What does a quant do? Machine learning, linear regression, moving averages? Lots of statistics on time series data?
A Master Quant here ... ask me anything
How much do you get paid?
In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
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Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#12What does a quant do? Machine learning, linear regression, moving averages? Lots of statistics on time series data?
Quant is a pretty broad term. Some would say it’s often working on nonlinear desks to implement/calibrate volatility surfaces and things like that or working more on the risk management side. There’s also the whole HFT world (Jane St, Virtu, Jump etc) many would call ’quant’ but really is a different game than the HF space.
On the machine learning side, in my experience it’s often simple, linear models that work best in the messy world of financial data. I’m sure there are shops out there breaking out the GPU clusters and training NNs with 6 trillion parameters but in no way will your super deep NN guarantee alpha whatsoever.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#13Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#14A Master Quant here ... Ask me anything
Fine, detail your compensation please.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#15What does a quant do? Machine learning, linear regression, moving averages? Lots of statistics on time series data?
It's a very wide category, but all those things could apply. I used to be a partner in a couple of funds, and at the time the major distinction was between people who priced complex derivatives and people who thought about how to use data to guess what the market would do.
You'd be more likely to find deriv quants at a bank selling such things to people, whereas the strategy quants would be what you'd find in the funds.
But even within that fund side I'd imagine the job looks very different depending on what firm you're at and what they ask you to do. Not everything is glamourous blue-sky "what should I buy or sell" stuff. A fair bit of it is things like cleaning the data. And there's going to be a lot of tooling. Since nobody says what they are doing, everyone has their own version of a research pipeline, and that needs to be kept clean. Likewise on the execution side, there's a load of code to be looked at, and a lot of data coming out relating to trading costs and such.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#16> recent graduates working at hedge funds made significantly more than their peers working at banks
This has always been true, for the entirety of my career. Buy side pays more than sell side for alpha-generating activities. (Sell side pays more for flow and scaling advantages.)
This article strikes me as a submarine [1] for Baruch’s program.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#17A Master Quant here ... Ask me anything
What percent of ‘ideas’ make it to live trading. How much time is spent on average validating idea. How much of the testing is automated/reuse of code and how much is custom per idea.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#18What does a quant do? Machine learning, linear regression, moving averages? Lots of statistics on time series data?
That's part of it. There's also classical modelling, some natural language processing probably more techniques.
In short it's trying to find the signal in a huge amount of noise/data.
I'm not a quant but I support the Quants at my firm. Some of our datasets are hundreds of millions of rows with up to 450 factors/features per row.
They also run NLP on terabytes of SEC filings (like quarterly and annual reports). Not sure how they analyze the results of that.