Students

I found out quite quickly during my studies that continuing the natural path of becoming a PhD was not for me. I really liked the content, as both physics and mathematics basically presented complicated puzzles that I wanted to solve, but there were a couple of specific things about a PhD which really irked me. Spending four years -a long time!- on a single topic, mostly by yourself, with relatively little reward for doing great as opposed to scraping by; it had a lot of things that I really did not want in a job. Instead, I flipped them around: what jobs are out there that are fast-paced, very diverse, team-based, where there is a clear feedback loop and you can get a lot of responsibility fast if you do very well? With these job traits to look for, I landed on two possible career paths: strategy consulting, and trading. I sent out some messages to members of my study association who were working in those fields, and after a lot of chats with them I was convinced I should at least try my hand at getting into trading. Now I am coming up to four years as a trader at Flow Traders and I'm still very happy being here.

Formula 1 seasons last more than twenty races, but championship battles often are predictable surprisingly early. After only two races, fans already speculate about who will become world champion. But how much information do the first races actually contain?

If I asked you to invent a list of 100 random expenses for a fake company, you would likely try to make the numbers look as "random" as possible. You would sprinkle in some numbers starting with a 4, some with a 7, and perhaps a few starting with a 9. In your mind, randomness implies equality. However, doing this would result in you being caught rather soon. This is because real accounting data follows a hidden, logarithmic rhythm known as Benford’s Law.

The concept of a martingale originates in the world of gambling, but the idea extends far beyond the roulette or poker table. Imagine a simple game: you start with €0, and in each round you toss a fair coin. If you win, you gain €1; if you lose, you lose €1. Each round is completely independent of the previous one; what happened before does not influence the outcome of the next toss.