Market Taking

Market Taking — Head of Desk

Applications open

Lead a desk researching and trading opportunities across 180 equities and ETFs. Your team can use manual strategies, automated strategies or both. You will coordinate four trader/researchers and two developers, deciding how the desk uses its capital and risk capacity.

What you'll do

Arm: Market Taking · Places: 1 per team · Team size: 7

About QTE

Queen's Tower Exchange is a financial-markets simulation for Imperial College London students. Teams trade using live market data and simulated capital, learning from measured results against other student teams.

Responsibilities

Allocate research responsibilities and risk across trading ideas.
Challenge the evidence behind strategies and approve their registration.
Decide when to deploy, resize or retire a strategy.
Monitor combined positions, including strategies exposed to the same underlying risk.
Coordinate session coverage, risk reductions and reviews after losses.

What success looks like

A desk that makes evidence-based decisions and controls losses across its whole portfolio. The team score weights risk-adjusted returns at 70% and net profit and loss at 30%. Manual and automated trades follow the same limits.

Prerequisite knowledge

Basic knowledge of shares, long and short positions, and trading costs.
Ability to assess evidence, recognise uncertainty and explain trade-offs.
Experience coordinating a student project, society activity or other team effort.
Discipline to change a decision when its original reasoning no longer holds.

An industry internship or professional trading record is not required.

Useful, but not required

Python, statistics, portfolio analysis or a research project involving financial markets.

What you'll be taught

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 to assess a strategy's entry, exit, holding period and realistic costs.
How diversification, position sizing and combined exposures affect a trading book.
QTE's registration, risk-warning, exposure-cure and daily-loss-halt procedures.
How to use performance reviews to distinguish a weak idea from an execution problem.

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