Jobs

Institutional Money Management firm seeks quant/data miner/text miner to join the investment team.

We are: Founded in 1995, Daruma Asset Management invests in a high-conviction portfolio of no more than 35 small-cap stocks. Our firm is 100% employee-owned, and manages roughly $1 billion for public and corporate pension plans, endowments, foundations and individuals.

Please visit our website www.darumanyc.com to learn more about our firm culture, history and investment process and philosophy. We are a small, highly-focused, entrepreneurial shop with a good long-term record that continually seeks new tools to enhance our process, maintain our track record and keep reversion to the mean at bay.

We are looking for: Someone with a strong applied math or computer science background who is entrepreneurial, creative, and with a voracious, wide-ranging curiosity. We need someone who is capable of defining their own role, and who is a leader (i.e. someone who delivers progress, not status reports, and can project manage outside contractors when needed).

This you? Keep reading.

What the job entails:

Using SPSS' Clementine data mining software we have built a production engine that text mines quarterly conference call transcripts to 1) make sure we scour all corners of our investable universe for ideas and 2) flag companies undergoing changes. As bottom-up stock pickers we spend a lot of time assessing whether changes in tactics and strategy in a company will lead to future results that are materially different from the trend-extrapolating Street, thus boosting the stock price.

We have built a data mining/text mining Ferrari - it is fast, it is robust, it is scalable, and can be expanded to include many other streams of data to enhance its predictive abilities. In contrast, we are little old ladies who drive the car to church on Sunday. We need someone with the stats/math/computer science background to do this baby justice.

We would like you to keep up with the latest academic research on finance, markets and investing and decide which studies are 1) statistically valid 2) applicable to our investment philosophy and then 3) figure out a way to include these actionable insights into our investment process.

We would like you to monitor our investable universe and publish insights into what's going on in small-cap land that our clients would find useful, and that would give our firm thought leadership "street cred" in the marketplace.

We would like you to exploit the intersection of technology and investing to contribute to our investment process. Visit O'Reilly's Money: Tech Conference site (http://en.oreilly.com/money2008/public/content/home) to see innovative ways in which your world of math, stats, and computer science can partner with our world of classic, bottom-up fundamental investing. (BTW, our CIO will be speaking at the 2009 Conference on our text-mining project, and could use some help coming up with the wow factor).

We would like you to analyze our performance and work with our behavioral finance auditor to glean any insights into how we could get out of our own way.

We would like you to help with developing new products, as well as running our existing portfolio.

Warning: We are not a black-box firm, and we aren't going to throw out 13 years of successful investing to become one, so if you want to convert us, as opposed to partner with us, forget about it.

What skills you need to have:
You will collect and manage large data sets, analyze them for behavioral patterns and/or indicators, develop predictive models, and document and implement insights gleaned as part of the investment team. The job requires defining and implementing data standards and procedures, creating data dictionaries and a scalable data warehouse architecture.

Requirements:

• Passion and deep technical competency in data and text mining
• 2-5 years experience in the application of modeling and business analytics
• Proven problem-solving skills
• Excellent computation and data management skills
• Ability to take complex and/or technical concepts and describe them to non-quant colleagues
• Strong project leadership, writing and interpersonal skills

Experience in using the following tools:

• SPSS 14.0 or above, including Clementine, Predictive Applications, PES, and / or SAS, SAS Enterprise Miner
• Business Objects Xi: Report Writer level (experience creating standard reports)
• Oracle 9i or higher: excellent knowledge of SQL for data analysis (PLSQL desired)
• MySQL: basic knowledge of query writing in SQL
• Attensity, ClearForest, Inxight, Webtrends or similar web analytics

It's critical to have the math/computer science chops, and to know what matters in the financial markets. Being an independent and innovative thinker who doesn't need to be micromanaged is more important than having tons of experience in the laundry list above - however, if you don't have Clementine experience you need equivalent experience with another data mining/text mining engine because you need to be able to learn Clem quickly and hit the ground running.

Still interested?

Contact:
Please email your resume as well as a brief paragraph (no need for a formal cover letter) describing why this role is of interest to you, and why you might be of interest for the role. Send your resume in confidence to darumajob@gmail.com. No phone calls please.