Three Takeaways From my Summer at Alpaca
(This is 12/1 post for Trading API Advent Calendar 2018) I’m Rao, and I’m a senior math major at Bard College. The internship before your senior year plays a large role in your career development. I spent the last summer at Alpaca.
Alpaca is a fintech startup that offers the commission-free algo-trading stock brokerage through its wholly owned subsidiary Alpaca Securities LLC (it launched just last month — check them out!). The summer of 2018 was a time of transition. The company was ramping up and operations and engineering. It was exciting to watch a company go from a team of five and fifteen, to see a product develop, and just be a part of an ambitious and determined group. I learned a lot from the experience, and here are my three biggest takeaways.
1. Don’t be afraid of learning a new concept.
When I started, I had zero experience regarding algo trading and finance theory. I knew broad strokes, but not the specific knowledge needed to building a full on robo advisor.
At first, I froze. I barely remember my first day at Alpaca — I was in a daze, scared that I was going to fail. And, I did fail by wasting a day not attacking the problem. I came back on Day 2, and started through ground zero. I read Vanguard decks on their distribution of fixed income/equity, Wealthfront’s white papers on robo advisors, and ran through Quantopians tutorials on backtesting basic strategies. Then, I got to work.
I broke the problem down into small manageable chunks. I read an insane number of forum threads. I did battle with the Quantopian IDE. Then, I finally had my first breakthrough two weeks in. The breakthrough was even more motivation. By the end of the summer, I built a fully functioning robo advisor that used the fundamentals of Modern Portfolio Theory. It’s one of my proudest professional accomplishments to date, and it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t dive in headfirst.
It’s a valuable lesson, that goes beyond the internship this summer. This approach serves me well now, and I feel far more comfortable solving problems where I can’t immediately see the answer.
2. The day-to-day job description aren’t rules set in stone.
Two weeks into my internship, our CTO Hitoshi asked me to write a blog post about the robo advisor creation process. All my previous writing experience had been for internal documentation. This was my first attempt at writing for public use. I wrote the article through the Alpaca account and submitted it for publication in HackerNoon. It was accepted!
The experience after was intoxicating. It got several thousand views. People reached out social media, and I made some new connections in the fintech space. Quantopian (the crowd-sourcing hedge-fund that created the IDE that I used) saw my post, and reached out and sent me a free T-shirt!
I kept writing throughout the summer. I published several more articles on HackerNoon, including a sequel (pssst — the long overdue part 3 will be coming out soon) and posts on other topics:
I plan to have writing be a part of my career, something I figured this summer after writing.
3. AlpacaEDU
At the end of the summer, our CEO Yoshi brought my fellow intern Ethan and I together for a project — AlpacaEDU.
AlpacaEDU is an initiative to encourage algo trading among the student community through various perks like a discount on the Alpaca service.
The work is more organizational than technical. Developing deployment phases, a long term acquisition plan, methods of communication are all skills that most stem majors don’t get a chance to learn.
AlpacaEDU recently launched. If you’re a student interested in joining a community of student algo traders, head over to our website and sign up!
Internships are learning experiences. Your resume and mindset before and after an internship shouldn’t be identical. I hope that readers find these takeaways useful. For me, getting my thoughts down on paper helped me organize my thoughts.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the opportunity to work with Yoshi, Hitoshi, and the rest of the Alpaca team. A big thank you to them for a great experience this summer.
Technology and services are offered by AlpacaDB, Inc. Brokerage services are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC (alpaca.markets), member FINRA/SIPC. Alpaca Securities LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of AlpacaDB, Inc.
You can find us @AlpacaHQ, if you use twitter.
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