61–65 of 65 posts
I am not a quant but I am working for one. Am I wrong to think that the quant analysts or "scientists" are not actually figuring out something fundamental about the market? You win by being "more complex" than your competition, which in turn makes the whole market more complex and this goes on endlessly.
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Hi there! I'm the author of the article.If you have a programming skills and a mathematics background, it is possible to break into the industry. Even better if your current role is as a data scientist of machine learning engineer. I work as a quant on a second tier hedge fund. The pool of potential firms is actually pretty big, but most people think that the only shops out there are citadel, two sigma or rentech. Th…
What are the noncompetes like? I've heard that once you work for one shop, you basically can't work/apply your knowledge & skills anywhere else, which leads to stress about keeping your job.
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Trading on insider knowledge is illegal afaik
Seems vague to me. So you go to an event or something. Company guy says something stupid that convinces you they're doomed to fail and then you make money by shorting their company's stock. That's illegal?
Certainly you can't have your friend Bob who works at Acme tell you stuff then suddenly you're in the clear. That isn't how it works.
But if let's say Bob does something dumb that leaks info publicly, sure - it's public now. You can trade on it.
I'm far from a lawyer but there's nuance here.
I am not a quant but I am working for one. Am I wrong to think that the quant analysts or "scientists" are not actually figuring out something fundamental about the market? You win by being "more complex" than your competition, which in turn makes the whole market more complex and this goes on endlessly.
Yeah I think you are wrong, and quants don't actually think like that.
Help me understand it then. AFAIK, this is how it goes:
1. The market can be modeled using A/
2. Someone figures out it can be modeled by A'.
3. The market inevitably changes because of this application of A'.
4. The real model for the market shifted to B.
5. Repeat 1.
Which just means that the model for the market will only get more and more complicated. And the way to win is to have more and more sophisticated model to capture every other model.
I recommend anything by Marcos López de Prado: https://quantresearch.org/ He has written a book and published several articles on financial machine learning, including what to look for,how to avoid overfitting, in detail, and done so far better than I've seen elsewhere. Good luck!