Robert Corwin, Developer in Austin, TX, United States
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Robert Corwin

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Financial Markets Developer

Location
Austin, TX, United States
Toptal Member Since
August 6, 2020

Robert has 20 years of experience working with and analyzing large data sets, quantitative modeling, and data science. He has been a founder and/or an early employee at his last three companies. Robert's expertise as a portfolio manager and quantitative researcher includes skills in SQL, NoSQL, C++, C#, Python, AWS, and web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, and Angular).

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Microsoft SQL Server, PyCharm, Windows

The most amazing...

...things I've developed were the trading strategies underpinning the hedge fund I ran and a retail gasoline price optimizer.

Work Experience

Principal Data Scientist

2019 - 2020
Zdaly
  • Created software products that deliver advanced insights into their businesses, predicting sales based upon factors such as weather, seasonality, and demographics.
  • Applied machine learning techniques for predictive purposes; techniques include regression/correlation, logit models, random forest models, clustering algorithms, lead/lag analysis, some NLP, multithreading, and multiprocessing.
  • Optimized client retail prices based upon price elasticities and competitor behavior. Recursively propagated potential price changes throughout the entire client/competitor network and determined optimal price.
Technologies: Machine Learning, Python, Elasticsearch, SQL

Co-Chief Investment Officer

2016 - 2019
EVA Capital Management
  • Served as the co-CIO of a quantitative asset management firm. With a business partner, laid the groundwork for company operations, hiring, and trading.
  • Pitched business plan and trading strategy to potential clients and business partners and raised seed capital.
  • Led the researcher and portfolio manager responsible for daily R&D and trading on a systematic EVA (economic value added)-based stock selection strategy. Managed one analyst. Implemented in both hedge fund and index/ETF formats.
  • Maintained terabytes of data in a SQL database which served a C++ trading algorithm to optimize the portfolio; a C# desktop app for data manipulation; and Python, MATLAB, and R scripts for statistical analyses.
  • Utilized finance frameworks such as Fama-Macbeth regression, mean-variance optimization, multifactor risk modeling, as well as ML such as NLP and clustering.
  • Coded the company web site using Node.js, Angular, and Highcharts.
Technologies: Python, MATLAB, AngularJS, C++, SQL

Head of Quantitative Research

2007 - 2015
EVA Dimensions
  • Hire as the fifth employee at a financial company startup based around the Economic Value Added (EVA) valuation framework. Instrumental in growing revenues to over $7 million and employees to over 20.
  • Created and marketed equity research reports, data visualizations, and interactive web tools to buy- and sell-side clients. Mined proprietary databases and tied statistical observations to non-technical, actionable investment recommendations.
  • Researched finding areas of under/overvaluation, commenting on trends in market or factor behavior, and custom client projects.
  • Led the research on many quantitative financial models, including an EVA-based global stock selection system and simulated ETFs designed to capture premia (beta) on various factors.
  • Aggregated a DCF analysis, a custom-built portfolio analysis, risk, and attribution system; cost of capital models; and thematic models tying factor returns and exposures to the business and company life-cycles.
Technologies: Java, MATLAB, C#, C++, SQL

Senior Analyst

2003 - 2006
The Rohatyn Group
  • Contributed as an analyst at a multi-billion dollar emerging markets hedge fund.
  • Provided support for an earnings-estimates based trading model. Created a 100GB store of data; researched underlying data quality and effectiveness of various trading signals/indicators; backtested. Implemented in the master fund at $50 million.
  • Created a cointegration-based pairs trading model and presented results to the trading desk weekly.
Technologies: C#.NET, C#, SQL

Analyst (Intern)

2002 - 2003
Citigroup
  • Created a multi-factor model to forecast US corporate bond spreads utilizing equity market information.
  • Presented results to the entire fixed-income research division for discussion.
  • Received internship credit for my master's in financial engineering program at Berkeley.

Associate

1999 - 2001
Nomura Securities International
  • Worked for the quantitative unit in an internal fund-of-funds.
  • Created a custom performance attribution system (Brinson-based).
  • Automated the pricing of options in the portfolio.

Predictive Maintenance for Printers

A system to ingest, clean, and process large data sets from industrial printers and predict when there will be a failure that would require service technicians to be deployed to reduce such calls.

Long and Short Equity Hedge Fund

Lead researcher and portfolio manager responsible for daily R&D and trading on a systematic EVA (economic value added)-based stock selection strategy. Managed one analyst. Implemented in both hedge fund and index and ETF formats. Created the Wilshire EVA 5000 Indexes.

Maintained TBs of data in a SQL database, which served a C++ trading algorithm to optimize the portfolio, a C# desktop app for data manipulation, Python, MATLAB, and R scripts for statistical analyses. Techniques utilized finance frameworks such as Fama-Macbeth regression, mean-variance optimization, multifactor risk modeling, and ML such as NLP and clustering.

Retail Gasoline Price Optimizer

Fuel Network Optimizer is a next-generation, AI-enabled software product for the oil and gas industry. It takes massive amounts of individual retail and wholesale fuel transactions as inputs, cleans them, and quickly computes a suite of business intelligence metrics (like volumes, profits, prices, etc.). It then combines these internal metrics with external factors such as weather, demographics, population density, traffic, proximity to major attractions, seasonality, and holiday effects, as well as features about each specific client retail site (like physical characteristics and customer loyalty), into machine learning models. The models predict sales, profits, etc. on a forward-looking basis, and also decompose history to increase understanding of what has transpired. Elaborate modeling of competitor behavior also exists, with a sophisticated price elasticity model that anticipates competitor reaction and recursively propagates price changes throughout the entire network of sites.

Languages

Python, SQL, C#, R, C++, Java, C#.NET

Tools

PyCharm, MATLAB

Paradigms

Data Science, ETL

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows, Azure

Storage

SQL Server 2014, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

Other

Machine Learning, Financial Markets, Risk Models, Data Warehouse Design, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Deep Learning, Oil & Gas, Artificial Intelligence (AI), GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Option Pricing

Frameworks

AngularJS

2002 - 2003

Master's Degree in Financial Engineering

University of California at Berkeley/Haas School of Business - Berkeley, CA

1994 - 1998

Bachelor's Degree in Chemical Engineering

Cornell University - Ithaca, NY

JULY 2005 - PRESENT

Chartered Financial Analyst

CFA Institute

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