Andrew Janian: We live and breathe this partnership every day
Andrew will be set to speak at Quant Strats 2024 at 10.00 am Fireside Chat: Where Quantitative Research Meets Engineering: The Art and Science of Building Exceptional Investment Tools. The panel will take place on March 12 at the Quorum by Convene, New York.
Please give us a little introduction to your current role and what you do
I am Citadel’s Head of Equities Engineering. In this role, I am responsible for frameworks and data solutions that serve Citadel’s Global Equities, Surveyor, Ashler, and International Equities businesses. I also lead Cloud and Platform Engineering, as well as Core Engineering, which together provide many of the firm's foundational technologies.
What do you consider your biggest professional achievement to date?
I have been part of some exceptional businesses over the years, but I am most proud of my current role as a member of Citadel’s Engineering Leadership Team. Every day, I get to work with brilliant colleagues on platforms and tools that support every step of the quantitative and fundamental investing process.
How do data, quantitative, and investment functions work together? And how could this relationship be improved?
Partnership is key—no one team or person should be “in charge” of the other. When you have ideas coming from multiple sides, you get exceptional results.
For an engineer, this means you must go beyond the nuts and bolts of programming to also gain a deep understanding of a business. When you have this insight into how a market or product functions, you gain an appreciation for commercial challenges, which then leads to more intuitive and useful tools.
At Citadel, we live and breathe this partnership every day. It shows up when our technologists help portfolio managers answer questions about the companies they cover, when our analysts work with data scientists to identify data sets and queries that help to unlock insights, and when our quantitative researchers uncover patterns in how we trade. We believe strongly that these open collaborations make our investment professionals and engineers even better at what they do.
The data market seems to be incredibly saturated at present, with more data being available than at any other time in human history – do novel data sources still exist?
There are still novel data sources and data sets, but I think the greatest opportunities lie in improving the way we make investment decisions using the data we already have. In the fundamental investing space, that comes down to creating tools that streamline access to data, that empower investors to ask the right questions, and that make it easy to interact with results.
At Quant Strats, we always discuss the challenges and opportunities of blending quant and fundamental strategies and this is always a popular topic – why do you think this is? What do you think is the most important questions for quants?
Some companies have the DNA of a quant manager. Others have the DNA of a discretionary fundamental manager. At Citadel, it’s in our DNA to use all the tools available to us to answer questions and deliver value to investors. We utilize quantitative strategies heavily, but we aren't trying to change our DNA by bolting a quantitative strategy onto a discretionary business, or a discretionary strategy onto a quant business.
I think these bolt-ons can result in cultures where one group overshadows another, or where teams lack respect for each other’s skills. We have just one group, and we work together to leverage quantitative, fundamental, and discretionary tools to arrive at the best results. For us, that partnership is extremely powerful.