About Junzi Capital Engineering

Finance - re-engineered

For centuries, the financial markets in their various forms have played a critical role in facilitating price discovery and risk transfer. These basic functions of the financial markets have not changed... but just about everything else has.

Within the past decade, the basic structures of the financial capital markets have been revolutionized by the growing impact of modern technology. Long-held assumptions are being challenged, and upgrades are around every corner.

Traders flashing hand-signals at each other have gradually evolved to algorithmic trading programs negotiating transactions on the scale of milliseconds. In Chicago, New York, and the other bastions of financial enterprise, the business of finance is increasingly being redefined by a new generation of engineers and mathematicians.

Junzi Capital Engineering, LLC seeks to be at the forefront of this growing tide. Our founder studied financial engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and contributes a unique skill set. We believe quantitative techniques allow us to mathematically understand our role and edge in the markets. We believe engineering expertise allow us to design reliable systems for trading automation. We believe the greatest value comes from tightly integrating these two disciplines.

Founded by a veteran of Silicon Valley’s startup culture, JCE applies the same startup philosophical model to investment management. We look for success in disintermediation, and in eliminating inefficiency. Rather than being veterans of the industry we look to revolutionize, we are proud outsiders.

We have minimal interest in brick and mortar, and instead concentrate our investment in talent and technology. We are devoted to short product development cycles, and constant improvement through agile programming. We complement internal software development with the purchase of off-the-shelf commercial solutions that provide a multiplier effect on efficiency. We don’t pay for capital expenditures, not if we can rent scalable, secure solutions from a computing cloud. We only work with companies and partners as hungry, informed, and flexible as we are.

Key technology trends that we believe make a “startup” investment management company viable:

• API-based trading is becomes increasingly reliable and available, with widely used open-source toolkits for backtesting and trading.
• Electronic trading itself is becoming increasingly relevant; NYSE specialists and CBOT pit traders are being supplanted by electronic networks.
• The proliferation of electronic trading also implies the proliferation of electronic data; 5 years ago, in many markets investment professionals would be fortunate to have open/close/high/low data. Now, gigabytes of data are being accumulated on a daily basis, showing not just every single executed transaction, but the movements of published ask/bid prices, and even their declared volume.