Christina Qi Databento CEO Joins Rebellion Research Board of Advisors
Christina Qi is the CEO of Databento, an on-demand market data platform. She formerly founded Domeyard LP, a hedge fund focused on high frequency trading (HFT) that traded up to $7.1 billion USD per day. Failing to earn a job offer after a Wall Street internship, Christina started Domeyard from her dorm room with $1000 in savings, in 2012. Her fund was a tiny minnow amongst the tigers of the hedge fund world, but after Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys came out in 2014 and HFT firms hid from the spotlight, Domeyard accidentally found itself in the center of the ring. Over the next decade, her company’s story was featured on the front page of Forbes and Nikkei, and quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, and the Financial Times as a result of the controversy and fascination with HFT. By a series of accidents, Christina became a voice in her industry, contributing to the World Economic Forum’s research on AI in finance, guest lecturing at dozens of universities, and teaching Domeyard’s case study at Harvard Business School. She is grateful to be able to open up about her mistakes, and to help people turn failures into opportunities. After a decade, Domeyard winded down gracefully after facing increased headwinds to its strategies, scalability, and operational resources.
Christina with Exodus Point’s Peter Cotton & Rebellion Research’s Alexander Fleiss
No amount of therapy has quashed Christina’s impostor syndrome, but she will always be proud of her non-profit volunteer work. Christina is a member of the MIT Corporation Development Committee, a standing committee of the MIT Corporation (the board of trustees), charged with raising critical financial resources to uphold the Institute’s academic rigor, promote student life, and advance global initiatives. From 2018 to 2023, she co-chaired the Development Committee and eventually became Co-Chair of the Board of Invest in Girls, bringing financial literacy education to underserved populations across the US. Christina also sits on the Board of Directors of The Financial Executives Alliance (FEA) Hedge Fund Group, drove entrepreneurship efforts at the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association (MIT SBAA), and served on the U.S. Non-Profit Boards Committee of 100 Women in Finance. Although “X Under X” lists are a gimmick, she’ll admit that Forbes 30 Under 30 made a positive impact on her life by giving her a community – friends who dragged her out of bed during the lowest days of her life. Christina holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Science from MIT and is a CAIA Charterholder.
Christina wrote a book about her many hedge fund mistakes, but the book is facing headwinds due to privacy concerns. If it ever gets published, you can sign up for a notification here: https://financesnake.substack.com/p/coming-soon.
To sign up for Databento’s market data (early access): www.databento.com
If you have questions, feel free to Tweet me: @christinaqi
Come meet Christina at the Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan 2024 Future of Finance Conference
MY UPCOMING BOOK (ON HOLD)
A PREVIEW FOR THOSE WHO ARE CURIOUS:
THE FINANCE SNAKE
Hedge fund (n): an investing group that pools capital from wealthy individuals and institutions, employing speculative techniques in the hope of obtaining large capital gains.
In other words, we make billionaires even richer.
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In the competitive hedge fund world, your return on investment, or alpha, determines whether you’re the next great legend – inducted into the Billionaires’ Club with the likes of Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, and Jim Simons – or the next laughing stock of the universe, ending up broke, in prison, or in a slow, elongated downward spiral.
Nearly 100% of hedge funds end up as laughing stocks: failing miserably, prior to even launching. Out of the few funds that manage to launch, only a tiny handful of founders perform well enough to pass the five-year mark. These lucky founders are known as hedge fund veterans.
Out of these veteran funds, almost none of them were launched by college-aged founders.
I am a veteran hedge fund founder who started from a college dorm room in 2012. I traded up to $7.1 billion dollars per day, made the front page of Forbes, and earned more money in an hour than my parents made in a year. I was also interrogated by the FBI, sued, evicted, and ran into my fair share of trouble. As we made mistake after mistake, I became the exact persona that I mocked and despised throughout my career: the latest laughing stock on Wall Street. There were times when I went home crying, questioning why I chose such a competitive and meaningless path. There were many troubled nights, where I wondered if the police would arrest me in the morning.
I grew up in a small town in northern Utah, far away from the pits of Wall Street. My parents, teachers, and role models always taught me to do something good for this world; to serve my community and the underprivileged. And yet, despite my desire to make a difference, I ended up in high frequency trading, or HFT, where I was contributing absolutely nothing to society. As I gained prominence in my industry, the cognitive dissonance grew and grew, until everything blew up. I became a Wall Street sellout – a finance snake – expanding the fortunes of the richest people in the world.
I wrote this memoir because people deserve to know the truth about starting a hedge fund today, about the controversial practice of high frequency trading, about life at one of the most elite colleges in the world, and about what happened to my fund, Domeyard LP.
I am grateful to the pioneers of the financial industry, who gave me every opportunity to succeed.
To the next generation of young leaders in finance: You will inherit wealth beyond your wildest dreams, from a legacy system that may not always make sense.
Just know that there is so much more to life than chasing alpha.
If you’d like to be notified of my book’s release date, enter your email here: https://financesnake.substack.com/p/coming-soon. I promise to keep emails to a bare minimum.
