Inside JPMorgan's two most interesting electronic trading teams

If you want to work for a top tier bank and have set your sights on JPMorgan, you need to read today's shareholder letters from the bank's senior executives. In them, CEO Jamie Dimon and head of its corporate and investment bank (CIB) Daniel Pinto, disclose some of the best places to work at JPMorgan now.

Predictably, both are related to technology. JPMorgan spends a huge $11.5bn on technology annually. Although the bank wants to get a grip on tech spending this year by, for example, building standardized and reusable application programming interfaces (APIs), it also acknowledges that technology is the way forward, particularly in sales and trading. - When JPMorgan didn't spend on electronic trading technology, Pinto says it fell behind and that the effect on the business was "crippling."

If you work in the markets area of JPMorgan's corporate and investment bank, two teams are particularly interesting.

The first is a team working on a project both mentioned by Pinto in today's letter and previously referenced by him at JPMorgan's investor day. JPMorgan is building a "sophisticated trading platform" called "Algo Central," says Pinto. This will enable clients, "to use predictive analytics to tailor orders and even change the speed and execution style while the trade is live." Modifiable algorithms are starting to look like the new Holy Grail for algorithmic trading - Goldman Sachs has said it's working on something similar. JPMorgan already launched Algo Central for FX on Bloomberg in February.  

The second very exciting team at JPMorgan is referenced by Jamie Dimon in today's letter. Dimon says JPMorgan's CIB also has a product called "Deep X' which, "leverages machine learning to assist our equities algorithms globally to execute transactions across 1,300 stocks a day." Deep X is being rolled out to new countries, says Dimon. He omits to say how DeepX interacts with Algo Central, but the two are probably linked.

If you don't work on DeepX or Algo Central, you might want to position yourself more broadly as an expert on cloud computing and artificial intelligence at the bank. Dimon devotes over a page of his letter to the potential of the related technologies, saying that machine learning technologies are being "rapidly deployed" across the bank and that JPMorgan is "rapidly refactoring" its applications to take advantage of the cloud. 

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