Barak Capital Market Making

Barak Capital Market Making is the market making and algorithmic trading arm of Barak Capital, an Israeli investment group that started out as a proprietary trading shop with a dozen manual traders. The group moved into market making in 2008 and launched its own latency-sensitive trading system in 2010, which is what today’s business is built on. The firm is headquartered in the Shalom Tower in Tel Aviv and opened a second office in Amsterdam in 2021 under its Dutch entity, Barak Capital Market Making B.V., a MiFID II investment firm licensed by the Dutch regulator, the AFM.

Barak is an official market maker on several exchanges worldwide, quoting continuous two-sided markets in futures and options on FX, fixed income, ETFs, equities and indices. It is also an official ETF market maker for a number of ETF issuers. Among its European memberships is Cboe Europe Derivatives (CEDX), which the Amsterdam entity joined at the end of 2022 to quote European equity index derivatives, and the group has been active on Euronext’s benchmark indices since Euronext opened up to Israeli trading firms in 2015. The Amsterdam office also runs an energy desk that trades and makes markets in European power, gas and carbon derivatives.

Everything runs on in-house technology: a proprietary low-latency platform on co-located servers in the main data centres, with kernel-bypass networking and nanosecond-level time synchronisation. Developers, quant researchers, traders, IT, compliance and risk all sit in one flat structure, and the firm describes its culture as collaborative and driven by technology.

What Barak Trades

• Index and equity derivatives
  Futures and options on European and global indices and single stocks, including on Cboe Europe Derivatives and Euronext.
• ETFs
  Official market maker for several ETF issuers, quoting the funds on exchange against their underlying baskets.
• FX and fixed income
  Futures and options on currencies and rates across Europe and the Americas.
• Energy commodities
  Power, natural gas and carbon derivatives, traded from the Amsterdam desk.

Culture and Benefits

Barak positions itself as a technology firm first: traders are expected to program (Python and C++ come up in every trading job description) and to work directly with the engineers who build the algorithms. Senior traders are explicitly asked to recruit and mentor juniors, so newcomers get a lot of desk-side coaching. In Amsterdam the firm offers highly skilled migrant visa support and help with the 30% ruling, breakfast and a daily meal allowance at the office in Amsterdam Zuid, gym access, travel reimbursement or a Lease-a-Bike plan, and regular team events. In Tel Aviv the package includes a daily meals card, fitness classes and social events.

Hiring at Barak

Entry-level trading hires go through the Junior Trader role in Tel Aviv. Juniors run the algorithmic trading on the desk, monitor and reconcile positions through the session, do post-trade analysis on the strategies and help the quant traders research new ones, and act as first line of defence when a system misbehaves. The firm asks for a degree in a STEM field or in business or economics, strong analytical and math skills, a genuine interest in markets and good English. Amsterdam currently hires experienced people only: senior quant traders with five or more years in derivatives at a market making firm, energy traders with a track record in power, gas or carbon, and low-latency software and infrastructure engineers.

The selection process is short and runs in four steps:

• Application
  Submit your CV through the form on the careers page.
• Phone screening
  A telephone interview at a time of your choosing, covering your background and motivation.
• Skills and knowledge assessment
  An in-office test of your quantitative and market knowledge.
• Final interview
  A conversation with the hiring manager.

Candidates describe the interviews as a walk through the CV followed by technical questions on trading and on the strategies you have worked with, with the whole process sometimes wrapped up within a few days. Rated difficulty sits around the middle of the scale. For the junior role, expect mental arithmetic, probability and market-intuition questions in the assessment, and be ready to explain how a market maker earns the spread and manages its inventory.