198: Christina Qi – Dorm room start-up defies odds, rises as large-scale quant fund

In her early-20’s, after graduating from MIT, Christina Qi and two classmates; Luca Lin and Jonathan Wang—who had collectively been trading futures from a campus dorm room—founded Domeyard. It was 2012, and Domeyard was to be one of the few high frequency trading hedge funds…

As Christina states during the interview, “By all means we should have failed,” given the three of them had little trading experience and minimal insight to the hedge fund industry. Not to mention, the three had almost no money, so Domeyard is also one of the few hedge funds that went out and raised money from VC’s (such as Softbank and a RenTech co-founder) as a necessary means to launch.

Now eight years on, the Boston-based fund is well-established and well-passed the start-up phase. Domeyard trades thousands of times daily, sometimes exceeding 10,000 trades across various futures products. And during its single biggest day this year, the fund did turnover in excess of $7-billion dollars.