Goldman Sachs has a new acronym for the hottest people in the market

If you're looking for a markets job at Goldman Sachs right now, you might want to be a TWC. They're all the rage.

Standing for 'Trader Who Codes', TWCs are traders who can work in Goldman's systematic trading business writing scripts to analyze large datasets and "draw useful commercial conclusions."

Goldman admittedly only has one job advert where it explicitly refers to a TWC  but there plenty of others where the combination of markets knowledge and coding skills are required. The role that floats the acronym is located in Goldman's systematic commodities trading team, but Goldman is beefing up its systematic trading strats, engineers, data professionals and quants as it pivots towards "platform" businesses with low marginal costs. 

Goldman is far from the only bank looking for TWCs. JPMorgan has been upskilling its junior traders using a Python course that it's posted online and Morgan Stanley's CTO Rob Rooney has set about entwining coders and traders and thus embedding TWCs across the bank's trading floor. 

Headhunters say there's also a rush of recruitment in hedge funds and quant hedge funds that want some TWCs of their own. "The smaller prop trading firms, multi-strategy hedge funds and high frequency trading [HFT] firms are hiring very aggressively and picking up talent from across the market," says quant headhunter Augusta Aiken. Another headhunter, speaking off the record, says that in light of the volatility in the market this year, the demand for TWCs to work on systematic trading strategies for hedge funds and HFTs is "immense."

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