Private Lunch Invite Getco

Yes…quite a few has been askin me abt my meetin with e Getco ppl. The Chicago traders.

I sat thru a talk by them..after agreeing not to disclose any information of what they do as well as to delete any materials that we may have from them. It was trade secret.

Prof Jaya brought to e attention of Robert (e trader from Getco) e moment I entered e seminar room. (I cannot thank Prof Jaya enough for e opportunity).

After I sat thru e talk which lasted one hour, explaining their trading systems, I was left speechless. The systems they build were built on brilliant ideas…which is enterprising in every sense. After the session with them, I finally understood y they’re all billionaires and y the 7 yr old company which started with 2 person is now worth 1.5b USD and comprising of only 100+ ppl.

What’s more impressive is that they have over taken e leader, Merrill Lynch, in areas of forex and equity trading in terms of daily volume in e US. Their trading system is so advanced that so long as volume came, so will millions of profits each day. Yes. Each day. I can’t reveal e range of profits and volumes…but all I can say is..breath taking.

The talk was attended by a handful of professionals ranging from economist to analyst to traders…lots of them expert in their field.

There was a lunch session scheduled after the talk…but not everyone could come. Out of SMU, only 2 students were invited to the private lunch session and I was honored in every sense to be one of the 2. The other guy is a final year Information System and Quantitative Finance international student from India. A lot of us were curious and abt y he chose to come to spore to study IS. Afterall, India is already boasting a fleet of impressive IS universities. And his response was that SMU has very gd reputation and is well known even in India and that spore was a tremendous international nation to be furthering business studies in.

I feel proud. Although I tink India is doin very well too. I’ve heard a lot about the Indian School of Business (What their locals call the India’s SMU) and they offer world class master courses which I was told by many profs to go for if I ever had the chance.

We spoke of possibility of building trading systems tgt. We may work something out…we’ll see how it goes.

As for employment possibilities…both of us were told to keep expectations really really low as their staff turnover is near 0 and it is extremely hard to get a position in GETCO. There was a PhD who kept calling and had to sit thru 27 interviews b4 he gotten a position in the company. So the fact that Robert bothered to call me up from Chicago last Nov already gives me a lot of pride. As I continue to set my expectations low.

We had a 8 course lunch at JAAN, the French restaurant at the 70^th floor of Swissotel. (which I din hav to pay a single cent. Lucky me! Thank you Mr Robert once again). The food was fantastic and the view was nothing short of spectacular.

I didn’t snap photos there cos it would have been a waste of opportunity. I’d rather be talking to them…or listening to them talk…that’s much more valuable. But I did find pics of some of e things we had…

P.S> and I owe Sentill a big thank you too for swaying me into biddin for prof jaya’s class at e very start. Thank you!