Jacob Waldo

01 / About

Background

Incoming Goldman Sachs Market Risk Analyst · SI Leader for ~100 students · FRM Part I, top quartile.

Junior at USC, majoring in Economics & Data Science with a minor in Mathematics.

I've never been great at memorization — I look up syntax, I struggle with state capitals, biology was never my thing. What I do well is understanding the logic behind things. That's what keeps pulling me toward analytical problems: macro trends, probability, risk, and finding the cleaner way to run a computation.

I'm always looking to grow, and I enjoy connecting with people who share that same problem-solving mindset.

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University of Southern California

B.S. Economics & Data Science · Minor in Mathematics

Los Angeles, CA · Aug 2024 – Dec 2026

GPA 3.95 / 4.0

Previously · Chapman University · B.S. Computer Science & B.A. Economics · 4.0 GPA · transferred 2024

// Experience

Incoming · Summer 2026

Summer Market Risk Analyst

Goldman Sachs · Market Risk Division · Dallas, TX

Joining the Market Risk Division for Summer 2026.

Aug 2025 – Present

Supplemental Instruction Leader

USC Dornsife Next Generation Science Programs · Los Angeles, CA

Lead 3 sessions per week for ~100 undergraduates per semester in ECON 317 (Statistics for Economists), writing notes, problem sets, and exam reviews from scratch.
One of only 2 SI Leaders in USC's economics department.

USC Dornsife · Supplemental Instruction Program

Jun 2025 – Present

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Dr. James Alcala, USC · Los Angeles, CA

Investigating inherent bias in LLMs (GPT-5, GPT-5 Nano, Ollama, Gemini) across viewpoint, sentiment, and context.
Built a LangGraph summarization pipeline with attention-inspired MapReduce refinement, cutting 40+ page review from ~1 hour to under 5 minutes.

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024

Manager on Duty

Palo Alto Swim and Sport · Palo Alto, CA

Directed operations for a rotating team of ~15–20 daily staff, coordinating scheduling and safety for 150–500 daily patrons.

02 / Research & Projects

Selected Work

Bloomberg Terminal options paper (with interactive charts), Fed Challenge presentation, and an LLM pipeline — all using real data.

Paper · 2025 Early-Exercise Premium 1 / 3

Paper · 2025

Determinants of the Early-Exercise Premium for American Puts

Built a reusable framework to infer the Early-Exercise Premium (EEP), the additional value of an American put over its European counterpart, directly from American option chains without requiring European comparables. The core idea: bound EEP between no-arbitrage limits derived from put-call parity, then use Monte Carlo simulation (1,000 runs, ~486k simulated points with antithetic variates) to sample the latent premium within those bounds. Bounds calculation was fully automated for reproducibility and scalability, and GPU acceleration (CuPy) reduced runtime 26× (from 5.6s to 0.2s) on workloads equivalent to 25M option pricing rows.

Applied to a single SPY $560 put chain (Bloomberg Terminal data) and confirmed with >99.99% confidence that EEP declines as expiration approaches and rises with implied volatility — consistent with theory. The specific regression results are not meant to generalize beyond this chain; the contribution is the framework itself, which can be reapplied to other underlyings, strikes, and time periods.

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No-Arbitrage BoundsMonte Carlo Bloomberg TerminalARMA(3,0,3) CuPy / GPU · 26× speedupPut-Call Parity

Download Full Paper (PDF)

Interactive Research Findings

SPY put · Strike $560 · Exp. June 20, 2025 · Bloomberg Terminal

EEP bounds for a single option chain: SPY put, strike $560, expiring June 20, 2025. 150 daily observations (t=1–241) sourced from Bloomberg Terminal. EEP_max and EEP_min are derived from put-call parity bounds adjusted for dividends and bid-ask spreads. The corridor narrows as expiration approaches, confirming the paper's central finding.

Mean coefficient estimates across 1,000 Monte Carlo replications (ARMA(3,0,3) on ln(EEP)). Both significant at p < 0.001. β_T avg t-stat ≈ 44.1 | β_ivM avg t-stat ≈ 15.7.

Change in Implied Volatility: +5 percentage points

+209%

Expected % change in EEP
exp(0.295 × Δ ivM) − 1

+143%

EEP increase per extra month
exp(β_T/12) − 1 = exp(0.888) − 1

10.65 / 0.295

β_T / β_ivM mean estimates
stable across all 1,000 MC replications

Slide to explore: a volatility shock shifts the entire EEP surface. At baseline, 1 extra month of time-to-maturity raises EEP by ~142.9%; 1 percentage point higher IV raises EEP by ~34.3%.

Competition · 2025

College Federal Reserve Challenge — Team Analyst

Competed as part of a USC team in the College Fed Challenge, a national competition judged by Federal Reserve economists where teams simulate an FOMC meeting and defend a rate decision. Our October 2025 presentation, "Navigating Monetary Policy with No Risk-Free Path," assessed four areas of the economy: growth, inflation, the labor market, and financial conditions.

The core tension we identified: inflation was still running well above target (Core CPI at 2.9%, Core PCE at ~3.1%, PPI at 4.6%), with 1-year inflation expectations rising back to 3.4% — all pointing to unfinished business on price stability. The labor market, while soft in spots (June 2025 marked the first net job loss since COVID), was broadly balanced: the unemployment-to-job-openings ratio had returned to 1:1, and the Sahm Rule indicator had declined to 0.24%, suggesting gradual cooling rather than a recessionary break.

Our recommendation at the October 2025 meeting was to hold the Fed Funds Rate at 4.0–4.25%. We argued that further cuts would exacerbate still-elevated inflation without providing meaningful relief to a labor market that was softening gradually, not collapsing. We also flagged that markets were pricing in 50 bps of additional cuts by year-end, making a hold a credibility-reinforcing signal on the Fed's inflation commitment.

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Monetary PolicyMacro Analysis Bloomberg TerminalFed Challenge CPI / PCE / PPILabor Market

FOMC Meeting | October 2025

Navigating Monetary Policy with
No Risk-Free Path

USC Fed Challenge Team · October 2025
To display the screenshot, save it as fed_challenge.png in your Website folder.

Research · 2025

LLM Bias Detection & Summarization Pipeline

Investigating inherent bias in large language models (GPT-5, GPT-5 Nano, Ollama, Gemini) by analyzing how viewpoint, sentiment, and context shift across models and prompts. Built a LangGraph-powered summarization pipeline with attention-inspired message passing and MapReduce-style iterative refinement.

Reduced 40+ page manual document review from ~1 hour to under 5 minutes. 2–3× faster processing of long documents.

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LangGraphGPT-5 / Gemini NLPMapReduceBias Analysis

04 / Beyond the Resume

Art & Illustration

Featured piece on the biology of anxiety and stress — with a full written breakdown. Plus a gallery of oil, ink, and graphite work.

Outside of coursework and research, I paint and draw. Most of the work explores psychology, the body, and social pressure, usually through a recurring cast of skeletons, vines, and hands. The pieces below are a mix of graphite, ink, and oil.

Featured · 2025

The Body's Response to Chronic Anxiety and Stress

Ink, coffee wash, acrylic marker on paper

Most illustrations of anxiety focus on the psychological or social dimensions: what it feels like, or how it's perceived. This piece tries to fill a different gap, asking what is actually happening inside the body. It draws on the biology of chronic stress (the HPA axis, allostatic load, and the SAM system) and looks at how medications like Escitalopram partially, but not completely, restore order.

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Allostatic Load. The vines wrapping around the brain and chest represent neural atrophy and declining muscle protein, both hallmarks of prolonged HPA axis activation. The coffee stains on the canvas stand in for bone deterioration and the late nights caused by stress-related sleep disturbances. The chaotic scribbles are the feedback loop itself: stress triggers cortisol release, resistance builds, which demands even more cortisol, which compounds the damage.

Sympatho-Adrenomedullary System. The heart sitting outside the ribcage represents the physical sensation of a panic attack, specifically the feeling of your heart beating out of your chest. Vines around the throat simulate the shortness of breath that accompanies acute anxiety episodes.

Mitigants. The magenta boxes are the only structured, geometric elements in the piece, representing SSRIs like Escitalopram. They bring order to isolated corners of the composition. But the surrounding chaos remains: medication reduces cortisol, not everything.

Full Written Explanation (PDF)

Perfectionism Graphite on paper

Anxiety over imperfection preventing work from even starting. Hands paused mid-motion, unable to commit to the first mark.

Overworked Ink on paper

The external pressure many young people feel to overperform in everything. Drowning in the volume of it, arms still reaching for more.

Puppeteer Graphite and acrylic on paper

External forces pulling the strings. Vivid, willful hands above controlling a skeleton that has no say in the direction it moves.

Expectations Oil on canvas

Good intentions dragging the bottom hand into a better environment, even as the process destroys it. The vines that carry the flowers also unravel the hand below.

Jacob
Waldo