With over 20 years of experience as a trader, portfolio manager, executive, and entrepreneur, Morgan Slade is now the CEO of CloudQuant, a cloud based quantitative strategy incubator and systematic investment fund. He has built quantitative trading businesses at some of the world’s largest hedge funds and Investment Banks over the last 20 years. Previously he was Global Head of Equity Trading at Allston Trading, a major HFT firm, Portfolio Manager in HFT at Citadel, and head of Global Systematic Trading for Kershner Trading Group. Morgan earned a BS and MS in Materials Science and Engineering with a concentration in Finance from MIT.
At CloudQuant, the company uses machine learning, alternative datasets, cloud computing, and crowdsourcing to generate alpha at scale.  You can follow Morgan and learn more about CloudQuant by connecting via twitter @jmorganslade or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/morganslade/. You can learn more about the CloudQuant team here: https://cloudquant.com/team/ or by following them via twitter @CloudQuant.
Grace: You started your career as an engineer and you’ve been in the industry as a quant trader for quite some time. How did you pivot your career and what inspired you to get into Quant trading?
When I was in MIT, there was a well-worn path from MIT to the Chicago and New York trading floors. I did a five year master’s program and spent some time at Motorola and Intel. As part of that I spent some time away from school working on my master’s thesis for Intel developing a sheer strain measurement technique for finite element modeling and finding ways to validate mathematical models using empirical data. When I returned to school after having spent some time in industry I started to talk to traders and I realized it sounded like their lives were a lot more exciting than an engineer for a Fortune 500 company. The …