On Campus Recruiting
This year Alphataraxia will be recruiting exclusively on campus at select universities. We do not accept applications outside of the listed schools. We will only be seeking to fill full time positions.
If you are a student at one of the schools we visit and having difficulties with your school's career site, you may email us. Please use your school email address.
FAQs & Trading
What does Alphataraxia do?
Alphataraxia is a quantitative energy investment firm with a focus on the electricity markets. We are one of the leading financial participants in the power space, buying and selling electricity futures contracts. We have a deep fundamental understanding of how electricity pricing works, and forecast and invest in contracts that are considered one of the most volatile commodities in the world.
What makes Alphataraxia successful?
Our collective ambition is the be the best investment team in the electricity space. We use a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools to uncover hard-to-find sources of alpha. This means our team enjoys paying attention. We enjoy getting a deep understanding and we enjoy seeing results. We have a smart and collaborative team that continually pushes the boundaries of our understanding. With decades of experience in the power sector, our world-class team has the freedom to own large pieces of the investment problem, and frequently innovates new solutions.
Do you use <insert vendor> software?
We create the majority of our tools and technology in-house. Often commercial available software doesn't meet our standards. The ability to customize our solutions allows our team to do our work better and more efficiently. Everybody at Alphataraxia can code. Our investment analysts, technology team, talented developers and engineers have added millions of lines to our internal code-base in an effort to continually make our systems and processes better.
How do you think about risk?
Everything we do, we do it for the long term. Alphataraxia has created a collegial sustainable environment that allows our team to do our work for a long time. Careful risk management is a core feature of our investment approach. All investments are subject to rigorously defined and monitored limits, ensuring Alphataraxia avoids unnecessary risk while prudently maximizing our investor's returns.
Do you trade energy stocks?
Alphataraxia operates in specialized markets that allow us to buy and sell electricity futures. These commodity markets we operate in allow us to capture opportunity more precisely than we could in the stock market. Much of our analysis is centered around the physical constraints of the electric grid, which leads to challenging and interesting quantitative problems.
Do you participate in competitive electricity markets?
Yes! We are financial participants in specialized exchanges that are similar to the NASDAQ but specifically for electricity. There are seven exchanges (known as ISOs and RTOs) in the United States, and we operate in all seven (PJM, CAISO, MISO, ERCOT, ISO-NE, NYISO, SPP). We are continuously growing and expect to expand outside of the US markets as well.
What websites should I go to if I want to learn more about energy markets?
Unfortunately, a lot of the learning is done on the job. There is truly a dearth of information out there about the Locational Marginal Price (LMP) market space. That said, there is a lot of dense information out there on the various ISO websites. Or contact us -- we love to talk about it!
Do you invest in energy infrastructure projects like power plants or transmission lines?
No. We do not directly invest in energy infrastructure projects, nor do we own or purchase any physical assets.
For the analyst positions, how much programming experience do I need?
Some programming background will help you hit the ground running. We parse, aggregate, and analyze billions of rows of data to make actionable investments. It is unreasonable and near impossible to perform such analysis in Excel. That said, we have a comprehensive training program that will teach you everything you need to know and fill in the gaps in your knowledge base. We value the ability to figure things out more than any understanding of a specific programming language.
I have energy policy experience. Would that be relevant for a job here?
Yes and no. If it indicates that you are interested in energy markets and digging into how they work, then it’s great to see! If your passion is lobbying senators to change domestic energy policy, then you probably won't be too happy with the day-to-day work at Alphataraxia. Though many of us are very interested in energy policy, it is more of a personal interest that dovetails nicely with what we do at work. We spend our time solving problems that lend themselves to quantitative answers. For example, the firm is more interested in forecasting what demand for electricity will be tomorrow than trying to find a way to reduce that demand over the next 10 years. However, if you are someone who is interested in reducing electricity demand or incentivizing renewable power generation, you will still find that much of what we do is relevant to understanding these problems. You will also get an intimate understanding of the complexity behind the electric grid, the diversity of jobs in the industry, and the extent to which policy, protocol, and oversight influence market operations.
What types of software do you use for analysis?
One of the things that makes us unique and distinct from other firms is a preference for building our own tools that allow us to understand the market better than anything commercially available. We happily use the latest technologies that enable us to build our own tools. We primarily tend to use a mix of MySQL, Python, Javascript, and PHP. We heavily rely on Python for number crunching, especially packages within the PyData ecosystem: pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, etc. Everyone at the firm helps to create in-house tools, which leads to a strong feeling of ownership and responsibility. Your team members will depend on the data you import, the visualizations you design, and the analysis you perform. Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with these specific tools -- we will teach you everything you need to get you up to speed.
What medical coverage is offered?
In alignment with our Team First value of taking care of our team mates, Alphataraxia provides truly best-in-class benefits. We take pride in giving our team literally the best healthcare plan money can buy at our current healthcare provider. Our platinum healthcare plan includes medical PPO, dental, vision, wellness, prescription drug, disease management, HSA, acupuncture and more. More details on the medical plan can be found here.
