INSIDE IMC'S FIRST HONG KONG INTERNSHIP: WHERE TRADING CAREERS BEGIN

“The internship really does position you to hit the ground running,” says Steven, Trading Internship Lead, IMC Sydney. “Because the work is real and tangible, grads aren’t starting from zero. They’re continuing.”

A first for Hong Kong

This year, IMC launches its internship program in Hong Kong, opening the door for students to join the founding cohort.

Our Hong Kong office sits at the center of IMC’s quant research strategy, building the models, technology, and research behind IMC’s trading across APAC’s options and D1 strategies, covering equities, futures, and ETFs. The research has a dual mandate: sharpen how IMC trades the markets it knows, and unlock new ones, like commodity options and futures in mainland China, which IMC is expanding into from Hong Kong.

None of it starts from scratch. Interns work on the same globally supported high-performance compute IMC’s researchers use daily: an on-prem cluster for training deep learning models on long histories of market data, backed by the co-location infrastructure that puts research into production on exchanges worldwide. The platform wasn’t built for Hong Kong; it’s what Hong Kong plugs into.

IMC has successfully run this playbook before. Our Mumbai presence grew rapidly on the same model, with a post-internship Graduate Traineeship program going strong in its 18th year. With three of Hong Kong’s local universities leading the way in machine learning and AI, IMC is scaling talent in Hong Kong as deliberately as it is scaling its technology.

“What IMC can offer is the chance to be part of something new, something growing,” says Andrew Fong, Managing Director, IMC Hong Kong. “The chance to take responsibility rather than being boxed into someone else’s design.”

Three streams, one standard

The program follows the structure refined across IMC’s global offices. From Sydney to Hong Kong, this is the model:

Most internships promise exposure. IMC delivers immersion. Interns sit with the traders, engineers, and researchers building the business and discovering new opportunities. Three streams- trading, quant research, and technology share one standard: real work, direct feedback, and a dedicated mentor throughout, with access to senior IMC professionals firm-wide. 

“People from outside the technology team willingly gave up their time to answer questions and review my ideas,” says James, Technology Intern, IMC Sydney. “The culture here is competitive, but it’s never against each other.”

Partway through, trading and technology interns come together for BOMEX, a cross-stream, immersive trading simulation a seat at the poker table, not a book about the odds. The point isn’t to watch how trading works; it’s to make decisions with live consequences.

Trading

Fully classroom-based, by design. Instead of a single desk, interns get structured, progressive exposure across market making, research, arbitrage, and more, from global market context to how IMC trades locally.

For Sydney trading intern Josh, the test came in his own project: how long does the market remember a significant trading event? His model kept growing more sophisticated; its results didn’t.

“After a liquidity shock or data print, modelling how its impact decays is never straightforward,” he explains. “The real challenge wasn’t building something more complex: it was knowing when complexity stopped adding value. That trade-off is critical. It can be the difference between a model that works in theory and one that survives in real markets.”

Quant research

The quant research stream is built around individual, mentor-led research projects, and preparation starts months before the program. Interns first meet quant leaders to discuss their interests, strengths, and technical background. This allows our leaders to better match an intern’s strengths with a project and designated business priority. Two weeks after classroom sessions, interns start working on their designated projects. Interns spend their time solving real problems, not searching for them. Each intern delivers two presentations: a mid-program update and a final showcase of project outcomes.

“Interns at IMC genuinely do value-adding work,” says Liam, Lead, Quant Research, IMC Sydney. “They’re exposed to cutting-edge machine learning and live research problems, and the projects they work on have a real chance of influencing how we trade. On the most recent program, interns brought speculative ideas to our attention that we likely wouldn’t have explored otherwise.”

Technology

Technology interns start with market fundamentals and stream-specific skills C++, Java, Python, hardware, in a classroom setting. Then, the interns start a six-week project phase, the core of the program, working in pairs on real challenges to improve the performance of IMC’s live systems. Interns present their findings to IMC colleagues, and work that proves out goes into production.

 

“I was tasked with overseeing architectural decisions and the deployment of our project,” says James of his Sydney internship. “It went far beyond writing functional code. I had to consider who my work was for, where it runs, how it scales, and how it fits within the broader trading system.”

Path to an IMC career

Standout performers are invited onto IMC's Graduate Traineeship: a three-to-six-week intensive across IMC's offices in Sydney, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Chicago and Mumbai, in one of four dedicated schools: Trading, Development, FPGA or Analyst. Trainees then return to Hong Kong for region-specific training in APAC strategies and systems. The internship is a first step in a long-term career, not just a summer on your CV.

The path in full is: intern in Hong Kong summer 2027 → graduate in 2028 → successful interns relocate to Hong Kong for a graduate role.

Who should apply

Students with technical degrees, strong academic credentials, and competitive drive. No trading or finance experience needed — bring your quantitative thinking and we’ll teach you the markets. And the program isn’t limited to local graduates: Hong Kong’s Top Talent Pass Scheme opens it to graduates of top mainland China and overseas universities.

Applications are open for our Hong Kong Internship Program. Learn more or apply now. Discover your edge.

About IMC: IMC is a research-driven trading firm where quantitative modeling, machine learning, and engineering shape how modern markets are traded. A stabilizing force in markets since 1989, we provide liquidity across trading venues, delivering the best outcome in value and risk management to investors. Using our own technology and capital, we build proprietary systems and algorithms that operate across global markets. Our researchers, traders, and engineers work as a collective, combining rapid experimentation, advanced infrastructure, and real-time feedback to turn insight into execution.