Intern Experience Summer - 2019  

Ayush Bhardwaj

Alpha Alternatives Pvt. Ltd. - Quant team

Process of Securing the Intern:

It was through indeed.com, although I did try through PT cell, and other external sites as well.

Work:

Goal of the project was to modify an existing trade strategy by filtering out the trades during chaotic markets using machine learning.

Workload and Tools used:

Work was very interesting, and that was the single reason I sat their from 9 in morning to 8 in night (despite the timings being 9AM - 6PM) and the work environment was really good, especially in the quant team.

Software Packages used -- MATLAB, Python, MS Excel and Amibroker (first three being used extensively)

Hardware instruments - PC ( :P) 

Essential theories - Chaos theory, Machine Learning

Courses that were part of the curriculum/ additional courses:

Nonlinear Dynamics (Prof. Punit Parmananda)

Data Analysis and Interpretation (Prof. Vikram Rentala)

Machine learning for remote sensing (Prof. Biplab Banerjee)

Learning Experience:

Non-academic -- Corporate work culture, that includes everything more or less 

Academic -- As I mentioned, chaos theory and machine learning, learnt a lot about how to apply these techniques to build something of use, trading strategies in my case. 

Places Visited:

Since it was a corporate internships, all we explored was different restaurants and bars. Apart from that, we co-interns developed a really nice bonding, others also being IITD and IITKGP.

My Expectations (before and after):

Before joining, I thought I would have to learn a lot of financial terms and economics theories in beginning. This is somewhat true and somewhat false. Let me explain how it goes (in a broad sense). Finance jobs (for engineering students) are divided into two parts - quant team or something related to investment banking type. My internship being of the former profile, required 1% of finance terms and rest was all programming and going through research papers. If it's of the latter types, you might need some knowledge of the field.

Contact Details: 

ayush1651999@gmail.com