

On Becoming a Quant - kobs
http://www.markjoshi.com/downloads/advice.pdf

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cperciva
Non-broken link: <http://www.markjoshi.com/downloads/advice.pdf>

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kobs
Oops. I totally meant to put "(PDF)" in the title rather than the URL. Thanks.

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lisper
This suggests a possible improvement to HN: do a WGET on the URL and make sure
you get a status code of 200 before allowing the link to be posted.

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msort
There is another route to become a Quant, similar to become a start-up founder
in software/internet industry. You can just learn to trade by yourself with
some simple trading strategy. One popular strategy is "High Frequency"
automatic or semi-automatic trading. A friend of mine has achieved such a good
result which allows him quit his day job. I'm not saying this route is for
everyone or easier than learning at hedge funds or investment banks though.

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grepfruit
The high frequency trading is a term used to denote automated trading in
intervals of tenths to hundredths of second, in volumes of even hundreds to
millions $ in one transaction, so that is not something an individual would
do. Automated trading by itself is of course feasible for almost anyone
determined enough.

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ewjordan
_Automated trading by itself is of course feasible for almost anyone
determined enough._

...as well as a healthy bankroll to start with. If you can't maintain at least
$25,000 in your trading account, you can't day-trade anything but currencies,
so you can't really bootstrap from nothing. And if you don't have a _lot_ more
money than that to play with, you're never going to make enough to replace a
salary. Even if you're actually able to beat the market.

Which brings me to: don't underestimate the market. That doesn't mean it's
efficient, but it's very difficult to beat it by a large margin or without
considerable risk. A 51/49 edge can be very good if you can get enough trades
that offer those odds (forgive my putting it in those terms, I know it's not
completely accurate), but that's still going to mean that you can have huge
swings either way, even over a large number of trades.

And please, please, PLEASE don't assume that because something worked on
historical data it will necessarily work in the live market. There are so many
ways to arrive at faulty conclusions here, not the least of which is bad data
or analysis (no, your vanilla backprop network is not predicting daily S&P 500
returns, even if it looks like it when you compare it to the training
data...), so even if you've got a rock solid strategy that you're sure will
continue to work, make sure you could actually make the trades before you get
too excited. Don't assume highs, lows, or opens mean anything, pretty much
ever, because weird trades that you couldn't have made sometimes show up in
those. If you can, deal with bid/ask data (tick by tick, ideally) instead, and
make sure the things you want to trade are actually there long enough to get
them given your latency.

Needless to say, use a decent broker that charges low fees and lets you have
programmatic access to their trading platform. Most fail on both counts, so
beware.

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tlrobinson
_Most fail on both counts, so beware._

Potential startup? I have no idea if it's feasible, genuinely curious though.

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mnemonicsloth
Dated May 20, 2008.

"Investment Banks, e.g. Goldman Sachs, _Lehman Brothers_."

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ig1
It's pretty accurate, although it doesn't mention that many quant jobs can
actually cover several of the quant roles he mentions.

(I'm not a quant, but I work with quants and friends in the field)

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clistctrl
As a market geek (did I make that up?) this would be my dream job (if i have
to be employed by someone else) but I wonder how many quant jobs are outside
of NY? Live in Boston at the moment.

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msort
Chicago is another place for quantitative trading.

