How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

Precisely. You've correctly identified the irrational non-technical prejudice the financial industry may have towards someone such as yourself. The only solution is to become their competitor. You'd be surprised how easy it is to beat incompetent corporations at their own game. If it can be done with multi-stage rockets, it can be done with hedge funds.

Hence why we're all united here as fans of PG's essays on HN. Welcome aboard, and god speed in your entrepreneurial ventures.

For me, it has been some fun math and software. I'm gathering some initial data and should go live soon. Then if people like the work, I'll be in good shape.

Just checked with my ISP: Can upgrade to 25 Mbps upload speed with a static IP address for $89 a month. That 25 Mbps is a lot: If users really like my work, enough to half fill that 24 x 7, it adds up to millions a year in revenue. Less expensive to start than a pizza carryout, and makes money even when I'm asleep.

I'm borrowing at least two of PG's points: (1) At first don't try to please 1 million users only a little but try to please 100 users a lot. Then they will tell others and will have 1000 users and 10,000 users. Then expand to another 100 users .... (2) Initially, don't be afraid to do work that does not scale. So, I'm following that: For the data, the 'business model' has that gathered, in a way that will scale, automatically as a by-product of the usage, but that will work well only with a lot of usage. In the meanwhile, I will will just insert good data by hand!

From the lectures in Sam Altman's course at Stanford, just completed, what I'm doing looks fine except I'm a solo founder, who's done all the work, thus, knows all the work, has no co-founder disputes, owns 100% of the business, and has meager burn rate. The burn rate is so low that by the time the business qualifies for equity funding, it will likely also be profitable enough for me to buy lots more servers, in a spare bedroom, upgrade my house circuit breaker to 200 A, put in a window A/C, get some UPS units, put my emergency electric generator on a pad in a small shack just out back and have it kick off when the UPS says so, get a new SUV and Corvette, and keep growing. Outsource bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, and legal, and grow. Maybe be like the Canadian romantic matchmaking service Plenty of Fish, long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue.

Sure, if we were four co-founders, all married, with all four wives pregnant and wanting a new, two bath, three bedroom house, with a nice backyard, in a nice neighborhood, and a new SUV, for her, with a baby car seat, a play pen, a bassinet, a crib, a stroller, two washing machines, help with the housework, a GYN, OB, pediatrician, GP, dentist, dermatologist, optometrist, swimming instructor, etc., then, sure, we'd be desperate for equity funding! But, not me!

Looks fine so far.

$10 million a year is a lot for a mathematician on Wall Street.

In my school you had a class for 6 months: introduction to programming, that's it! The rest of the 5 years where basically only math/algorithms (machine learning, statistics, probability, compiler algorithms and such).

I've heard that this is changing as the industry values practical programming experience, but boy would I've been pissed if I'd spent 5 years to learn ancient tech.

I'm quite pissed about people getting a comp. sci. degree from knowing some C++, HTML5 and bubble-sort nowadays from shabby universities. Get of my lawn!

to get this I computed the function f(x,y) which is my expected value if I reroll if roll <= x and my opponent re-rerolls if roll <= y. let p be the optimal value. by symmetry f(p,p) = 0.5 so there must be a local minimum around that point. solving by taking a one sided derivative gives me (sqrt(5)-1)/2

How do we maximize EV? A single throw's pdf is 1, for x in [0,1], so its EV is 0.5. The question is how to improve on a single throw by deciding to re-throw. A re-throw is independent and gives the same EV. We want a strategy that gives us higher cumulative EV. Say our strategy is that we have a threshold A, where we re-throw any result below A. Because x is uniform, the probability that we re-throw is also A. The cumulative EV of the strategy is A * EV(second_throw) + (1-A) * EV(keep_first_throw). Since we only keep the first throw for results in [A,1], the EV for that event (integrating x * pdf from A to 1) is (1+A)/2. So EV of the whole strategy is A/2 + (1-A) * (1+A)/2. It has max EV when A is 0.5, giving EV of 5/8.

So how do you do better?