News/Info

Vera Cady is a PhD student of Computer Science (Mobile Systems) at the Department of Computer Science at UCL.

Vera contacted Banking Science during Autumn 2007. Banking Science found her a project in one of the leading investment banks after assessing her skills and discussing with her some possible projects. The project she undertook involved investigating different performance attribution methods and was carried out in two stages.

The first stage was to complete a comprehensive literature review of current research. The second was to implement one of these methods. Vera worked on this project over the course of a six-month period under the guidance of one of the bank's team of quantitative analysts.

Subsequently, she applied for and was successful in gaining a place on the bank's graduate recruitment programme in the capacity of an analyst in the quantitative research department; a role she started in May 2008.

Vera commented on the Banking Science initiative: "Banking Science enabled me to utilize my analytical and quantitative skills by providing me with interesting contracting and scholarship opportunities within investment banking sector. I can highly recommend their extremely helpful and efficient services."

Louise Hunt from Nomura International plc commented, "Vera carried out a good piece of work for us; it was very thorough and well researched. We were pleased to have the opportunity to access such a high caliber student as Vera through Banking Science, both to carry out a specific research task for us and now as a recruit".

Ghada Hassan - PhD student Intelligent Systems group - HSBC project

The project in HSBC involved the development of a back testing system to evaluate traders performance and test effectiveness of trading strategies.

The first stage of the project was to re-build an order book from the London Stock Exchange canned data of orders and trades for a specific time period, which if fed again into the automated trading system would re-play the course of events that took place on the stock exchange during this time period. To enable proper plug-in of the developed order book into the trading system, simulation of communication signals and statistical feedback to and from other components in the system was also implemented. The next stage of the project was the use of the simulated order book along with trading strategies under test to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies through executing and monitoring made up trading scenarios.

Working in HSBC has been a very enriching experience. It gave me the opportunity to have a real understanding of what it is like to work in algorithmic trading in the investment banking sectoe. I worked alongside wonderful people and gained invaluable practical knowledge.

I would like to thank Banking Science for helping me get this job. They were very helpful and highly supportive in every step.