Inside the Black Box: The Simple Truth About Quantitative Trading

Acknowledgments

This book would not be readable without the untiring editing of Arzhang Kamarei. My colleagues at Telesis Capital, Myong Han and Yimin Guo, similarly read through countless revisions of this text and offered many invaluable and timely suggestions. I am grateful to Sudhir Chhikara, one of the brightest quants I know, for taking the time to read Inside the Black Box and provide many constructive criticisms. I'd also like to thank Aaron and Sandor Straus of Merfin LLC for their help with the Data chapter.

I am indebted to my brother, Manoj Narang, from whom I have learned so much. Vijay Prabhakar provided many helpful suggestions and answers to questions related to machine learning, as Rick Durand did with the subject of optimization.

I am grateful to Steve Drobny for being hugely helpful and an enabler in the infancy of this project and for coming up with its title. Without him, it is extraordinarily unlikely I would ever have started. John Bonaccolta, too, was there in the earliest days, providing suggestions and encouragement when it was greatly needed.

Similarly, I must acknowledge the help of the rest of my partners at Telesis Capital: R. Alexander Burns, Julie Wilson, Eric Cressman, and John Cutsinger. Richard Vigilante offered a few extremely important criticisms early on, which helped shape the book.

For their help with getting some metrics on the size of the quant trading universe, I'd like to thank Keith Johnson and Ryan Duncan of Newedge, Greg Lindstrom ...