Quant here. I used to be a seismologist but switched to finance one year ago. This year I earned well below 100k€.
Out of curiosity how did you switch to being a quant?
In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
31–40 of 57 posts
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#32> 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. [1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Is "submarine" just "Trojan horse"?
If you read the linked article you'd see that it's a more specific phenomenon to news articles. Maybe you'd consider it a type of trojan horse because it's misleading.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#33What does a quant do? Machine learning, linear regression, moving averages? Lots of statistics on time series data?
A Master Quant here ... ask me anything
Can you get me one of those million dollar jobs referred to in the article?
I've only got a bachelor's degree in software engineering, but I've been doing data science(ish) at my job since I graduated.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#34Quant here. I used to be a seismologist but switched to finance one year ago. This year I earned well below 100k€.
Out of curiosity how did you switch to being a quant?
I'm not the OP, but it's a switch I'm strongly considering making. I'm looking at doing it by going back to get a Masters in Quantitative Finance, so that's one possible option.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#35> 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. [1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Agreed. Otherwise the story makes no sense. It's always been the case that hedge funds pay more than banks just like silicon valley pays more than government. This is so well known, I knew it when I was a kid and people outside of the finance industry are aware of it.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#36Hedge Funds have always paid quants significantly better.
In the past decade or so many banks have built out their engineering teams. Goldman is now 25% engineers. More recently these banks have started to compete with hedge funds for the same quant talent that can better take advantage of their new technical prowess. But the comparatively strict compensation structure still means you can make a lot more on the buy side.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fun…
> It's a very wide category The term is historical, not functional. Before option-pricing theory, securities pricing was an art. Yes, there were capital asset pricing theories for fundamental analysts. But at banks, a phone and hustle were the tools of the trade. With Black-Scholes (and put-call parity) came the ability to (a) manufacture options out of other securities and (b) print objectively-wrong quotes. The for…
I thought now with securities with negative interest there were a lot of securities that now had to take that into account and black-scholes is just no help whatsoever there.
Is there any answer to it yet ?
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#38Is Financial Engineering still relevant these days? I thought it is all Data Science now.
Nah, most data scientists don’t know stochastic calc, even if they are capable of learning it.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#39> 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. [1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Is "submarine" just "Trojan horse"?
You could call it the news industry's equivalent of tv/movie's sneaky product placement. A paid ad pretending to be a legitimate news story just like a product placement is a paid ad pretending to be part of the plot.
Re: In Battle to Recruit New Quants, Hedge Funds Outpay Banks
#40Not going to fight the paywall to read the article, but as a developer consultant (not a quant), hedge fund clients pay better across the board than both commercial and investment banks. They tend to be small shops, so it's not really a fair comparison. I've worked for boutique hedge funds, market makers, wealth management funds, pension funds, and two huge investment banks. The small hedge funds pay a lot more and t…
do they also work you more?