
Ask HN: Any developer who transitioned from Tech to Quant Trading? - mightymosquito
As a developer what did it take for you to transition from Technology to Quantitative trading, and how does it compare to your life working in Technology?
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praeconium
Its bound to be extremely hard because though quants code and there should be
many similarities with soft dev - its a different beast. Many scientist make
the switch and run major firms, but someone like a front-dev making switch,
would be interesting to see. More likely to be smth outside of soft dev role
that got him in.

Quant crowd hangs on NuclearPhynance forum, but for what You are asking
WallStreetOasis is the place.

But..

1\. Not really PhD, but You have to learn math somewhere.

2\. Start trading crypto Yourself.. there are so many exchanges giving You
direct access for free.. fetch a market feed, reconstruct limit order book in
real time, backtest some strategies, do deep learning models. They do the
same.

3\. You have to be lucky, just like anywhere. There are lots of unsatisfied
people in tech though it pays more than ever.

4\. No idea.

5\. Two years or so, but previous roles were quantitative.

I am trying to make transition myself, let me know if You need more info..

www.vladovukovic.com

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mightymosquito
What would you suggest I read up on in quantitative finance and mathematics to
get started with algorithmic trading.

My background: I have a computer science graduate with about 5 years of
experience building very high throughput consumer facing applications as a
backend developer.

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thiago_fm
You can do it by yourself, if you create any algo that is able to perform
above 50% hit, you can get infinitely rich. Why work for a company if you can
do it? Or why would a company that does it would exist if somebody solo can do
this?

I'm a fundamentalist, so I hardly believe anybody can reliably make money
doing this. Maybe with HFT or insider information, which both are fields I
don't really wanna compete in, as they both feels like cheating to me(and the
second, illegal).

If anybody could reliably make money doing trades of any kind, which doesn't
either abuse insider information or latency of systems, they could as well
predict the future, the lotto ticket etc.

The people I think work on this field are working for big companies and
investing other people's money, which generally got a huge amount and by
themselves can sort of try to manipulate the market, usually have a taste of
inside information and generally get outperformed in the long term by somebody
that just reads balance sheets.

But this is a comment from an outsider, which has been making constantly more
gains than S&P(by a tight margin, dunno if this will last, maybe I'll just
regress towards the mean) for a decade, just checking balances sometimes. I
just invest in companies which are well managed, by my criteria, while I work
fulltime as a software dev.

Just try to imagine how many companies with open capital exists, and how bad
management can be, if you could find the good management in good markets, also
try to understand more how the government will influence it, you could create
much more powerful methods.

I've done a fair of trading though, mostly flipping IPO's, but I don't believe
somebody can make money doing trades.

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godelmachine
By Quantitative Trading, you mean full-time trading, right? Like buying and
selling stocks. I don't think this designation requires knowledge of
algorithms.

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mightymosquito
By quantitative trading I refer to people who do algorithmic trading for a
living.

People from tech generally end up becoming quantitative developers(implement
trading strategies other people make),and some go even further and make their
own trading strategies(which it what traditional quants do. Correct me if I am
wrong here).

I would like to know experiences of people who transitioned this field from
pure technology. Some key points are:

1\. What did you have to learn as a experienced developer to break into this
field(do really NEED a Phd in Mathematics or Finance?!?!) 2\. Whats the work
like? 3\. Does it pay as much as it hyped to be? 4\. How does it compare to
your life back in Tech? 5\. How long after working in tech did you make a
switch?

