This Stock Trading Firm Hires Computer Geeks Instead Of Finance Guys

When hearing the phrase “trading stocks,” we often think of places that give us guidance on the right financial steps. But it looks like a new trend is dominating these days, which is Data Analytics with the ability to offer more precise results. This has been applied by Alex Gerko, generating a net worth of $700 million.

He’s the founder of XTX Market’s Limited and he has a different approach from a regular person that works in financial markets. He, in fact, acts more like the CEO of a Silicon Valley firm. In 2018, his company reported 117 million GBP profit, twice that of 2017. Each day, the company handles more than $150 billion trades, which include commodities, fixed incomes, currencies, and stocks.

XTX’s functioning is based on data analytics, predicting the fluctuations on the market in all conditions and acting based on the info at hand. But another impressive thing about the firm is its employees’ qualifications.

At XTX, there are more people with degrees in computer science than in financial or economics.

Most of the people working at the company have a background in computer science rather than finance or economics as usual. They also get paid well, about 244,000 GBP each person. XTX has only one salesperson and doesn’t rely on stock traders to conduct tradings.

Recently, it even held a contest searching for data scientists to work for it, with a prize of 100,000 GBP.

XTX was looking for the best statisticians from around the world. Gerko says that the contest will set great talent from the best talent in the world. Candidates applying for this position were statisticians with Ph.D. degrees and were required to upload a stock market prediction model of their own which must be based on the training data given by XTX.

In a statement about the contest, Alaxe Gerko said: