Dr. Simon Christofides
Professor Nicos Christofides
Professor Nicos Christofides
CEO / founder
Simon worked at leading investment banks in quantitative, strategy, risk and trading roles with several decades of experience in the practical and theoretical aspects of quantitative finance.
From 1996, he worked at Bankers Trust in the quantitative analyst team, focusing on interest rate derivatives. In 2000, he joined Goldma
CEO / founder
Simon worked at leading investment banks in quantitative, strategy, risk and trading roles with several decades of experience in the practical and theoretical aspects of quantitative finance.
From 1996, he worked at Bankers Trust in the quantitative analyst team, focusing on interest rate derivatives. In 2000, he joined Goldman Sachs, where he ran the European trading on credit index (iTraxx) and iTraxx derivatives. Prior to his trading position, Simon worked for the global strategy group where he designed and implement the bank's first globally integrated bond and credit-derivatives risk platform.
Simon moved to Singapore in 2009 focusing on his work in combinatorics and machine learning, specifically in the use of classification trees and evolutionary learning. In 2010, he founded Rekiki, providing an academic level of private research applied to finance, medical prognosis/diagnosis and image compression.
Simon is a co-founder of quantitative research company, SW7 Research, and Chorus Capital, a London-based private debt manager, to which he serves as a non-executive board member.
Simon has published academic papers on topics ranging from optimal corporate tax structures to incomplete financial markets.
Simon holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Finance from Imperial College, a Masters in Statistics from Cambridge University and a BSc in Mathematics from Imperial College.
Professor Nicos Christofides
Professor Nicos Christofides
Professor Nicos Christofides
Consulting Head of Research
Nicos was a Professor of Operations Research at Imperial College, and later, a Professor of Quantitative Finance. He became Professor Emeritus after retiring in 2009.
Nicos is perhaps best known for his work in combinatorial optimization and graph theory, an area where practical problems are often so complex tha
Consulting Head of Research
Nicos was a Professor of Operations Research at Imperial College, and later, a Professor of Quantitative Finance. He became Professor Emeritus after retiring in 2009.
Nicos is perhaps best known for his work in combinatorial optimization and graph theory, an area where practical problems are often so complex that they cannot be solved optimally, and precursors to many modern forms of artificial intelligence. One of the most intensively studied of such problems is the Travelling Salesman Problem, where, in 1975, he produced a bounding heuristic called the ‘The Three-Halves Bound’. It is now known as ‘The Christofides Algorithm’ and, as of 2020, is still the problem's best approximation.
In 1990, Nicos founded and, headed for 18 years, the Centre for Quantitative Finance (CQF) within Imperial College. The CQF was one of the largest and most highly respected research groups in finance in the world and was fully funded by a large number of distinguished financial institutions and corporates.
After retiring from CQF, Nicos's research concentrated purely on advanced machine learning techniques with particular emphasis on algorithms with provably optimal behavior.
Nicos spent nearly 50 years at Imperial College, with academic sabbaticals at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Universities. He wrote 4 books and over 200 papers on optimization and quantitative finance.
Tragically, Nicos passed away in 2019 and his work is the foundation of Rekiki's research.
Dr. Alexander Christofides
Professor Nicos Christofides
Dr. Alexander Christofides
Consulting Head of Development
Alexander is CEO of Network Models R&D Ltd, a collaborative research group based in London.
From 1998 to 2008 Alexander was a Senior Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Quantitative Finance (CQF) at Imperial College, and was the Scientific Director responsible for the stochastic asset-price mod
Consulting Head of Development
Alexander is CEO of Network Models R&D Ltd, a collaborative research group based in London.
From 1998 to 2008 Alexander was a Senior Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Quantitative Finance (CQF) at Imperial College, and was the Scientific Director responsible for the stochastic asset-price modelling and optimization components of EUROSIGNAL, a multi-year project of the European Union on company valuation.
Alexander has consulted on a variety of valuation and planning problems, including the pricing and risk management of exotic derivatives and, for a multi-national oil firm, the valuation of oil field exploration and production projects. He also works on forecasting and portfolio optimization problems for hedge-funds, delivering fund management software.
Alexander has published papers on modelling of asset prices, forecasting, and is a co-author of a forthcoming book on mathematical finance. His current areas of research include similarity and clustering techniques for sparse data and zero-error image compression.
Alexander is a co-founder of SW7 Research Ltd, a quantitative financial research company.
Alexander holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Finance from Imperial College and a Masters in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.