The two new men applying AI to the markets business at JPMorgan

While the attention on Wall Street has been on the recent changes Deutsche Bank's program trading business and at Goldman Sachs following the retirement of co-head of securities division engineering Constantin Shakhnovich and his replacement by Adam Korn, JPMorgan's electronic trading business has been going through some big alterations of its own. But not many people seem to have noticed. 

JPM insiders say the new person to know at the bank is Eddie Wen, the former head of eCommerce for its macro businesses. Quietly, and with a minimum of external fanfare, Wen was promoted to head of 'global digital markets' in January 2019.

JPMorgan isn't saying exactly what Wen's up to, but he's effectively in charge of the markets element of JPMorgan's Digital & Platform Services division, the new unit managing the digital, data and analytics capabilities of the investment bank under David Hudson, the former head of J.P. Morgan’s markets execution team, and Guy Halamish, the former CFO of J.P. Morgan’s global markets division.

As such, it seems Wen would be one of the men to know if you want to work on JPMorgan's most interesting new electronic trading innovations - DeepX, Algo Central or LOXM. 

The other man to know is Hans Buehler, JPMorgan's London-based global head of equities analytics, automation and optimization. Buehler's been at JP for nearly 11 years since joining from Deutsche Bank in 2008, but he was only promoted into his automation and optimization role in September 2018. Both he and Wen, therefore, are part of something relatively new. They're working with JPMorgan's more established quant traders, including Vacslav Glukhov, head of EMEA E-Trading quantitative research. 

As we noted last month, JPMorgan's digital services team is hiring product managers in New York and London. The bank has also begun looking for a quantitative researcher with experience of machine learning to work on its equities electronic trading team in London. Before applying you might want to read this academic paper (click here) authored by Buehler together with JPMorgan juniors Jonathan Kochems, Ben Wood and Baranidharan Mohan (plus others). It outlines the bank's use of reinforcement learning to hedge over the counter (OTC) derivatives. 

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