We invited Sonam Srivastava, Founder of Wright Research, for an interview with Most Popular Stories to know more about her entrepreneurial journey.
Sonam Srivastava is an experienced quantitative researcher and portfolio manager with experience in systematic strategies, hedge funds, long-short, arbitrage, and execution. Her focus is on building a research-focused business around equity factor models, tactical allocation, statistical arbitrage and applications of machine learning in finance.
1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey as an Entrepreneur
I am a Mumbai based entrepreneur who started a technology and data science-driven investment platform Wright Research a year ago. I have deep experience in quantitative trading and investments having worked at Edelweiss, HSBC, and Qplum over the past 9 years. I am an IIT Kanpur graduate and Masters in Financial Engineering from Worldquant University.
I am deeply passionate about quantitative finance and I saw ample interest in the same in the Indian markets. Indian markets are adapting to quantitative investing that is growing rapidly globally. I decided to leverage my wide experience and skill set in the same to build an exciting business in India.
2. Why did you choose entrepreneurship over a job?
For me, entrepreneurship has always been a big dream. Throughout my career, I have been passionate about learning the nuts and bolts of the business processes so that I can build it on my own. I love working in passionate and exciting teams anywhere, I decided to become an entrepreneur after the last team I worked at shut down.
I chose to start a business at this stage in my career as I was confident about building products and teams in quantitative finance and I saw an exciting opportunity to do so, seeing immense interest in the new age Indian audience for machine learning and technology-driven investment products.
3. What was the vision behind it?
We believe that following a research-based approach using statistics and machine learning to model financial processes we can build superior and stable investment products that can benefit all audiences, be it retail investors at various stages in their lives or institutions, in achieving their financial goals. A systematic approach leads to diversified opportunities, scalability, flexibility and lower costs.
4. Describe the services that you offer to your customers and in what way they are unique?
We currently offer investment management services tailored to investors with different risk profiles. Our portfolios are dynamic and perform well in all market conditions making them a one-stop for an investor to park their money. We have been delivering excellent results for close to a year and stood the test of time during the market crash this March going down only 5% when the markets crashed up to 30%. We are also doing a proof of concept testing of long-short portfolios with institutional partners.
We are unique because we are purely quantitative, all the ideas we use are researched on a large set of historical data ranging from fundamental, technical, macroeconomic and alternate. We rely on extensive statistical testing to remove any investor biases and backtesting errors. Our operations are purely technology-driven via our awesome technology partners’ smallcase.
5. What difficulties which you have faced or you are facing?
Being a technology-heavy bootstrapped startup we faced challenges in terms of setup costs which were greatly eased after we got incubated at Zone Startups India at BSE. Being in a highly regulated industry in India we face challenges in setting up legal structures through which we can offer our products to clients. We got amazing support from the smallcase in distributing our Registered Investment Advisory to clients.
An investment manager is judged by the gamut of assets they manage, we are working hard in terms of digital marketing and business development to reach more and more people and potentially partner with distributors who can help us reach domestic as well as international investors. We aim to get registered as a PMS or an AIF with SEBI to offer large scale products, for which we need funding support for setup.
6. How do you handle the pressure and manage stress?
In this journey, I have realized that the startup dream which looks so exciting before you start can be incredibly stressful. To handle work-related stress we rely on project management tools like slack, asana and google suite and we automate as much as we can to make sure that we stay on course and not miss anything.
I try to exercise regularly and do yoga to keep my body healthy and motivated. I lean into my family and friends for emotional support, meditate and invest time in motivating podcasts and books.
7. What is one strategy that you believe has helped you grow as a person/startup?
Following your passion and realizing that you can achieve great things only after you conquer your minds!
8. How is your company helping India to grow?
We are part of the technology and machine learning-driven FinTech revolution in India. We are helping Indians realize that they can make their investments work for them using smarter products. We are bringing robust quantitative strategies to the Indian masses and educating them about their efficacy.
9. In your opinion what are the keys to success?
Learning from failures and not giving up. Keeping your mind and body healthy.
10. What advice would you give to someone starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur?
Work hard, persevere and take care of yourself. Success hardly ever comes instantly and the world is full of good people and support if you look at things constructively.
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