CU Quants - Trading Team

CU Quants is the University of Colorado Boulder's student-run quantitative finance club. Its live trading fund — split into Trading, Research, Risk Management, and Engineering teams — operates with the rigor of a professional firm. During treks to quant firms with Boulder offices such as Belvedere Trading, we were told the fund runs more like a real company than a student club. Since May 2025, the fund has achieved 137.63% annualized returns.

As a member of the Trading team, I was primarily responsible for monitoring systems during trading hours, making real-time decisions during periods of unexpected market movement, and helping expand our proprietary infrastructure: namely a real-time trading dashboard and a custom asset allocation engine ensuring optimal supply and demand balance between exchanges. Across 12 instruments on Kraken US and OKX US, I helped maintain 98.44% system uptime with spread capture ranging from 1 to 178 basis points, and helped prepare our systems for expansion onto Gemini US.

As a final sendoff before graduating, I put together a workshop for the Trading team on determining the intrinsic value of options contracts. The presentation walks through various strategies of increasing complexity, providing real-world examples. My favorite section describes a scenario where an uncovered call on NVDA is sold right before the stock doubles, illustrating theoretically unlimited loss exposure.