Women In Data Science

Leda Braga is the founder and CEO of Systematica Investments, a hedge fund that uses data science-driven models to support its investment strategies. Leda was born and raised in Brazil and found her way into the financial sector after getting her PhD in engineering and spending several years as an academic. Her financial career started with seven years in investment banking at JP Morgan and then she joined the hedge fund startup BlueCrest in 2000. She explains that while her funds did very well during the 2008 financial crisis, the time felt like an existential crisis because you didn’t know if the major investment banks were going to survive. But she said it was a formative time and she learned many lessons. Several years after the financial crisis, she spun off her own firm, Systematica Investments focused on systematic trading.Leda explains that systematic investment management is data science applied to investment. The systematic approach makes the investment process less reliant on the random nature of f