R. Scott Morris is an American author, financial engineer and quantitative consultant. He is president of Morris Consulting, LLC, Chief Investment Strategist of Blackthorne Capital Management, LLC, and was CEO of the Boston Options Exchange from 2006 to 2008. He has also was a Managing Director of

Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many internationa ...

and Partner at Hull Trading Company.

Education and Hull Trading

Morris was born in

Indianapolis, Indiana Indianapolis ( ), colloquially known as Indy, is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Indiana, most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana, Marion ...

, and attended Pike High School. After completing a degree in economics at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

in 1986, he entered a rapidly changing futures industry as the NYSE and NASDAQ began trading equity options contracts. As an associate for GNP commodities, Morris developed strategies for risk hedging and management and began his lifelong research into algorithmic trading. After joining a team of mathematicians and scientists working under Blair Hull at Hull Trading Company, he obtained an M.B.A from the

, where he specialized in both

finance Finance refers to monetary resources and to the study and Academic discipline, discipline of money, currency, assets and Liability (financial accounting), liabilities. As a subject of study, is a field of Business administration, Business Admin ...

and

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

. During his tenure with Hull Trading, Morris engineered electronic

option pricing In finance, a price (premium) is paid or received for purchasing or selling options. The calculation of this premium will require sophisticated mathematics. Premium components This price can be split into two components: intrinsic value, and ...

systems and developed option pricing and volatility models, eventually becoming a Partner and the Director of Financial Engineering.

Career

Goldman Sachs and Boston Options Exchange

Hull Trading Company was acquired by

in 1999 for $531 million. Morris joined Goldman Sachs, where he managed the equity trading

financial engineering Financial engineering is a multidisciplinary field involving financial theory, methods of engineering, tools of mathematics and the practice of programming. It has also been defined as the application of technical methods, especially from mathe ...

groups and continued his work on trading systems and

statistical modeling A statistical model is a mathematical model that embodies a set of statistical assumptions concerning the generation of sample data (and similar data from a larger population). A statistical model represents, often in considerably idealized form ...

. After two years, he became a

managing director A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

and led the firm's

algorithmic trading Algorithmic trading is a method of executing orders using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume. This type of trading attempts to leverage the speed and computational resources of ...

division at the Automated Execution Strategies desk. In 2006, Morris became CEO of the Boston Options Exchange Group, an automated equity options stock exchange. As CEO, Morris continued his engineering work, developing execution speed and messaging capacity for

hedge funds A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that holds liquid assets and that makes use of complex trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and insulate returns from market risk. Among these portfolio techniq ...

and algorithmic traders. Morris led the implementation of the Sola Trading platform and PIP price improvement algorithm. He departed in 2008 after the TMX majority ownership acquisition.

Consulting and writing

Morris is the founder of Morris Consulting, LLC, which develops quantitative models and automated trading strategies, and advises large trading firms on regulatory relations, risk management, and recruiting. He has spoken at numerous educational and industry events and has lectured at the

Chicago Board Options Exchange Cboe Global Markets, Inc. is an American company that owns the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the stock exchange operator BATS Global Markets. History Founded by the Chicago Board of Trade in 1973 and member-owned for several decades, the ...

Risk Management Conference, the Futures Industry Association, and the Security Traders Association of Chicago. In 2002, he lectured on volume-price ratios and optimal execution at the Computational Finance program at

Carnegie Mellon Carnegie may refer to: People *Carnegie (surname), including a list of people with the name **Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist * Clan Carnegie, a lowland Scottish clan Institutions Named for Andrew Carnegie * ...

, and he is currently a guest lecturer for the

Careers in Business program. Morris is also the author of Polished, a careers resource book that teaches resume, cover letter, and interview skills to college students and other first-time job seekers.

Blackthorne Capital Management

In July 2016, Morris joined Blackthorne Capital Management as the Head of Research and Strategy Design. He has spearheaded the design and implementation of Blackthorne’s Sentiment Enhanced trading models. In 2018, Morris was named Chief Investment Strategist of Blackthorne Capital Management, LLC.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morris, R. Scott Living people American businesspeople Goldman Sachs people University of Chicago alumni University of Chicago Booth School of Business alumni Year of birth missing (living people)