Get to know us: Aleš Tavčar, Senior Quantitative Analyst
In the Get to know us section, we introduce you to our people - who they are, what they do and what working at GEN-I means to them.
Aleš, almost two years ago, you decided to make the leap from academia - you were a researcher at the Jožef Stefan Institute - to business. What were the reasons for this decision?
That's right. For a number of years, I worked in one of the departments at the Jožef Stefan Institute, where we dealt with data analysis and the development of intelligent systems, among other things. For the last few years, however, I have been leading a team that has been working on several commercial projects with industry, so I have already gained some insight into the way of working and the aspect of striving for practical applicability of the results of development tasks that is often more typical of the industry. It was this focus on development and translating results into practice that attracted me and was a key factor in my decision to move. The choice of the company itself was not difficult, as I was impressed by GEN-I's vision of using data to make business decisions and the company's investment in analytics.
You joined GEN-I as a Business Analytics Associate and now support your trading colleagues as a Quantitative Analyst in Advanced Analytics and Algorithmic Trading. So you are the one who can explain the difference between two related areas of analytics.
The biggest difference is in the types of tasks, stakeholders, and business issues addressed. In Business Analytics, the spectrum is broader, as, during my time in the field, we have worked on tasks related to solar power plants, sales processes, customer support, news sentiment analysis, and other content. In the Global Markets Analytics and Algorithmic Trading Service, the main focus is on supporting the trading desk. This includes analysis of market and product developments and their relationships. We enable traders to test trading ideas against historical data and identify potential weaknesses in the strategy, we also provide visibility and analysis of strategies and, of course, we develop our own trading strategies for automated trading, which we also manage.
Can you tell us about the most interesting project you are currently working on?
Apart from algorithmic trading, which is extremely interesting and still has a lot of untapped potentials, I would perhaps highlight the development of a trading strategy visualization and analysis tool. With this tool, we want to develop an environment for traders that gives them a slightly different view of their trading and analysis, all with the aim of learning from their past performance, taking into account market conditions, and, of course, with the ultimate goal of improving the performance of future trading strategies.
From your own experience, how would you describe the GEN-I culture in a few sentences?
It is very motivating. There is a really strong focus on people and developing their skills. This is particularly evident in the Culture of Virtues project, which was implemented last year and aims to maximize the potential of individuals and encourage them to make more use of the virtues that are most natural and intrinsic to them.
