A day in the life of a quantitative researcher at Citadel
Navid is an alpha researcher at the hedge fund Citadel in New York, where he works in the firm’s Equity Quantitative Research (EQR) business unit, building alphas for its equity strategies. He joined Citadel a year ago after completing his PhD in Statistics at Columbia University, where his research focused on machine learning theory. This is a typical day in his life.
07:00 - I usually wake up somewhere between seven and eight. I'll catch up on the news, get into my routine and walk to work, which takes about half an hour. It's a good window to listen to podcasts – at the moment I've got a couple of finance podcasts on the go, but I also like short stories and folklore. By the time I'm in line for my coffee, I'm starting to think about what I want to get done that day. I like having that time to plan because most of my work is self-directed, so it's important to start each day with a clear idea of what I want to accomplish.
09:00 – I reach my desk. One thing about a quant research role is that you're not tied to the market open the way a lot of other roles in finance are, so there's a bit more flexibility in the day. I tend to start by really pinning down what I want to do, and that begins with taking notes on the overnight runs I kicked off the day before. I take extensive notes on what comes back; writing it all down helps me internalise the results, and it makes them much easier to explain to my team later on.
Research is an iterative process, so keeping detailed notes makes it much easier to build on ideas over time instead of starting from scratch every morning. That iterative approach is one of the things I enjoy most about the role – it reminds me of the research I did during my PhD, but with the added motivation that my work directly contributes to investment returns and P&L for EQR.
11:00 – After a few hours with last night’s results – I started running a sim right before I went home for the evening – I’ll spend an hour or so catching up with my manager. We'll go through what I found the day before and what I looked at that morning, challenge my thinking, and bounce ideas around about next steps. I started out in market impact research before moving into alpha research, so these days I'm less focused on day-to-day performance and more on building signals. Ultimately, I'm trying to develop new alpha ideas that can materially impact our P&L, so every piece of research has to be both robust and genuinely useful.
Research is guided by both your manager and the head of research, who stay closely involved throughout the process. That constant feedback means I learn incredibly quickly, and it helps me focus my research on ideas that could have real commercial results, meaning I can see they’re generating a profit in the market. Even as someone early in my career, I regularly discuss my work with very experienced researchers, including the head of research. At the same time, you're given a lot of ownership – you're expected to develop your own hypotheses, test them rigorously and drive your own research. The idea-generation process is highly collaborative, and we're constantly challenging each other's thinking and building on one another's ideas, but large parts of the job are spent working independently, looking at dozens of signals to separate what's meaningful from what's just noise.
12:00 – Lunch is around midday, and it's usually about half an hour. We've got a great kitchen here – there's a salad bar every day with loads of variety, and the mains are good too. I'll often eat with friends and talk about what we're working on, or whatever’s interesting. With the World Cup, there's been a lot of football chat.
12:30 – After lunch, I try to keep at least two hours of proper focus time for my own research, roughly between half past twelve and three. This is when I work through the more actionable things, such as the feedback I got in the morning and the results I've turned up, to figure out what new angles are worth looking at. I always have a running research document open to capture anything that catches my attention, even if I'm not yet sure whether it'll turn into something useful.
A lot of what I do is testing new ideas and building signals for our investment strategies. A signal can be all sorts of things, but you're always trying to build something systematic and robust with good metrics to judge it by. The research process is deeply non-linear, and there's a lot of noise. You have to become comfortable exploring ideas without knowing whether they'll lead anywhere – that's part of what makes research so rewarding when something finally clicks. Sometimes you catch a thread and pull it all the way through. More often than not, it’s a dead end. You don't land on a new idea every day. But it's enormously enjoyable when something does come together and gives you a new understanding you can act on. That usually happens about once or twice a week.
15:00 – This is the time I like to cluster my meetings. Some meetings are with the quantitative developers, or QDs, I'm collaborating with on a specific project, while others are our weekly research meetings where we present findings, challenge each other's thinking and often uncover new directions to explore. I really enjoy that balance. The QDs I work with are involved throughout the research process, so we're constantly exchanging ideas as research moves into implementation. A lot of my day is spent working independently, but these discussions often help shape where the research goes next.
One of the things that surprised me when I joined was how much we're encouraged to pursue longer-term research questions in the search for new sources of alpha. When I was finishing my PhD, I wasn’t set on working in finance. My internship at Citadel gave me my first real exposure to research in finance and a sense of what the work was like. That experience convinced me that I wanted to return full-time so I could continue doing rigorous research while solving open-ended problems with a direct impact on our trading strategies. That’s what I really enjoy about working in EQR.
19:00 – I usually head out around seven and it takes me about 25 minutes to walk home. It’s a little later than I strictly need to, but I like the work, and I want to make sure I've kicked off some runs to look at the next morning. There's something satisfying about coming back the next morning to see what the overnight runs have uncovered. Every day starts with new information, which means the research is always evolving.
19:30 – After I get home, I'll often go for a walk along the Hudson, catch a bit of the sunset and put some music on to cool down. Sometimes I’ll go and practice a bit of tennis off the walls in the evening, too. Then I’ll usually have a late, light dinner, maybe some salmon or something ordered in. I like to watch TV while I eat – recently, I’ve been into comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
23:30 – I’m a bit of a night owl, so I tend to get to bed around midnight. Before I do, I'll usually read a bit of the news, mostly geopolitics, for my own interest rather than anything to do with work.
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