About
Nick Psaris is a quantitative developer with over two decades of experience building automated option market making and equity stat-arb backtesting and trading systems as well as data and analytic platforms. He is a CFA charterholder and holds a Masters in Computational Finance (MSCF) from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Nick wrote Q Tips: Fast, Scalable and Maintainable Kdb+ based on his years of practical experience developing production trading systems in q. His second book, Fun Q: A Functional Introduction to Machine Learning in Q, uses the expressive q language to guide readers through implementing twelve machine learning algorithms from scratch. Nick is currently an adjunct professor for the Market Microstructure and Algorithmic Trading class at Carnegie Mellon University’s MSCF program and a Managing Director in Bank of America’s Equity Central Risk Book (CRB) desk.
New York I
After graduating Duke University with a degree in Physics and Chinese, he began his career in finance at Morgan Stanley in New York. He obtained his CFA charter in 2003, and a Masters in Computational Finance (MSCF) from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006.
Hong Kong
Nick moved to Hong Kong in 2006 and built an equity portfolio trading and backtesting system in q. After spending three years at Liquid Capital Markets Hong Kong building a high frequency automated market making system in q, he then built an inventory optimization platform in q at a top tier American investment bank.
Q Tips
Nick wrote Q Tips based on his years of practical experience developing production trading systems in q. Published in 2015, Q Tips teaches you everything you need to know to build a fully functional CEP engine. Advanced topics include profiling an active kdb+ server, derivatives pricing and histogram charting. As each new topic is introduced, tips are highlighted to help you write better q. A book review was published in Vector, the Journal of the British APL Association.
New York II
In 2016, Nick moved back to New York and joined his firm’s Equity CRB desk where he manages the data and analytics platform built with q. Most recently, Nick built the PREDICTIFY cross-asset client interest model using a collaborative filtering machine learning algorithm.
MSCF
Beginning in 2018, Nick has been co-teaching the Market Microstructure and Algorithmic Trading class for Carnegie Mellon University’s MSCF program as an adjunct professor. Students use q and jupyter notebooks to analyze high-frequency tick data sourced from NYSE Daily TAQ, CME DataMine, and ICE Cryptocurrencies.
Fun Q
Combining his love of data and efficient q algorithms, Nick published Fun Q in 2020. Fun Q demonstrates how many common machine learning algorithms can be efficiently implemented in q – thus bringing the code to the data, instead of the data to the code. Each algorithm is broken into its basic building blocks and then rebuilt from scratch. Famous machine-learning data sets are used to motivate each chapter as advanced q idioms are introduced as well. A book review was published in Vector, the Journal of the British APL Association.
Competitions
To promote interest in q, Nick has lead a few coding competitions.
- Computing HKID Check Digits
- Computing VIN Check Digits
- Loading Data from the MNIST Database
- Compute the Mastermind Score
Podcasts
Nick has been a panelist and guest on the The Array Cast podcast.
- What Challenges Face the Array Languages
- What is an Array
- Responding to a Listener’s Email
- Nick Psaris and the q Language
- KxCon 23
In The News
Nick has been mentioned in reference to the Q programming language on eFinancialCareers.
- The coding language that will get you the best jobs in banking
- Why so few people learn the hottest coding language in finance
Emacs
Nick uses Emacs in all parts of his life. He is the author of q-mode, which adds syntax highlighting to q code and the ability to inject code into both local q processes and remote q servers. Q Tips and Fun Q were written using q-mode and adoc-mode for editing AsciiDoc files.
Pediatric Cancer
Nick is passionate about finding a cure for childhood cancer. In addition to supporting The D10 mission, he has raised over $150,000 for pediatric cancer research by shaving bald at the annual St. Baldrick’s event in Hong Kong and has joined the ranks of Knight of the Bald Table: 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 2023, and 2024.