Denis Dariotis, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of cryptocurrency-focused trading software firm GoQuant, remembers the constraints and pressures of maximizing his trading portfolio while he was still in the third grade at school.
“I remember telling my teachers I had to take 10 minutes out of class to check my portfolio when the market opened and closed,” Dariotis said in an interview.
The child trading prodigy recalled how a teacher wanted to see his computer screen and what he was trading. But he shut the laptop saying, “No, I’m afraid that’s private” — an interesting presage of the crypto-focused dark pool app Dariotis released just last month.
Dariotis grew up in Montreal, where his earliest memory of the trading world was being attracted to the symbols flashing green and red on the CNBC morning show his parents had on in the background. It was only a matter of time until he made the connection between the tickers on the TV screen and the money in his piggybank.
From his early days at school, audaciously following the investment thesis of Warren Buffet, the next logical step was getting into computer programming. “When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I took an interest in computer programming, starting with basic web development languages, and then evolving into Python and C++,” he recalls.
Listening to the way Dariotis tells it, his evolution toward building trading infrastructure seems the most natural thing in the world. By the age of 13 he realized he was spending too much time scanning a ton of datasets, and wasn’t there some way to use his computing knowhow to automate that process? That way, he could spend more time on researching trading strategies and getting alpha.
Having been hitherto unaware of quant trading, Dariotis began back-testing strategies and researching different elements of portfolio construction, optimization, risk management and “really getting into the weeds of every element of how quant markets operate.”
It wasn’t long before a breakthrough came: At the ripe old age of 15, Dariotis says he basically licensed his strategies and started consulting for a major Canadian bank, which was his first main client. This was followed by a few other investment managers. Later, at a trading and data science conference in New York, a large hedge fund tried to hire Dariotis on the spot.
“But then they were like, ‘Hang on a second, how old are you?’ And then I was like, ‘I’m 15,’ and they sort of freaked out.”
This was also around the time Dariotis started looking at crypto. The initial realization was how retail-orientated crypto markets are, lacking any real institutional-grade infrastructure. Crypto suffered severely from having fragmented liquidity spread across many venues: centralized and decentralized exchanges, OTC desks.