Summary: Shardul Mehetar, an MS Data Science candidate at the University of Delaware, has been named Lead Quantitative Research Intern on Light Water Capital's Systematic Strategies team. Since joining the firm in March, he has co-authored two published strategy studies, extended the firm's open-source backtesting engine, and authored a seven-part empirical study of core market behaviors across U.S. equities.
Shardul Mehetar, Lead Quantitative Research Intern, Light Water Capital

Light Water Capital is pleased to announce that Shardul Mehetar has been named Lead Quantitative Research Intern within the firm's Systematic Strategies group, effective October 1, 2026.

Mr. Mehetar joined the firm in March with a background in credit risk modeling and a disciplined approach to model validation. His work over the past seven months has been published in full, and reflects that approach.

Contributions Since March

Strategy research. Together with Zach Smith, Mr. Mehetar co-authored two published strategy studies: a live-built RSI-divergence strategy on the Nasdaq 100, and a 60-backtest study of a 50-EMA New York session breakout across EURUSD, GBPUSD and XAUUSD on 16.5 years of hourly data. Both went through Monte Carlo, walk-forward and data-integrity validation.

Research infrastructure. He extended July Backtester, the firm's open-source research engine, with point-in-time universe screens that eliminate survivorship bias, magnitude-weighted price-jump validation, and tooling to verify published outputs.

Foundational research. In Before the Strategy, he authored a seven-part empirical study of core market behaviors across U.S. equities back to 2004: momentum, volatility clustering, shock response, volume, resiliency, commonality and correlation. Each was tested against its own null hypothesis, and 155 persistence tests were corrected for overlapping windows. The study also found variance far more predictable than direction, which supports volatility targeting.

Lead Quantitative Research Intern
Mr. Mehetar continues within Systematic Strategies, focused on strategy research, validation, and risk controls across U.S. equities and ETFs.

Recognition

The designation recognizes the breadth and rigor of his work across strategy research, research infrastructure and foundational market studies. He documents his methodology in full and applies the same validation standards throughout, which are the standards the research group aims to uphold.

The firm congratulates Mr. Mehetar and looks forward to his continued contributions.

Light Water Capital  ·  October 2026