The JPMorgan quant with an award winning alcohol side hustle
Wherever you work in quantitative finance, the work can have a tendency to get repetitive. On the buy side, funds offer a number of quirky benefits to compensate. Steve Cohen's hedge fund Point72 allows quants to work on data analysis for his baseball team, the New York Mets, while the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has created a scientific R&D lab for its quants to play with.
In banks, those kinds of opportunities are fewer and further between. Quants must find their own side hustles. One such person doing this is London based quantitative strategist ED Lovjit Thukral who has been establishing a vodka business with his wife since 2021.
Thukral's acumen extends from the quantitative to the artisanal, with his brand, Desi Daru, winning an award from the American Distilling Institute last month. While he and his wife appear the only two employees for the moment, Thukral is hiring: he wants a London based brand ambassador.
He may be on the verge of breaking into another beverage market too. On the UK's Companies House, he has been appointed as a director of Mohit Coffee Limited, which was incorporated in mid-May. At present, his wife is not attached as a director to this endeavour.
Prior to working at JPMorgan, Thukral was a quant at a private hedge fund and Deutsche Bank, he was also educated for his PhD in financial mathematics by 2023's quant of the year Helyette Geman.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: alex.mcmurray@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
