Balyasny Asset Management’s head of quantitative research talks algos, hedge funds, correlations and cats
Robin Wigglesworth I Financial Times I June 12, 2025
Morning! After some dabbling in the genre, FT Alphaville is starting an informal series of simple Q&A interviews. The basic premise is that we’ll have a hopefully interesting chat with hopefully interesting people doing hopefully interesting things in and around finance, economics and business (sometimes they may be boring people doing interesting things, or interesting people doing boring things as well), and publish a lightly-edited Q&A afterwards. No promises, but we’ll try to do one a week.
FTAV: Hi Gappy. You’re originally a physicist from Rome. How did you end up in finance?
I came to the US to study for my PhD at Stanford. In the last year of it I had a long internship at Enron, and that immunised me from joining finance for the next 10 years. So I went to IBM Research. After the 2008 crisis, with perfect timing, I decided to enter finance, mostly because of financial reasons. I had kids, the usual stuff. It was not a marriage of passion. But I went to Axioma, which is a factor risk model provider, and was then hired by Citadel. And surprisingly I had a fantastic time at Citadel, contra expectations. So I came to like what I was doing, and have stuck around since then.
What was IBM Research like?
IBM Research was an incredible place for the first 40 years of its life. I had colleagues who spent, as part of their job, a year in Africa tracking the migration of elephants. I don’t even know why. It’s great to be a research lab attached to a near-monopoly. There was plenty of research funding, you didn’t even need to ask, and you would just be evaluated once a year by your manager. As a result, there was a lot of really good research that was never monetised. But in the 1990s, IBM started laying off of thousands because of the transition to personal computers, and that was the beginning of the end. We had to start to recover some of our salary through consulting. It became neither fish nor fowl. It was not fundamental research, it was not applied research, and over the years all the good people left for Google, Yahoo or Wall Street.
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