REBELLION RESEARCH
COMPUTER PROGRAMMER / MATHEMATICIAN
Summer
Number Date Type Wage
1978593 01/25/2007 Summer $500 per week
Start Openings Location Hours
May/June 3 New York, NY 9-5, five days a week
Company Description
RebellionResearch is a quantitative hedge fund that launched on January 3rd, 2007. We have designed software which incorporates financial and price related information about U.S. companies, and uses this information to make buy and sell decisions. We run this software daily to automatically manage a portfolio of investments. In addition to devising our investment strategy, we have developed simulation software, which allows us to backtest our models to see how they would have performed in historical markets. In the near future, we will be engaged in a number of activities, such as improving upon our current investment strategy, increasing our data collection capabilities, and expanding our model to apply to securities other than stock. We may also use the cash that we expect to generate to invest in other, more varied projects. Currently we are a very small firm (with a very young staff) consisting of seven employees. Our work atmosphere is also very relaxed. We look forward to hearing from you!
Job Qualifications
Computer programming experience (Python, Ruby, Java or C++) a must. Mathematics and problem solving skills a plus. Furthermore, you must either be a U.S. citizen or have a valid visa to work in the United States. TO APPLY, please respond to the questions in the short quiz below, and email your solutions together with your resume to spencer@rebellionresearch.com. DO NOT SEND YOUR RESUME WITHOUT YOUR QUIZ RESPONSES! Here is the quiz: ##### These questions are intended to gauge your knowledge of computer science, your ability to reason abstractly, your ability to express your thoughts clearly, and your interest in working with us. ##### 1. Suppose that you have access to a file which contains the closing price for 10,000 stock tickers on each day over a period of 10 years. Suppose also that you must create a component of a computer program which will be called thousands to hundreds of thousands of times per day on many different days to: (A) Retrieve the closing price associated with a given stock ticker for a given date. (B) Iterate through all stock tickers that have price information available on a given date. (C) Find the last date before a given date for which a given stock ticker had closing price information available. What data structures would you use to organize this stock information to best satisfy (A), (B) and (C)? Would you load all the stock information into memory at once, or format the data before hand so that it could be read piece by piece from the hard drive as information is requested? Explain why you believe that the data structures you chose are the best ones for this job. If you feel that it helps to illustrate your solution, please include a little pseudo code describing the classes (and relationships between them) that you would construct. Your answer to this question need not be lengthy, so long as it is clear. ##### 2. Consider a purely probabilistic game with potential outcomes x1, x2, ..., xn (each of which is a specified gain or loss of some number of dollars) which occur with the probabilities p1, p2, ..., pn respectively (where, p1 + p2 + ... + pn = 1.0). Assume that x1, x2, ..., xn and p1, p2, ..., pn are known. Theoretically speaking, how would you define or measure the risk of playing this game? Explain why your solution does a good job of capturing our intuitive notion 'risk', and how it might be used in actual decision making. Assuming that you could play this game at most one time, how would you decide whether you would want to play it? Assuming that you could play this game as many times as you liked, how would you decide how many times to play it? NOTE: Though question 2 is central to much of human activity, there is no single agreed upon solution to it. We are interested in the reasoning that you undergo to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. PLEASE ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY YOUR STATEMENTS. Best of luck to you!
Job Description
For information about Rebellion Research, including our article in the July 3rd, 2006 BusinessWeek magazine, please google the phrase "Rebellion Research". The exact nature of your work with us will depend on our needs at the moment, your abilities, and your interests. Projects could relate to helping us refine our investment strategy, improve and optimize our simulation software, expand our data collection abilities, enlarge the class of assets that our investment strategy can handle, develop our customized equity research product etc.