Trading Should Make Money Through Intelligence, Not by Digging Through Mountains

From the study of financial mathematics, through life in Amsterdam's Bijlmer ghetto – cycling dozens of kilometers to school each day – to the nerve-racking trials and shattered keyboards of the world's most cut-throat trading floors, and finally to work he genuinely enjoys and finds meaningful.

Daniel Krycha talks about what first drew him to financial math, the personal "threshold" he set to protect himself from burnout, and why he believes trading should make money through intelligence, not by blasting holes through mountains.

Interview by Anna Urbanová

Daniel, I know you as someone who's always completely immersed in whatever we're working on at Qminers. What keeps you pushing forward so relentlessly? Reason number one – and this has held true in every job I've ever had – is that I want to work with good, motivated people. People with real ambition who want to move things forward, so I don't have to push them. Quite the opposite, actually – if I'm not sprinting myself, I can't keep up. If you're in an environment where you may be the best but constantly have to drag others along, it just isn't fulfilling in the long run.

That sounds like you might be better suited for a high-powered tech startup. Why didn't you end up there? I did consider it. But in the end, I optimized for the balance of risk and reward. I didn't want to look back after five years and think: "It didn't work out, and I earned nothing." To be personal for a moment: my family always lived very modestly. I was raised by a single mother, and as a kid I saw how difficult it was for her to make ends meet. That shaped me a lot. My ambition to provide a good life for myself and my family was enormous. And on top of that, I grew up with a deep-seated value: if income disappears, everything collapses. So job security was always incredibly important to me.

Did that play a role when you chose your university? Definitely. For my bachelor's I chose general mathematics at Matfyz, and for my master's I specialized in financial and insurance mathematics. Finance had been on my mind from the very beginning. But when I sat the entrance exam for banking at VŠE, it struck me as absurdly easy – my math score was full marks, essentially at a high-school level. I thought: "If I go here, plenty of weaker students than me will get in, and I'll have to adapt to that environment." At Matfyz, I knew the standards would be uncompromising and the challenge real. That was what drew me in.

And was Matfyz really a challenge? Oh, absolutely. More than I admitted to myself at the time. I realized that if I wanted to meet the bar I had set for myself – to truly understand and master things – I'd have to work extremely hard. So I did: evenings, weekends, my friend and I would meet to solve problems and debate solutions. Then came the first big test: mid-semester linear algebra, where you needed 50 out of 100 points just to stay in the course. I studied like mad – and got 100 out of 100. That was my "aha" moment: if you put in the work, it pays off. Some people there were true geniuses, everything clicked for them instantly. I wasn't a genius, but I had discipline, and I could grind. And it paid off. Eventually, I ended up with three honors diplomas.

Matfyz has a reputation as a tough filter. Did that turn out to be true? At freshman orientation, the dean told us: "Look at the person to your left and your right. In six months, one of you won't be here." And he was right. I remember one situation in our cryptanalysis class where, instead of the expected test, the professor handed out blank sheets and a cipher. "This is a piece of a message the Poles intercepted from the Nazis during the war. Based on what we've already covered about Enigma, figure out how to set the machine so you can decrypt it. You've got eight hours." Forty-seven out of fifty people failed. I was among the three who succeeded.

So you were aiming for a career in finance. Why didn't you settle into a comfortable spot at a bank? My mom wanted me to become an auditor or an accountant at one of the big consulting firms. I, on the other hand, wanted to study abroad for a while – and at the same time I didn't want to drag out my studies unnecessarily. So I decided to finish Matfyz in four years instead of five: in my second year I was already taking senior lectures, and in my third year I picked up even more.

Then came an offer from Kooperativa, the big insurance company: they would sponsor a student's master's thesis, with the condition that it be written directly with them and quickly, because they needed the results. I thought: "Perfect, I don't want to be stuck with my thesis for two years." I applied, won the selection process, wrote the thesis, and immediately got an offer for a part-time job as an insurance mathematician. I accepted, even though at the same time I was cramming two years of courses into one. For half a year I was working and studying in parallel. And then I left for Amsterdam – with the clear certainty that I didn't want to spend my life doing insurance math.

How did you realize that so quickly? I found it soul-draining. It just wasn't the kind of work I wanted to do. And it was a bit of a sad realization – you invest several years of your life, and then once you really get into it, you discover it's basically boring. Sure, I had a decent income, but I also saw that my boss had been there for ten years and was doing the exact same tasks I was just given.

You went to Amsterdam on Erasmus? I told myself that if I was going to go, I wanted to actually earn a degree there. So I applied for a master's at Vrije Universiteit, in a joint program with the University of Amsterdam. I asked for some courses to be waived, since I had already covered them at Matfyz, and in the end I basically just did their final year.

And how was life in the Netherlands? Tough. Even though I'd saved up during my studies and still had some income from Kooperativa, I had completely underestimated how expensive life in Amsterdam really is. I covered tuition with a grant and scholarship, but there was almost nothing left for living expenses. I couldn't afford a dorm, so we rented a house in Bijlmer – Amsterdam's ghetto. At six in the morning I'd go work a shift in a supermarket stocking shelves, just to earn extra money. A public transport pass cost 80 euros a month, which I couldn't afford, so I biked everywhere. I lost ten kilos, rode at least 20 kilometers every single day. And when I went out for drinks with others, I'd buy a one-euro tea and sip it all night.

And the studies? Were they different from Matfyz? Easier. Not effortless, but nothing a Matfyz student couldn't handle. They do things quite differently, though. In Prague it almost doesn't matter what you do during the semester – the brutal exam period decides everything. In Amsterdam, you have to work consistently all year: homework every night, continuous credits – and the exams are more of a formality. I wasn't used to that. At the end of my studies, I even went to the coordinator and asked: "Where do I register for the final exam?" And she replied: "What exam? You already have all your credits."

By the end of your studies, you must have been looking for a job. How did you go about it? I thought: "Okay, I'll go for the most prestigious and best-paid option I know – consulting firms like BCG or McKinsey." I knew the working hours were insane, but within a few years you could gain amazing experience. I went around job fairs, sent out CVs. At one career event where I'd submitted my résumé in advance, I got an email from Optiver: they were interested, offered me a numerical test and an interview about trading. At that time, I barely even knew trading was interesting for mathematicians – I thought it was a world for aggressive finance guys. But out of curiosity, I went. They put a test in front of me, hit the stopwatch, I filled it out – and passed. I didn't realize that maybe one in a hundred people make it through.

Trading has a reputation for being risky and sometimes even unethical. Did you wrestle with that? Honestly – not much at the beginning. Only later, once I was in the industry, did I start thinking about its impact on society. And I came to the conclusion that, just like anywhere else, it depends a lot on the specific firm. There's always a bit of truth to "the game is rigged" – money is made on speed, on hardware optimization. Someone somewhere blasts a hole through a mountain just to run a cable that carries information a microsecond faster from one exchange to another.

That never sat well with me. I always said trading should make money through intelligence, not by blasting through mountains. But in the end, it comes down to conscious choices: whether you make "clean" money – supporting liquidity, lowering investor costs, building a market – or whether you become a predator exploiting loopholes.

A lot of people picture trading the way it's shown in "The Wolf of Wall Street" movie: wild lifestyle, alcohol, drugs, sex. Does that really exist? Today it's a completely different world from the 80s and 90s, but some of it still applies. At Optiver, the average trader lasted about four years. You hire young people, throw enormous amounts of money at them – and what do you think happens? It's a male-dominated industry, extremely stressful, full of adrenaline. And yes, you see the excesses: a boss screaming at someone until they break down in tears. Someone loses a hundred thousand dollars and starts punching their monitor until it shatters. We even had a special bin just for the keyboards and mice people destroyed during the day. I myself smashed several mice and one keyboard. That environment changes you.

Was there a moment when you said to yourself: I have to quit? I had a clearly defined threshold almost from the start. At first I thought I'd last a year. But then I realized I had a unique opportunity, that I'd gotten somewhere very few people ever get, and where you could make very serious money. My threshold was: "As soon as I earn enough for a really nice apartment in Prague, I'm done." And once I knew that one annual bonus would push me over that line, I handed in my notice. In the end, it took about six years.

Did you already see your future back in Czechia? Two years before leaving Optiver, I'd already started talking with Petr Zahradník from Qminers. A mutual friend from Charles University had connected us. We'd meet for breakfast in Prague now and then. It was a process of Petr verifying my experience and outlook, and me trying to understand exactly what Qminers did, what made them different, and where I could add something of my own. We quickly realized we had a lot to offer each other – and then it was just about timing.

What surprised you most in your first months at Qminers? I'll admit, I came in with a bit of swagger after Optiver. I expected a bunch of Czechs hacking something together for a few years, and instead I ran into extremely sophisticated code and world-class processes. I soon realized they were fully competitive on a global scale, and that my know-how alone wouldn't be enough to transform the company's trajectory. There were already people here with excellent market knowledge. I could contribute, sure, but it was clear this would be about long-term, patient work – not some quick revolution.

The second surprise was the culture. In a corporation, you have a very narrowly defined role, whereas here you need to know a bit of everything. Even though I had a solid skillset, it turned out to be pretty narrow. I had to improve my programming, refresh math I hadn't needed in practice before. It was the classic experience of someone coming from a big, business-driven firm into an environment that's more about math and technology.

Your position is Chief Project Officer. What does that role actually involve? My role is very specific. You need to understand analytics, but also be fluent in code and development – and those two worlds don't overlap much. You have to be able to see the big picture, zoom out, and know where the company should be heading, which investments make sense and which don't. In practice, that mostly means coordinating between analysts and developers. Analysts come with priorities, developers say it can't be done in time – and I have to decide. Essentially, it's continuous work to ensure synergy between two of the company's key parts.

You've got one specific project to your name – the visualization GUI – where your know-how significantly advanced the analytical work. What was it about? I knew I wanted a tool that would let me analyze data quickly and effectively. From the start I had a clear vision of what the final version should look like. Eventually we developed a fully featured interface. You can picture it like slow-motion replay in Formula 1. When two cars crash and all you see is smoke, you have no idea what happened. Only the slow-mo replay shows you that, say, a tire slipped. In the same way, our tool lets you replay the market microsecond by microsecond, combine market data, our own data, and trader logs, and see exactly why an algorithm made a given decision. An analysis that used to take half an hour is now done in thirty seconds.

At the beginning you said you need a steep learning curve to enjoy your work. Is that still true after five years at Qminers? Absolutely. Just the fact that I started as an analyst and today I help decide on the company's priorities. To make those decisions well, I need to process a huge amount of information every day. Then there's the breadth of scope. Every year I'm given one big task completely outside my knowledge base. Once I temporarily led a programming team, another time I handled accounting and bonuses. Today I'm working on AI agents and how best to integrate them into our workflow. Every year a new topic comes along that pushes me further. And that's exactly how I like it.