Episode 165: Roman Ginis on Trade Execution

After the Soviet Union broke apart, Roman Ginis and his family left Ukraine and came to America. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the California Institute of Technology, and then landed engineering jobs at Intel, IBM and BAE Systems. From there, he moved to Wall Street as a junior quant at UBS, developing execution technologies and quantitative analytics for electronic market-making for the investment bank. That led to a job at Cubist Systematic Strategies, the quant trading arm of Point72 Asset Management. After seven years at the hedge fund, he shipped off to create a startup called Imperative Execution, the parent of IntelligentCross, a dark pool that uses AI to improve match times on a security-by-security basis to reduce market impact. Imperative Execution is backed by a consortium of investors, including Point72. Ginis talks about his career, the challenges of creating a startup, and how the world of trade execution is evolving.