student project, society activity or similar team effort.
• Willingness to follow instructions precisely and escalate issues promptly.

Professional trading experience and coding are not required.

Useful, but not required

Basic market knowledge, spreadsheets, operational experience or an interest in algorithms.

Much of your learning will take place during a dedicated training week, held after teams are selected and before trading begins. Your Head of Arm will deliver lectures exclusively for the teams in your arm, giving you a strong grounding in the concepts and tools you will use in your role.

• How large orders are split into smaller trades and managed through time.
• The trade-off between price, liquidity, urgency and delivery.
• QTE's ticket lifecycle, shared participation allowance and desk controls.
• How to interpret execution scorecards and coordinate with investment teams.