Tickmill: Bridging academia-industry gap

Tickmill’s first data science competition among university students has helped bridge the gap between academia and the industry, head of Quantitative Research, Chariton Christou said during the award ceremony of this year’s winners.

Ten different teams of 15 local university students had the opportunity to experiment with real world financial time series data to “predict the future” in the context of Tickmill’s forecasting challenge that was completed this month.

This was the broker’s first forecasting challenge and one of the few competitions in Cyprus that deals with real world data in the financial markets.

Students had to predict a financial asset using a number of inputs they were provided with which should have helped them predict the target variable. Inputs are described as the pricing of other financial instruments that are available to be traded and are correlated with the target value.

The teams were selected from 40 registrations from various state and private universities across the island.

Most of them, 36, were from the state University of Cyprus, two from the state university of technology (Tepak), one from University of Nicosia and another from the European University of Cyprus.

Of them, the three best submissions were awarded cash prizes after they were graded on ‘improvement’ which means the difference between the model itself and the furthest away model.

The first team, consisting of PhD candidate Dimosthenis Stefanidis, Sophia Loizidou and Nikolas Petrou from the University of Cyprus, was awarded €5,000 for achieving 47 per cent improvement.

UCY MA student Marios Mettas came second and won €3,000 as his model achieved 26 per cent improvement, while Theodoros Solomou and Kyriakos Georgiou came in third with 20 per cent improvement and won €2,000.

Speaking at the competition’s award ceremony which took place at the Stelios Ioannou Learning Resource Centre at the University of Cyprus, Tickmill’s Chariton Christou said the process gave students who are considering a career in quantitative analysis an insight into how brokers function.

“The students were exposed to solving real world data problems and had access to previously unobtainable yet realistic financial data,” which was the result of Tickmill’s work in 2021, Christou explained.

The competition also allowed brokers, including Tickmill, to single out possible future employees or internship candidates among the university students, he added.

“As a team, we wanted to launch this kind of competition a long time ago. It allows us to identify future talent in the data science field.”

For his part, the head of the maths department at the University of Cyprus, Constantinos Fokianos, congratulated the students and highlighting the importance of data science in today’s world he described it as “a modern interdisciplinary field that will benefit the community”.

He also mentioned the English language taught master’s in data science at the university which aims to offer a strong understanding of basic and advanced methods in statistical inference, machine learning, data visualisation, data mining and business analytics. According to Fokianos, the programme is a collaboration of the Business and Public Administration, Computer Science, and Mathematics and Statistics departments.

After the ceremony, students had the opportunity to discuss with Tickmill’s team and receive input on their models over an informal dinner.

Tickmill's head of Quantitative Research Chariton Christou

Students receive feedback during informal dinner

Founded in 2014, Tickmill is a trading name of Tickmill Europe Ltd, a member of Tickmill Group, which is authorised and regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC). It has over 250 employees globally including a newly formed six-member data science team of mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists and engineers called the Quant team.

The Quant team is responsible for managing the trading risk of the company at any given time. The team’s experts mine, analyse and interpret financial data and even predict the markets. According to Christou, the ultimate target is to be able to make accurate predictions at various frequencies using modern machine learning models.

Tickmill has received more than 20 awards in the past five years. Its offices are in Limassol, London and Tallinn.