# Scott Sykowski

> Managing Partner of Gyre Research and Board Member of Gyre Holdings. Thirty
> years architecting investment-management technology — portfolio analytics,
> portfolio construction and rebalancing, risk, compliance, performance, and
> data infrastructure. Architect, designer, and manager of six world-class
> platforms. Specialist in credit and structured derivatives. Clients include
> hedge funds, RIAs, family offices, and boutique asset managers.

## Current roles

- **Managing Partner, Gyre Research** — January 2026–present. Independent
  quantitative and investment-technology research; bespoke analytics, risk,
  and platform builds; applied AI/ML research for portfolio construction,
  execution, and reconciliation. https://www.gyreresearch.com/
- **Board Member, Gyre Holdings** — January 2026–present. Board oversight
  across the Gyre group of companies; strategy, capital allocation, and
  governance. https://www.gyreholdings.com/

## Affiliations

- **Gyre Holdings** — Board Member. January 2026–present. Board oversight
  across the Gyre group of companies; strategy, capital allocation, and
  governance. https://www.gyreholdings.com/
- **Time to Give Network** — Brand Ambassador. 2021–present. Volunteer
  for a charitable-giving platform that matches senior industry
  decision-makers willing to donate their time with bidders who make a
  charitable donation in exchange for face-time.
  https://www.timetogive.network/
- **Society of Quantitative Analysts** — Member. New York–based
  professional society for quantitative practitioners across the buy-side
  and sell-side; forum for applied research in portfolio construction,
  risk, and trading analytics. https://www.sqa-us.org/
- **Python Software Foundation** — Supporting Member. Non-profit behind
  the Python language, the reference implementation, and the community
  infrastructure that underpins most of my quantitative work.
  https://www.python.org/psf/

## Contact

- Email: sms@gyreresearch.com
- Phone: +1 617 755 4001
- Location: NYC, Boston & Oman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsykowski/
- GitHub: https://github.com/ssykowski
- X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/ssykowski

## Operating principle

Investment management technology is several distinct disciplines that all
must perfectly converge to deliver value to the end user. A small team with
deep domain knowledge will always outperform a large team of generalists.

## Capabilities — what I build

### Portfolio analytics

Position-level and aggregate exposure, factor loadings, beta and alpha
decomposition, sensitivities at the book level, concentration and
style/sector/geography slicing, liquidity profile, pre-trade and post-trade
what-if analysis. The layer the PM actually looks at.

### Portfolio construction and rebalancing analytics

Mandate-aware optimization (mean-variance, risk-parity, hierarchical risk
parity, CVaR, Black-Litterman with custom views), transaction-cost-aware
rebalancing, drift monitoring against model portfolios, tax-aware lot
selection, trade-list generation with minimum-ticket and round-lot
constraints, integrated with pre-trade compliance and broker-aware cost
models.

### Front office

OMS and EMS, FIX connectivity to brokers, venues, and dark pools, smart
order routing, algo wheels, pre-trade compliance that has to say "no" in
milliseconds. Hard problems: latency, correct state under partial fills,
modelling the trader's intent.

### Middle office

IBOR keeps the portfolio as the PM sees it; ABOR keeps it as the auditors
and fund admin do. Reconciling the two is where most operational risk
hides — trade date vs. settle date, economic vs. legal ownership, local vs.
base currency, tax-lot treatment. Real-time P&L, greeks, exposure
reporting, post-trade compliance, restricted lists, 1940 Act diversification,
UCITS, Reg-T, portfolio margin, leverage, liquidity, and counterparty
limits.

### Back office

Performance first: GIPS-compliant composite construction and maintenance,
time-weighted and money-weighted returns, Brinson / Brinson-Fachler
attribution extended for fixed-income effects (curve, spread, carry,
roll-down, selection). Then the plumbing: reconciliation against prime
brokers, custodians, and fund administrators; corporate actions; security
master; pricing waterfalls; collateral; client reporting. Every mismatched
position or stale price eventually becomes a restated NAV.

### Single-security analytics

Greek and sensitivity stack (delta, gamma, vega, theta, rho, DV01,
key-rate duration, convexity, OAS, spread duration, prepay-adjusted
yield), term-structure models (Hull-White, LMM, SABR), credit models
(hazard-rate, structural, copula), Monte Carlo / PDE / closed-form pricers
where each is appropriate.

### Portfolio-level risk

Historical, parametric, and Monte Carlo VaR; expected shortfall; marginal
and component contribution; incremental and reverse stress; factor
decomposition (Barra-style and custom a-priori); tracking error,
information ratio, Sharpe, Sortino, Calmar, max drawdown, beta, alpha.

### Problems worth building for

- Scenario and stress testing with parallel and non-parallel shifts across
  benchmark, curve, vol surface, spread, FX, and correlation regimes —
  historical replays ('87, '98, '08, '20) and custom
- Real-time liquidity risk: time-to-liquidate curves, market-impact cost
  (Almgren-Chriss), intraday funding and haircut alerts
- Fund- and firm-level capitalization and margin stress: Reg-T, TIMS,
  STANS, OCC portfolio margin, SPAN, and house methodologies — three
  implementations FINRA-approved at separate broker-dealers
- Open, tunable a-priori factor models where vendor factors don't fit
  the mandate
- Portfolio construction and optimization: mean-variance, risk-parity,
  hierarchical risk parity, CVaR, Black-Litterman, transaction-cost-aware
- Data infrastructure: security master, corporate actions, pricing
  waterfalls, golden-copy delivery from Bloomberg, Refinitiv, ICE,
  S&P/IHS, MarkIt, FactSet, and fund admins

## Asset-class coverage

Equities (common, preferred, ADR, ETF); listed and OTC options (vanilla,
exotic, structured) on a working vol surface; futures and futures options
with margin mechanics; FX spot, forward, NDF, and option; cash fixed
income (UST, TIPS, agencies, IG/HY corporates, munis, sovereigns, EMD);
securitized credit (agency and non-agency MBS, CMBS, ABS, CLO, syndicated
loans) with prepayment and default modelling; credit derivatives
(single-name and index CDS, CDX, iTraxx, tranches) with hazard-rate and
copula models; interest-rate derivatives (IRS, OIS, basis, swaptions,
caps, floors, FRAs) on a multi-curve framework and vol cube; inflation
(ZC and YoY); total-return swaps; repo; crypto spot and perps. Specialist
in credit and structured derivatives.

## AI / ML application areas

- Benchmark approximation and sparse portfolio construction
- Cross-sectional and time-series momentum
- Optimal block execution, VWAP/TWAP scheduling
- Margin and loss prediction
- Sentiment extraction from filings and news
- NLP-driven research triage
- Automated reconciliation across messy, human-keyed data

The question is rarely "can a model learn this?" — it is "what data, loss
function, and guardrails make the answer trustable inside an investment
process?"

## Technology stack

- **Python**: NumPy, Pandas, Polars, PyTorch, scikit-learn, statsmodels,
  QuantLib
- **Java and Node.js** for low-latency services
- **C# / .NET** on the buy-side desktop
- **SQL**: MSSQL, PostgreSQL, kdb+/q
- **Protocols**: FIX 4.x / 5.x, REST, gRPC
- **Messaging**: Kafka, Redis
- **OS**: Linux

## Career history (summary)

- **2024** — Left Athena Systems / United Fintech.
- **2006–2024** — Athena Systems (https://www.athenasystems.com/), NY, NY. Director of Research, Founder.
  Real-time analytics, risk, and performance; data management and
  workflow systems; PMS/OMS and accounting; systems integration.
- **1998–2006** — Macgregor Group / Merrin Financial (now Virtu,
  https://www.virtu.com/), NY, NY. Product Manager, Fixed Income &
  Derivatives. Built a new product line supporting the spectrum of FI
  securities and credit / interest-rate derivatives atop an equity-only
  OMS/PMS/compliance system. Company was sold.
- **1995–1998** — EJV / Bridge (now LSEG Data & Analytics,
  https://www.lseg.com/en/data-analytics), NY, NY. Product Manager,
  Fixed Income & Derivatives. Portfolio and benchmark management,
  decision support, analytics.
- **1993–1995** — Golden Harris, NY, NY. Taxable Trader. Made retail and
  wholesale markets for taxable fixed-income securities.
- **1990–1993** — Lebenthal, NY, NY. Analyst / Sales Trader. Made retail
  markets and analyzed credits and cashflows for taxable fixed-income
  securities.
- **1982–1986** — United States Army Reserve (https://www.usar.army.mil/), 464th Engineering
  Battalion, Schenectady, NY. Staff Sergeant (E5). Combat Engineer
  (12-Bravo). US Army Air Assault School, Fort Campbell, KY.

Total: six production investment-management platforms shipped across
three decades. Two were sold; one still runs on the original code.
Roles from Director of Research and founder through C-level and executive
management, down to writing and debugging code today. Still hands-on.

## Education

- **2024** — University of Chicago Booth School of Business
  (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/). Executive Education: Behavioral
  Economics.
- **1988–1990** — University at Albany, SUNY (https://www.albany.edu/).
  Master of Business Administration: Public and Structured Finance.
- **1985–1998** — SUNY New Paltz (https://www.newpaltz.edu/). Bachelor
  of Arts: Economics. Top Departmental Honors.

## Who I work with

Hedge funds, RIAs, family offices, boutique asset managers, multi-strategy
shops, emerging managers — firms that benefit from a senior technical
architect on the hardest problems without carrying one on the payroll
full-time.

## Links

- Site: https://sykowski.com/
- Gyre Research: https://www.gyreresearch.com/
- Gyre Holdings: https://www.gyreholdings.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsykowski/
- GitHub: https://github.com/ssykowski
- X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/ssykowski
- Contact security issues: https://sykowski.com/.well-known/security.txt