Symmetry Investments is a global investment company with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Jersey and Cayman Islands. We have been in business since 2014 after successfully spinning off from a major New York-based hedge fund.
At Symmetry Investments, we seek to engage in intelligent risk-taking to create value for our clients, partners and employees. We derive our edge from our capacity to generate Win-Wins – in the broadest sense. Win-Win is our fundamental ethical and strategic principle. By generating Win-Wins, we can create unique solutions that reconcile perspectives that are usually seen as incompatible or opposites, and encompass the best that each side has to offer:
We integrate fixed-income arbitrage with global macro strategies in a novel way. We invent and develop technology that focuses on the potential of human-machine integration. We build systems where machines do what they do best, supporting people to do what people do best.
We are creating a collaborative meritocracy: a culture where individual contribution serves both personal and collective goals - and is rewarded accordingly. We value both ownership thinking AND cooperative team spirit, self-realization AND community.
The Role
We're looking for a few analysts to join the business side of a post-startup asset manager. You don't need to have deep experience in the financial industry. We're looking for open-minded people that are hard working and willing to learn. We're not fans of traditional financial institutional structures, and see little reason to follow in their footsteps.
Technical aptitude, resourcefulness and a willingness to figure things out is very valuable. Learned helplessness is unacceptable. The ability to use logic, break down seemingly intractable problems into smaller ones and address them systematically is a massive asset. The ability to code well is valuable, but not a necessity.
As we've grown from 30 people to nearly 300, there's a lot of work that's required to manage both the growth in assets that we manage, strategies, and overall complexity of the business.
There are a lot of areas that we need talented, capable people to contribute in. You could be assigned to one of these groups, or sit between them. Groups at Symmetry are not meant to be silos, and every group works very closely with many other ones. People don't typically sit neatly within one group, but will often work on different projects with different groups.
Market Data
Market data is the lifeblood of an alternative asset manager - we use it to figure out our profits and losses each day, what our risk exposures are, to test new strategies and to understand what is happening in the markets in real-time versus historically. It's also one of the largest cost centers of the firm, as data vendors have increased monetization of data that used to be free a decade ago.
The Market Data group, works very closely with Operations, Product Control, Risk, Trading and Research teams to ensure the smooth running of the firm, optimize our spending on market data and maintain compliance with our regulatory and contractual obligations. Initial work for a new joiner in the first 3 - 6 months would include:
- understanding the structure of market data, getting a picture of what our contractual relationships are and how the costs are being driven in market data
- understanding the licensing structure of data providers and exchanges
- helping with the administration around contract renewals and reporting obligations resulting from exchange licenses
- checking and processing of market data invoices via our inhouse Contract management platform, under the supervision of other team members
- ad hoc research projects on new providers for particular data sets, and assisting with testing, vendor negotiations and coordinating with other teams to onboard new data sets
- learning to use our project management platform and documenting how things are done, what agreements we have, our negotiations processes, tradeoffs when we make decisions and making sure instructions, documentation and processes are up to date
External Research
Research is an area that was often overlooked in the past. With the introduction of MiFID, a whole host of regulations have been introduced that often don't play nicely with regulatory obligations in other jurisdictions. As a result, the external research team has to work with legal and compliance to understand how different rules interact and how we're going to manage research subscriptions at Symmetry.
External research is another major cost for Symmetry, and the external research team manages the sourcing, negotiations, onboarding and ongoing review process of external research to make sure we're getting good value for the money that the firm spends. In your first few months, you'd would likely get involved:
- understanding the different kinds of research providers, and our relationships with each of them
- learning the cost structure and learning to manage the invoicing process, under the supervision of other team members
- learning the review process and helping ensure that we have good feedback on our external research providers, so we know which research providers we should focus more on, or which ones we should negotiate lower costing or cut completely.
- help with negotiations and understanding the contractual side of the vendor relationships, learning the commercial terms that we care about, and where there is room to budge on negotiations.
- documenting the ongoing relationships, negotiations and compromises, as well as keeping existing documentation up to date.
- helping figure out how changes to the firm or laws may affect our regulatory obligations.
Organization Operations (OrgOps)
We've taken a fairly radical stance on cross-firm integration and collaboration, and have invested heavily in our tools, processes and culture to move towards it as a core part of our founding ideals. Growth has brought change and increased complexity, and the approaches that served us well as 50 or 100 people inevitably aren't sufficient as we approach 300.
OrgOps studies the behaviour of the firm, from specific teams in detail to the whole organization as a system of systems, and works to move everyone towards the principles we're striving for, while keeping the business running every day. This includes both improving work processes that already exist, and finding ways to build better habits for new projects across the firm so we automatically move towards coherence.
Automation is obviously a core part of our strategy here, but in practice we find things usually bottleneck on perceptiveness and the ability really to get to the bottom of what's going wrong in a complex situation. Your first few months might include:
- helping automate fundamental business processes with our in-house scripting language, learning the language and platform as you go
- working out how specific things are currently being done, documenting it, and taking part in discussions to decide how to improve things
- helping more staff and teams move data onto our general sensitive data infrastructure, documenting things and working with programmers to resolve pain points
People Admin/Talent/Aptitude Assessments
We are focused on hiring really capable, talented people and making sure that people that we hire continually raise the bar for Symmetry. To that end, we ask all candidates interviewing at Symmetry to do the aptitude assessment, which tries to figure out what you are good at or bad at.
Nobody is good at everything, and nobody is bad at everything, and knowing what a particular person is good at and bad at helps us figure out where they may best sit within Symmetry. There's lots to do both improving and streamlining the aptitude assessment, as well as analyzing the results and seeing if the data can help us improve our recruiting processes. Are there commonalities between very successful traders at Symmetry that we can look out for in future candidates? The aptitude assessment can help us try to figure that out.
Can we improve our workflows in people admin and talent? When we onboard someone, can we auto-magically generate all the accounts and accesses they need? Can we ensure that all accounts are disabled auto-magically when someone leaves? Can we make sure there's a streamlined process and a great onboarding experience for new hires? Helping with these groups, you could spend the first few months:
- learning our inhouse scripting languages and putting pieces in place for some automation
- helping migrate data and documentation from legacy platforms to our new project management tool
- helping iterate on our people administration data store to ensure it's user friendly and people can access and edit the data they need and workflows and any issues are documented
What to Expect from our Interview Process
Our interview process is not a cookie cutter process and changes based on the candidate. In general, you should expect:
- An introductory meeting and an aptitude assessment. The aptitude assessment is not a pass/fail test, and we do the same aptitude assessment for all candidates coming to Symmetry - so it cannot be a test of competency for a certain role. We're trying to understand what you're good at and what you're bad at, to try to form a role around your strengths and weaknesses.
- A meeting with a member of the team for an open discussion on your background, experiences and how you may fit into the team.
- A meeting with someone technical. We're not looking for everyone to be a software developer, but we do like having technical people meet candidates to see how they approach complex problems, how they can break them down and solve them, and how they learn.
- Iteration from there, based on the feedback from the interviews and any further interviews to try to figure out where you'd best fit within Symmetry and what role we can create for you.