"HSE teaches you how to do your best to make it to the top"
A BSc graduate of Faculty of Economics and MSc graduate of ICEF, Artem Gudov chose to work in business and was successfully leading the investment departments of such giants as OZON and M.Video—Eldorado. Currently a Chief Financial Officer at Dubai-headquartered Eqvilent Group, Artem shares why he quit banking for industry, why the future belongs to marketplaces, and how to thrive on high-frequency trading.
How did you choose your university?
I studied at Gymnasium No.2 with a focus on humanities, in the city of Sarov, Nizhniy Novgorod Region. While a school student, I was a frequent participant in academic contests as diverse as mathematics, geography, English and astronomy. I had a wide range of interests, but my biggest passion at the time was mathematics and economics. The choice of my degree therefore came naturally.
My Gold Medal for exceptional academic performance made me eligible for the fast-track admission to college. During my final school year I won a prize in the Moscow Mathematics Contest held by the Moscow State University Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics that became my pass to any Moscow-based university of economics, mathematics or physics. I went to Open Days, talked with students, and chose HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences as my best-fit option. I have never doubted my choice.
Did your parents try to influence your choice?
No. It was completely up to me. My father is a radiophysicist at a state-owned enterprise in Sarov and my mom is an economist. Economics and finance seemed a promising career track. I had good knowledge of economics, and my parents said they’d be supporting me in every possible way. Dad liked the English language part of economic studies. As to my English skills, they were advanced enough at the time, because my school taught an advanced course in English.
An expectations vs. reality question. What was it like to find yourself in a big-city college after school?
I mentally prepared myself for four tough years of study at a serious school, but at the same time I was looking forward to studying exciting mathematics and economics courses. HSE is known for its high academic standards. Many of the people that I met there are highly intelligent, versatile personalities, and many became my good friends. My first two years were the toughest. I was studying really hard to manage the high volume of academic work while trying to adjust to my new life in the capital. I was new to Moscow and had almost no acquaintances there. But I managed to go through it, I began to communicate a lot with other students and teachers. So a new social circle appeared, which helped me adapt and get used to the new life.
What helped you make it to the top? You were even nominated for the Golden HSE Award “Silver Nestling” scholarship.
There were three things, I believe. First, my good knowledge of economics, mathematics and English, which I owe to my school teachers, academic contests and private classes. Second, my diligence. The academic workload is high at HSE, and the only way to cope is by going the extra mile and studying hard for the exams. You won’t be likely to make progress by relying solely on your previous knowledge, as there will be lots of new information to be digested.
It takes having to study hard every day at HSE, not only on the eve of exams, to pass them with top grades
And last but not least, communication with teachers and senior students. Apart from interesting conversations, they were my source of hints about things to be considered in the first place, which of the courses required one hundred percent attendance, and which electives and non-core courses seemed most interesting. When you are a student of a top university, you need to be prepared for large amounts of information that need to be assimilated in a timely manner and, in parallel, finding time for personal life and career. You’ve got to be able to get your priorities right. HSE teaches you how to do your best to make it to the top.
How was the career side of your life?
I concentrated on my studies and decided not to work elsewhere than at HSE until I attained my bachelor’s. I was giving private lessons and working at HSE Entrepreneurship Laboratory. The latter involved me in Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a very exciting project that involved a hefty amount of data analysis. It was a good test and an add-on to my knowledge of math, stats and econometrics, and it allowed for paper publishing and speaking at conferences. I enjoyed doing that research. I think it’s great that HSE gives access to such opportunities and I was able to use them. I presented my research at conferences in the USA and China, worked on summer school projects in the Netherlands and Germany, and contributed to several research seminars and conferences in Russia.
Also, I competed in business case championships in parallel, mostly as a member of my university team, to become more experienced with applied business problem solving. Although we have never won first place, we made it to the finals with several business case championships. They proved a perfect means to build skills such as teamwork, data structuring, analytics presentation and elevator pitch. Since most of the business cases I was dealing with were related to consulting, I started to view this industry as my potential career. I did two internships, one at BCG, where I worked on one consulting project, and the other at Accenture, where I worked on several ones. In my 4th year of bachelor’s studies, when I decided to pursue Corporate Finance as my major, I became more interested in finance and decided to do a master’s in Financial Economics at ICEF.
What contributed to your academic achievements? Why didn’t you choose a career in academia?
For a student to become interested in pursuing research, there should be talented supervisors, captivating courses, and opportunities to engage in research that is absorbing and involves the brightest minds of science. I was lucky in this regard, as HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences offers them all. It is of great benefit that students have the opportunity to contribute their knowledge to large-scale research projects on a par with experienced researchers, just as we did at our laboratory.
In my 4th year, when the time came for me to choose between an academic career and a corporate one, I opted for the latter. Even though I have an analytical mind and have always enjoyed academic research, I was keen on seeing the applied outcomes. Science uses teaching and research to influence our surroundings only indirectly, whereas a more tangible impact can be assured through working in corporations or starting your own business.
Why did you choose to do a master’s at ICEF?
When faced with the question ‘Should I do a master's degree’, one thing I was sure about was that I wanted a corporate career. Unlike some of my classmates who started full-time jobs at reputable companies while still being students, I decided to take my time and first do a master’s and a couple of internships before finally deciding on the line of business to be in. One option was to do the master’s at my faculty, but ICEF’s English-taught Master’s Programme in Financial Economics, with advanced finance courses and international standards of teaching, looked like a better choice.
ICEF is a strong brand and enjoys recognition among employers and research community
I was drawn to its strong focus in finance, classes in English and international lecturers, holding PhD degrees. Also, it was appealing that graduates of the faculty received a certificate confirming the programme's consistency with the quality standards of the London School of Economics. What I also liked about this programme was its strong academic focus. In my 2nd year, when I started a job at Sberbank CIB, I was able to apply the knowledge gained from both bachelor’s and master’s studies.
Also, while studying for my master’s, I applied to the First Generation Foundation and got accepted. FGF is a community of university students and alumni that supports talented young people on their way to corporate careers and entrepreneurship. I was lucky to become its part. It is a community that feels like family and it gave many good friends with whom I’m still in contact.
After completing my master’s studies, I started teaching a course on private investing and finance at ICEF and was combining it with my job at corporations. My course was aiming at practical advice where to invest, how to create financial portfolios and maintain personal budgets.
Are you still running your blog?
Yes, though less actively these days. I now have more responsibilities and tasks in my role as a CFO. It was never my ambition to become an infopreneur and make money on views or by selling information services to people. My blog is an outreach project, a hobby and a way to share my knowledge on savings and investments, as well as current trends and analytics with an audience of 10,000+ followers.
Many people with master’s in Financial Economics from ICEF become quants and go to work for trading companies that make use of cutting-edge technologies and sophisticated algos.
About Artem:
Graduated with honours from HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences in 2012 and earned his master’s in Financial Economics from ICEF in 2015. Artem’s excellent academic performance earned him a nomination for 2013 Golden HSE Award. While a student, Artem worked at HSE Entrepreneurship Laboratory for two years.
2013–2014: Garden Ring Capital, Investment Analyst
2014–2017: Sberbank CIB, Senior Analyst
2017–2020: M.Video – Eldorado, Head of Investment Analysis and Strategy, Head of Investment Management Department
2020–2022: OZON, Chief Investment Officer
Artem currently serves as Chief Financial Officer at Eqvilent Group, a quantitative trading powerhouse headquartered in Dubai (UAE), that provides liquidity on financial markets worldwide using cutting-edge technologies such as Deep Learning.
Artem runs a finance blog named Finoman.
HSE, and its joint department with Yandex School of Data Analysis, provide the education that seems to be the best fit for our quantitative research positions. Quantitative analytics requires serious knowledge of data science and machine learning, whereas my role deals more with classical finance.
Why did you, a finance specialist, choose to leave the banking industry? What was wrong with it?
Corporate and investment banking is, in fact, an exciting industry to work in. I know from my experience at Sberbank CIB how beneficial corporate banking is for novices at finance, involving them in designing product portfolios for corporate clients and assisting in major transactions such as financing of acquisitions or construction of factories or residential buildings. Corporate banking is a good place to learn derivative transactions, banking products and how big businesses and groups actually operate.
Sberbank CIB is a strong team and it can teach a lot about effective corporate transactions management. There were several reasons why I moved from corporate banking to investment and then to industry. First, I started to lean towards investment and financial modeling – something that my role at Sberbank CIB had little to do with.
Second, in banking you only get to see the outside of corporate business because there’s never enough time to explore companies’ business in detail. I wanted to get to know the practical side of business and how actions within it can transform its processes and lead to better performance and corporate growth. In business, you use action to create new products, start investment projects and improve customer journey. This explains the highly applied, value-creating nature of business management.
So, you went to work for M.Video as where you could watch your efforts bring fruit?
Me joining M.Video–Eldorado was due to a combination of circumstances. At that time, Safmar Group, which owned Eldorado, M.Video and Technosila, decided to merge the them, in order to create a more profitable and efficient group of companies. I was recommended to M.Video as a suitable candidate for the role of the head of investment analysis. M.Video’s CFO, Ekaterina Sokolova – the best CFO in retail industry according to Kommersant Publishing House – was looking to add to her team a member to be responsible for investment design process and integration of the assets. I passed the interviews and tests and was lucky to be offered the position.
M.Video subsequently acquired Eldorado, further solidifying its position as a market leader. A new investment department was set up under my leadership, which involved building its team, setting up its processes and creating the in-house pool of finance expertise. In addition to my analytical role, I was entrusted with managerial functions, and I am very grateful to the company's management for its trust in me. My role at M.Video–Eldorado brought my career and expertise to a new level, and our team had proved highly productive. M.Video–Eldorado - the company with a staff of 30,000 – announced me the Best Employee of 2019. My department was responsible for evaluating the profitability of prospective investment projects and IT products; implementing geo-analytics for identifying best locations for new stores in different parts of Russia; and evaluating acquisitions and real estate for further sale. This gave me new competencies. While tackling complex tasks, I could see finance in action yielding tangible outcomes.
What was it that attracted you in OZON and why did you decide to leave M.Video–Eldorado?
Following the progress of the Russian e-commerce and retail industry, I also watched trends on international markets. I read lots of books, bank surveys, performance reviews.
The more I explored, the more evident it became to me that the future of retail belonged to multi-category businesses with widest product range possible
These businesses are the largest marketplaces – OZON and Wildberries in Russia, Amazon in the U.S and Europe, Mercado Libre in Latin America, Alibaba in China, etc. M.Video–Eldorado was focused mostly on consolidating its leading position in the household electronics market, while my ambition as an investment specialist was to contribute to a business with many-fold higher turnover.
One such business was OZON, a swiftly growing marketplace. In the fall of 2020 OZON announced its plan to apply for IPO on America’s Nasdaq and was looking to hire an investment manager who’d be responsible for prospect analysis, capital investment management, investment committee meetings, warehousing and office property transactions, and business evaluation. My expertise suited the position perfectly and I am glad to have been able to contribute to OZON’s growth, which was already impressive when I joined this company.
I had been working at OZON for about two years when a good friend told me he was building an international group of companies with headquarters in Dubai and needed someone to be in charge of its finance. I had the skills and experience that suited me for that role, so I accepted the offer and became the CFO at Eqvilent Group in Dubai.
Can you tell more about Eqvilent? How does it stand out on the innovation side?
Eqvilent is a quantitative trading powerhouse and liquidity provider with leading positions on some of the world’s largest financial exchanges. We specialize in high-frequency trade (HFT) in futures, options, shares, metals, currencies and cryptocurrencies, and we are, in this sense, not a classical trading company where investment solutions are made by analysts and traders “manually”. We rely solely on algorithmic strategies and have as our key resources data and human capital.
The group was founded by one of the world’s greatest quant geniuses, who is, by the way, an HSE graduate
He brought to Eqvilent top-notch professionals in the field of modern machine learning and data analysis. In a nutshell, what we do is analyze huge amounts of price movement data to predict which of the financial instruments are likely to gain in value and which can fall in price. Quants create mathematical models using high-capacity servers and supercomputers. By scaling their results across multiple exchanges and financial instruments with similar patterns and dependencies, it is possible to derive greater profits from trade.
On the IT side, we have a fast-speed connection to exchanges and can be getting data and sending sale and purchase orders really fast. Eqvilent is built on a symbiotic relationship of research and technology. Our programmers write low-latency codes and develop FPGA technologies to generate highly effective and fast connections. We are a rapidly growing company and welcome quants and C++ developers to join our team. Feel free to send us your resume. We’ll surely consider every candidate.
How does this change your role as CFO?
Eqvilent is an international holding. We trade in different countries in Europe, Asia and America, which implies the obligation to follow legislations and standards relating financial accounting and liaison with banks, brokers, consultants, auditors, regulators and other counterparties. And as with any internationally trading company, our reporting is governed by international standards (in our case, IFRS), requiring an increased accounting competency. This makes my role as chief financial officer somewhat unorthodox. And because we are a high-frequency trader with high daily turnover rates, the many transactions we perform per day can be challenging to take record of and analyze, especially given that exchanges upload and communicate data only for limited time periods.
Is Dubai crypto-friendly? Does Eqvilent trade in cryptocurrencies?
Eqvilent trades in both classical assets and cryptocurrencies. Since we work in several different countries, we must stay aware of, and duly observe, their legislation. The situation in the Emirates is curious: while some Financial Free Zones (DMCC, ADGM) allow for incorporation and registration of crypto companies and transacting in crypto assets, others, including those of the mainland, have many banks that are particularly conservative above cryptocurrencies and even deny service to clients that deal in cryptocurrencies.
This dual situation – when cryptocurrency can be used to buy real estate but is restricted by classical banks, some of the state-owned companies and other economic sectors – explains why Eqvilent does not operate its crypto-related part of business in the UAE. However, work is in process in the UAE towards enhancing its guidance on regulation of crypto asset activities, so hopefully we can expect to get more clarity soon.