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A group of Harvard-trained physicists and astrophysicists are trying their hand at running a hedge fund in the US. Rather aptly they've called their firm Financial Labs and launched their fund at the end of last month. The five Harvard graduates set up their firm in July last year. Since then they have been developing a technological infrastructure that they feel differentiates them from other funds. Aaron Sokasian, co-founder of Financial Labs, says: "Our approach is extremely objective and numerically based. We don't really use any kind of discretion."
The firm has been running a managed foreign exchange account since January this year. "The forex market interests us for obvious reasons," says Sokasian. "It's continuous, the liquidity is very deep and it's something we can trade, I think, at an advantage to most other people just because we have the technological infrastructure to allow us to connect up to multiple banks."
This ability to connect to multiple banks means Financial Labs can get extremely tight spreads, explains Sokasian. "Instead of going to a single bank where spreads might be three to four pips we can potentially connect up to several banks and have that reduced down to one or two or potentially zero pip spreads," he says.