Kartik Agarwal

Alpha Quant Researcher & Former Software Engineer

About Me

Quantitative Portfolio Manager with experience building and designing investment strategy for a $2B hedge fund. Focused across all asset classes including equities, currencies, commodities and fixed income. Previously led a 12-person engineering team delivering software solutions used by 2,500+ organizations worldwide.

Technical Skills

Programming & Analytics

  • Python (Primary)
  • Java
  • R
  • MATLAB
  • SQL

Technologies & Tools

  • Bloomberg Terminal
  • Git/Hg/SVN
  • Kafka & Redis
  • GCP
  • AWS

Areas of Expertise

Systematic TradingMachine LearningQuantitative AnalysisStatistical ArbitrageAlpha ResearchRisk ManagementFinancial EngineeringData Pipeline Development

Personal Interests

Soccer🎾Tennis🥋Martial Arts🏎️Car RacingWatches🎬Horror Movies🎮Video Games

Experience

QMS Capital Management

Associate (Alpha Quant Researcher)Feb 2023 – Present
Senior AnalystJul 2021 - Jan 2023
Durham, NC
  • Directed alpha research across FX, commodity, equity, and fixed income futures resulting in 11 production ready trading strategies
    • oCreated ML-driven trading strategies (Neural Nets, XGBoost, Affinity Propagation, Kalman Filter, Lasso)
    • oInnovated proprietary macro indexes (e.g. bond risk premia, country sentiment) for economic-based signals
    • oIncorporated higher frequency metrics like order flow data to enhance predictive signals
  • Introduced Emerging Markets FX trading at the firm
    • oManaged the universe selection, portfolio construction, signal weighting and risk management
  • Built the firm's Python-based infrastructure from scratch, significantly improving robustness and research velocity

GIC (Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund)

AFPMar 2020 – Dec 2020
San Francisco, CA
  • Developed an NLP-driven trading strategy on U.S. equities by analyzing 10-K filings to uncover peer mispricings

UCLA (Federal Reserve Bank)

ResearcherJun 2020 – Jun 2021
Los Angeles, CA
  • Applied NLP techniques to quantify the effect of COVID-19 policies on households by analyzing state and local government documents across the U.S.
  • Analyzed the effect of world events on trends in equity, debt, and real estate

WeInvest

Software EngineerMar 2019 – Jul 2019
Bangalore, India
  • Implemented and deployed a white-labeled robo-advisory platform for banks across Singapore and the Middle East

Zoho ManageEngine

Software Engineer/Product LeadJun 2017 – Mar 2019
Chennai, India
  • Built product Zoho Zeptomail from inception to product launch, now being used by 2.5k+ organizations
  • Spearheaded feature ideation, technical design, and execution to create a competitive product
  • Led a cross-functional team of 12 developers, designers, testers, marketing and content writers

Education

UCLA ANDERSON SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Los Angeles, CA

Master of Financial Engineering

  • Represented UCLA at the Chicago Booth Investment Competition-Quant track
  • Represented UCLA at CFA IRC and performed financial analysis on Snapchat

VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Vellore, India

Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science and Engineering

Research & Selected Projects

Automated Nifty Stocks Strategy

Researched, developed, and deployed a multiple stat arb trading strategy on the top 100 NSE stocks (Nifty 50 + Next 50) over Google Cloud, with dynamic universe selection in backtesting to avoid survivorship bias.

  • Sharpe Ratio 3.52 on 10% daily turnover

Entrepreneurial & Platform Initiatives

  • Founded and built an invoicing software startup (end-to-end ownership; ultimately shut down)
  • Initiated a student-led quantitative investment fund framework at UCLA

Competitions

  • Booth Investment Competition: Represented UCLA at the Chicago Booth Investment Competition-Quant track
  • CFA IRC: Represented UCLA at CFA IRC and performed financial analysis on Snapchat