CTA Futures Trader

Job Description:

Midas Technologies is looking for a CTA Futures Trader to research, build, and manage systematic futures strategies across Chinese exchanges. You will own the full lifecycle from idea generation and backtesting through to live trading, risk management, and post-trade analysis, working closely with the founders and the quant/infra teams.

This role is ideal for someone who already has a track record in CTA / futures trading and wants a small, fast, engineering-driven shop where your P&L is directly visible and rewarded.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy Research & Development

• Design and develop systematic CTA strategies on Chinese financial and commodity futures (trend, carry, spreads, relative value, intraday MF, etc.).
• Perform data cleaning, feature engineering, and backtesting on historical futures data.
• Evaluate strategies using robust out-of-sample testing, walk-forward methods, and risk metrics (Sharpe, drawdown, turnover, capacity).

Portfolio & Risk Management

• Construct and manage a diversified portfolio of futures strategies under pre-defined risk limits.
• Decide leverage, position sizing, and risk allocation across instruments and models.
• Monitor and control exposure, drawdowns, liquidity, slippage, and transaction costs in real time.

Live Trading & Monitoring

• Oversee daily trading operations for your book: pre-open checks, intraday monitoring, end-of-day review.
• Work with engineers to ensure trading systems are stable, robust, and aligned with strategy logic.
• Diagnose and respond to unusual market behavior, execution issues, or model breakdowns.

Performance Analysis & Iteration

• Analyze live and backtest P&L to identify what is working, what is not, and where to allocate more risk.
• Continuously refine models, parameters, and execution logic based on empirical evidence.
• Document assumptions, methodology, and post-mortems for major strategy changes.

Collaboration

• Collaborate with quant researchers and developers to improve backtesting, data quality, execution, and risk tools.
• Communicate clearly with management on performance, risks, and the pipeline of new ideas.

Requirements

Experience

• 2–7 years of futures trading experience in CTA / quant / prop / hedge fund environment.
• Direct experience trading Chinese futures markets (e.g., CFFEX, SHFE, DCE, CZCE, INE, GFEX).
• Demonstrated involvement in designing or running systematic futures strategies (not just manual execution).

Skills

• Solid understanding of time-series / trend / mean-reversion concepts, portfolio construction, and risk management.
• Strong numerical and statistical thinking; comfortable interpreting backtest results and limits.
• Programming ability in Python (preferred) or similar for research and analysis; C++/Rust is a plus but not mandatory.
• Comfortable working with large datasets, futures term structures, and roll/continuous contracts.

Mindset

• Strong ownership mentality – you treat your book like your own business.
• Pragmatic and empirical: prefers data and P&L over theory.
• Able to operate in a small, lean, high-intensity team without layers of support staff.
• High integrity and respect for risk; understands that survival matters more than any single trade.

Education & Language

• Degree in a quantitative field (Math, Physics, Computer Science, Finance, Engineering or similar) preferred, but not strictly required if experience is strong.
• Fluent Mandarin required; working English is a plus.

Nice-to-Have

• Prior P&L track record as a CTA PM / sub-PM / lead researcher.
• Experience in multi-asset futures (equity index, rates, FX, commodities).
• Experience with transaction cost modelling and execution optimization.
• Experience in options / volatility strategies is a bonus.

Compensation

• Competitive base salary.
• Performance-based bonus strongly linked to risk-adjusted P&L and contribution to the platform.
• Potential for long-term upside (profit share / partnership-type economics) for high performers.