The ongoing opportunities within electronic trading houses in Ireland
Ireland's financial sector isn't renowned for its front office expertise, and both asset managers and the capital markets divisions of domestic banks have been scaling back recently. However, there's one area where opportunities continue to present themselves locally - within the electronic prop trading firms based in Dublin.
The likes of SIG Susquehanna, Virtu Financial and Geneva Trading have relatively significant operations in Ireland and have been steadily recruiting for both trading roles and technology positions to develop their front office systems.
Virtu Financial currently has four openings for algorithmic traders, as well as software engineer roles, SIG Susquehanna is hiring for experienced traders and technologists, but - along with Geneva Trading - is also offering a number of roles for its graduate training programme and trading internships.
"While these firms are in the market for experienced hires, they tend to favour recruiting graduates and training them up according to their specific requirements," says Paul Smyth, senior consultant at financial headhunters FK International. "These roles are highly quantitative and impeccable academics in an area like maths, physics or engineering are usually required."
Obviously, in the current climate, there's an also opportunity for these firms to recruit from the London market, but Smyth suggests that their preference is to look for candidates in Ireland first.
This could be because there's less of a focus on financial sector experience, and more emphasis on quantitative reasoning, analytical and probability skills.
"They're looking for people with gambling instincts, backed by a strong understanding of statistics and probability," says Smyth. "This is something they test during interviews; candidates' ability to recognise patterns and make accurate predictions about the markets."
There is, of course, another thriving sector in Ireland, which generally looks for similar skills sets among its recruits - the gaming industry - and competition for new recruits is heating up.
"There's a lot of competition for highly-numerate graduates with an understanding of probability and odds among the gaming companies here and the quantitative electronic trading firms," says Ken Harbourne, managing director of recruiters Wallace Myers International.
