# Introducing NEFS Quant 2026/2027 Szymon Kopyciński, Gabriel Bridger, Bilal Naheem · 21 September 2026 An introductory post, aiming to give you, the reader, an idea about what NEFS Quant is. ## Who we are NEFS Quant is the quantitative division of the Nottingham Economics & Finance Society. We exist to give students a place to learn how quantitative trading actually works by building, researching, testing, and trading, rather than simply reading about the theory behind it. The division brings together three main areas: Trading, Research, and Dev/Engineering. Each approaches markets from a different angle, but none exists in isolation. Without research, a fund or trading shop has nothing to trade. Without engineering, there is no infrastructure to trade on. And without trading, well, you get the point. A strategy needs research behind it, infrastructure to run on, and someone who understands how and when it should trade. Our aim is to expose members to that entire process. That means NEFS Quant is not intended to be a weekly lecture series, nor a collection of isolated coding exercises. This year, we want members to work together on problems that resemble, as closely as is practical within a university society, those encountered in quantitative trading firms. The way we hope to achieve this is by making the sessions we do run contribute towards broader goals, such as simulated trading competitions and group projects. This year, NEFS Quant is run by three Directors and five Seniors (Senior Analysts), all of whom have demonstrated a strong interest in markets through competitions, internships, research groups, or independent projects. ## What we do Throughout the year, members will work within teams built across our three tracks. **Trading** focuses on decision-making, market mechanics, and the practical side of taking risk. Members will develop their understanding of execution, market microstructure, probability, and some fundamental quantitative trading strategies. **Research** focuses on turning ideas into evidence. Members will work with financial data, statistical methods, and quantitative models to develop hypotheses, test them properly, and understand how and where apparently promising strategies fail under scrutiny. **Dev/Engineering** is a combined track with two broad paths. Quant development is about bridging the gap between a strategy on paper and something that can actually trade, while engineering focuses on the systems that make that possible. Members will build trading infrastructure, market-data systems, APIs, and internal tooling for the competitions we have planned, while learning about the technical problems that arise when software interacts with exchanges in real time. There will be a lot of natural overlap across all three, and we do not plan on pigeonholing members into whichever track they were initially most interested in. A researcher should understand execution constraints. A trader should understand where their data comes from. A developer should understand the strategy they are implementing. The most interesting problems tend to land somewhere between the three. ## Learning by doing Our main focus this year is practical experience. We are not saying that members who join will be able to trade on real exchanges purely based on what they learn from NEFS Quant this year, and we would never make such a claim. What we do aim for is for those who join either to find a passion for markets or to deepen one they already have. Markets are particularly interesting because they create mechanisms through which participants can express views, react to information, and, importantly, put something at risk when they believe they are right. Rather than teaching each topic in isolation, we are building environments in which members can apply what they learn. Teams will be able to research strategies, write trading systems, consume market data, place orders, and compete against one another inside markets built by our own team. Some things will work, but most things will not. A backtest can look excellent until transaction costs and latency are introduced. A trading strategy can behave very differently once other participants enter the market. A system that works perfectly on a laptop can fail once data arrives out of order, connections drop, or several things happen at once. Understanding these failure modes is often more valuable than producing something that works immediately. ## The year ahead We will be starting this year with a small trading showcase, where participants will be given an opportunity to trade in a live simulated market. This will be discretionary trading through a UI, but we deliberately will not be giving you price charts. You will have to work from the numbers. Later in the year, our analyst cohort will take part in a larger and more structured internal trading competition. Teams spanning Trading, Research, and Dev/Engineering will have time to prepare their strategies and infrastructure before competing against one another in pods. Alongside this, we will run technical sessions, talks, projects, and events covering areas across quantitative finance and electronic trading. Towards the end of the year, we have an ambitious plan to open a trading competition to other student societies, where participating student pods will trade against one another on bare-metal infrastructure, giving them exposure to some of the engineering considerations involved in ultra-low-latency trading. We also want NEFS Quant to be a place where members build things outside the formal programme. If somebody wants to investigate an unusual dataset, experiment with a market-making model, build an exchange simulator, study options, improve our own infrastructure, or simply learn about a part of the market they have never encountered before, we want there to be people around them who are equally interested. ## Who is NEFS Quant for? You do not need to arrive knowing how to price an option, build a trading system, or derive a stochastic model. You do need to be curious and **enjoy solving difficult problems**. Our members come from economics, mathematics, computer science, physics, finance, and other disciplines. The problems we work on benefit from that mixture. We place more value on natural curiosity and demonstrated interest than on hard credentials. The point of the division is not for everyone to become the same kind of quant. It is for members to discover which problems they enjoy solving, become better at solving them, and understand how their work connects to that of the people around them. ## Building NEFS Quant This year is also a building year for the division itself. The Directors and Seniors last year built very strong foundations for the division. ![nefs quant at rotman, nov. 2025](/uploads/cad85d75a197c68a) > NEFS Quant + Haaris Khan (Co-president of NEFS 2025/2026) at Rotman x Trinity SMF Trading Competition. Dublin, Ireland - November 2025. This year, we are expanding our engineering capability, developing our own infrastructure, and creating a more structured programme across all three tracks. Many of the systems, competitions, and resources we are introducing are being built for the first time. That gives our members an unusual opportunity: not only to participate in NEFS Quant, but also to help shape what it becomes. We want the division to become a place at Nottingham where ambitious students can seriously explore quantitative finance, meet people who share their interests, build difficult things together, and end the year having done considerably more than follow a syllabus. On behalf of all the Directors, Senior Analysts, and Chairs, welcome to NEFS Quant.