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As you can imagine I have a pretty good spam filter and the majority of easily spotted crap contains Cyrillic and Chinese characters, so it often gets binned. If you're sending a resume to me or anoyne else you think might help get you a job, I would advise you only to use western (ie ASCII)...

Dullu, which country do you have to go back to, is it Brazil ? I suspect something is wrong with your CV, the outline of your experience implies that although the market at entry level is still weak, you ought to have got some interviews.

I agree that for MC development and learning 4 cores is adequate, but someone wanting to go the whole way might want to look at GPU computing. There is of course Amdahl's law, so don't ever imagine that 8 cores will go 8x as fast, though it can be instructive to deal with the extra chance of...

I think there should be a section on "Should I choose this line of work ?" I good % of the threads on QN and Wilmott.com are around that theme, so people clearly want help and given the cost and importance of the decision they are wise to seek advise. I volunteer to write that part. The...

The CQF is much more about the maths of markets than the CFA, so it might match your existing skills better. I hadn't realised you were in London, why don't you come along to an open evening, that wought to answer a lot of questions ?

As you may know Clatty, I have an interest in the CQF... What is your background in terms of education ?

Programming in what ?

I agree with those who say do economics, the term "Quant" gets overloaded quite a bit and I think you'd find it very hard to get in to what most people here call quant work from where you are now. You could do the certificate in mathematical methods as part of the CQF, it would be very hard...

I suppose it's a bit late now, but you made the right choice.

Yes, Precision is "desktop replacement", ie low footprint, they are quite heavy and a 17" screen will never make for easy portability. Mine doesn't get out all that much but some people have mentioned the incongruity of a headhunter in a nice suit and Thomas Pink shirt occasionally seen with a...

In general, yes, but it depends a bit on your background.

For whatever reason I find Type *p to be more readable, I guess because it is more common.

MathAndrw, "Doesn't IC have a career service ?" Yes it has two, sadly the OP has only access to the dysfunctional one, the business school is much better. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to help ecanif because not long ago Imperial College's career service sent mailout forbidding City recruiters...

My previous Precision has lasted 5 years, it still works, it just isn't really all that mobile any more.

There was recently a thread on Quantnet about laptops for Quants and I mentioned that I just bought myself a nice 8 core Intel I7 & 17" LCD laptop from Dell, it's predecessor was of course famous for being the host of my C++ lectures that so many of you have watched. It doesn't work, keeps...

Vol modelling is classical quant work, but I suspect the Econometrics will give you the best chance of a decent job. VaR will be with us always and represents the least risky choice since it will make you attractive for risk jobs. Ken is right about the current situation, but you shouldn't...

Yes, Barny it is, that was to illustrate my point with one cause of subjectivity :) Does it shock you that alma maters appear when people tell me what schools are good ? However I note a contradiction, either you've never heard of QMC or it's laughable, you can't really have both. QM did fall...

It seems to me that the last part of the article contains a big truth. It mentions the "free market" which we were all taught is an information aggregation mechanism. Given that information, what would you do with share in a firm that did this ?

The market is indeed competitive and there exists a subset of hiring managers who focus on Oxbridge, however the smarter end of HRs and HH typically interpret "Oxbridge" to mean IC,Warwick,QMC, as well as oxford and Cambridge, but not of course Reading which is in its heart a teacher training...

Katrina have you got a source ? The breakdowns I've seen for parts+labour seemed pretty plausible, but if you have a better source, please share ?

Had lunch last week with a "classical" quant, one eminent enough to have a model named after him and he is broadly of the opinion that the time for new pricing models has passed for most instruments. My view is congruent with that position, being unsure whether we are at a turning point in the...

Antifragility by Nassim Taleb

Andy, it must be said that the iPads are priced really quite cheaply for what is inside them, breakdowns of the parts and realistic costs for labour make it a relatively low margin product. Apple make their money on other things.

As someone who has pulled a few 40 hour days over the years, it's clear to me that any given individual has a maximum and that it varies for that person across time. Yes, your productivity goes negative, but it begs the question of what you are doing ? One coping mechanism I develop is being...

AS others have mentioned, the CQF does not have a careers service, partly because a good % are paid for by their employers, but you might ask yourself what else I do on the CQF apart from C++

Deferred bonus has several purposes and nothing you've said is unique to HFs. Yes it is to tie you in. Second it makes clawbacks easier, you haven't seen them yet ? That's why I'm here. Third it is to make the timing and structure of your comp the same as management, that's not so much a...

Getting economic theory from the Guardian is like getting biology from evangelicals. We're actually in an area that I've spent some effort in understanding, it's called agency theory, been a respectable part of mainstream economics since before nearly all here were born, apparently it's news...

I think it's wrong to model any education simply in terms of returns, frankly if you have done an MFE and still think that way, you've wasted your time and money. Education buys you a bunch of options, so the first term we need to add is risk, education gives you more options when the fan is...

News analytics are trendy

Although it may be confusing, trust me when I say a lot of entry level people would like to be in the position where batting off hedge funds, google and M$ is a hassle. First question is of course how good are you at maths ? The term "quant developer" is getting overloaded (as in the normal...

The trick here is to spot internships that are in effect some form of apprenticeship and those that are just looking for cheap labour. So how do you do that ?

Andy is 100% right, I'm currently sitting literally next door to JP Morgan and directly above a prop FX shop, but don't expect today to have any contact with either of them at all. Effective networking is a function of you, not your location unless you're in Hawaii or Byelorussia. A bit of...

Having taught logic, and studied economics I see it as perfectly logical. The economic topic most relevant is agency theory, studying they way employees maximise their utility according to their perception of the incentives in their employment. The people who run the former "University" of...

Sadly, I am under an implied obligation not to publish such a list, however I am at liberty to talk of schools to avoid...

Just so you know, we now no longer regard Florida as a university, note I'm not saying good university, its leadership has decided to take up a position somewhere between a Bible college and the induction process given to cleaners at Disneyworld who to be fair are really quite good at their...

I agree with kpranjal that diversity should not be high in your list of criteria, geographical or otherwise, though as I've said before I don't believe the correlation between quality of programme and those taking it is as high as it should be, but at least that's some data in a low data...

Here's why I don't think Quant will only be an option in MBAs.... Firstly let's look at programming, now MBAs typiccally do a bit of this, but it's dressed as as what people here would see as naive modelling. However there are vast legions of people still doing CS and being hired as such...

One thing I'd note is how little quants get out. I am a professional attender of conferences, seminars, etc and the pool of Quants who talk to to peers outside their team is a lot smaller than it should be. Although one needs to concentrate on the work, you can too easily lose perspective, yes...

I'm going to be careful about separating reality and perception, but if I fail to make it clear, as a headhunter I observe that the "branding" of a school/course and the value it adds are correlated but far from the same thing. People who manage the recruitment of grads are spectacularly...

WLFGNGPCK is right most of quant work is based on applied maths.

I'ts not a "dilemma" as Andy suggests, it's racism. This "Diversity" is just a more complex form of racism, reflecting the prejudices of people in academia as opposed to other people who think the colour of your skin or your accent is the principal determinant of your worth. One thing I've...

It's generally accepted that quants spend aobut 60% of their time doing some form of programming. Recently I was talking to a quant who has models named after him, he can write C++ DLLs for Excel addins, something a good % of IT department programmers would be intimidated by. Some quant work...

Andy is right, there's a lot of people frustrated in their finance work, indeed mfe_candidate shows some of the things I experienced in my last real job before I quit to become a headhunter. I model this as an energy term, that provides motivation for changing things at the price of greater...

The first question is what do you want to actually do ?

As far as I know, there isn't a dedicated algotrading masters course in the USA, there is one at UCL in London and that's pretty much it. Jim Gatheral at Baruch has done some good stuff in this area, but their MFE is not optimised wrt HFT. Be aware that Quant MFEs are mostly about things that...

One way this case is interesting is that he appears to have been caught by someone in his own firm, something that is quite common for low-mid level offences and he did something that was pretty flagrant and had a paper trial of him trying to cover up. From that point he was a dead man walking...

Just to clarify, when I say "theory of languages" I mean a course that compares different ways of expressing constructs as well as different constructs. For instance a language may implement a variant of for...loops that allows each iteration to be done in parallel, not just in sequence. That...

There's two different games here, so there are different criteria for employment and admission to programmes. One thing that has not been mentioned is grades, these are important because there is a trade off between learning as much as possible by stretching and looking good on paper. I say...

Where did you do your undergrad ?

I'd refine"CS" to mean a deep insight into computers which gets you to the point where you know the difference between a pointer, a smart pointer and a stack pointer, indeed unless you know all three don't ever call yourself a competent programmer on a resume you send me. Most quants don't...

Back in the day I had a column in PC Mag about this stuff and then I used ODBC which is a C style library, powerful but not easy to use until you get the hang of the way it does memory, the gold standard in debugging nasty SQL client/server problems but no concept of C++ classes. I lean...

bullion mentions CS and that prompts me to a line of thought based upon a Quant headhunter's grasp of financial economics, a disclaimer in itself... When I give career advice a common theme is that "easy, riskless" ways to make money are inherently unstable, enough that "riskless" should be...

On this forum I have more than once suggested to some people that stats might be a better masters for them, being cheaper and as you say applicable to pretty much every industry. It doesn't rule you out of quant jobs either.

They are reluctant, but it is possible if you have what they want.

Some will reject you on the basis of age, even if they don't say so for legal reasons. I guess the issue is what you've done with the last 20 years and what you want to do. An MBA + MSc in S/W eng does not imply to me that you've done the right maths and IT consultancy does not set and...

At 5-6 years experience $3-500K is not very unusual, but nor is 200K, it's a distribution. You expect the % of pay that is bonus to increase as the total comp goes up, at the 300K level, I'd put the base pay on about 120-150, but again it varies to include 90% of pay being bonus and vice...

bullion is right about the perils of only knowing one language, but I think you've mostly already avoided that problem and also that programming is a creative process. Porting is a good workout but you need to write code to do stuff as well and porting between similar languages won't help you to...

Ken is right, whenever I advise people on choosing between job offers or on taking a job, I always explore with them the job after the one they may move to. It's hard and hardly deterministic but a valuable process. Risk pay shows some signs of improving, but frankly not very much. I will...

katrina :Doesnt growth in GDP have more to do with population size these days ? There seems to be a correlation, but in general GDP growth is measure in % so absolute size shouldn't drive that, except... I believe their size is a cause for their growth... Their size enabled India and Chinese...

If you want "life changing" advice that's any good, I'm afraid all I have is a method for working out how to change it, not a path that will lead you to where you want to be. As a headhunter I do a reasonable amount of career advice and a central point is helping the candidate work out what he...

They were indeed crap British professors, evidence for their lack of ability comes from believing nonsense like the US doing the world's thinking. My point about evolution is to illustrate a basic flaw in their argument. Any country where that many people actively disbelieve in evolution has...

Firstly of course, the idea of Americans "doing the world's" thinking was always laughable. America does indeed have a good % of the top universities on the planet, but the average is not great and it has the literacy and religious obseverance levels of a 3rd world country. Remove from the...

Following bullion, one thing that has bugged for for a while is why, for a given level of ability, finance has paid better than most other lines of work. That arbitrage should have been traded away long ago, maybe we are in that phase now. "Passion" or "enthusiasm" for the work is a critical...

There is tech of algotrading at UCL, but a reasonably standard MFE isn't really ideal preparation for working in this area.

I'm interested in what are your choices above Imperial and why ?

Why the MBA and not an MFE ?

Sounds like so far you've followed the anti-fragile style suggested by Taleb, you've bought options at a low cost and they may pay off. However... I must warn against doing a PhD as a purely career option, 4-5 years of your life in mostly self driven study/research is a brutal price to pay for...

I'm interested in what has led you to believing that HFs want mostly CS grads ? You're right that Imperial has the worst careers service of any British university, actively seeking to piss off people who would find jobs for their grads. The only reason I don't say "worst in the world" is...

As someone who works on people after Nola's team has finished educating them, I'm interesting in the interview based upon "character"; we do stuff like that because ideally we'd like to find people who'd fit into a given team but i'd be interested in what sort of things you look for, I'd really...

Career paths for quants are both diverse and random. A bundle of paths are what I call project management, a mix of finding out what needs to be done, getting people to do it and adjusting the result to be useful. That's a mix of people management, IT, business analysis and general...

I'm a classical liberal (not in the US sense) so I see the role of the state as to serve it's people, not to serve itself. The justification for any state supported program is whether it is a sensible allocation of resources to help students get good careers, where they have them is none of its...

One thing I picked upon was that SecurityWeek described him as "Chinese" in the headline, which given that his name is Zhang anyone who cared could work out for themselves. There is of course the issue of the People's Republic spying on the US, but this very clearly is not the case, he lifted...

In describing jobs, which "office" the job is "in" has to an extent fallen victim to being a term of approval or disapproval rather than what part of the process you contribute to. Some firms have built central quant groups which do some work that is clearly FO like HFT but may also support...

Econometrics is a decent enough way to get into Quant work, indeed a criticism I sometimes hear of MFE programs is the relative weakness in this area.

Thanks for sharing that Andy, any idea what's going on ? Given the notice periods that I'd expect for the staff, my guess is that they lost some critical staff, but I've no inside info at all.

Nano, my background has led me to a position where from the start I separate evaluation of candidates from where I look for them, I first learned of conditional probability 33 years ago, it's now pretty much hardwired into my thinking, just in time for me to go senile :( The general...

"I think this was the "last straw", when the professor told us, that if we calculate the wrong number, and the traders trade on that, we can be fired immediately" This is pretty rare and it was told to you by an academic, not a practitioner. It's not my job (as I define it) to sell you on...

Use a land line, mobiles often make it harder to be understood.

I fear that I have to be the grown up here and point to history... America has since its inception flatly refused to accept the IP rights of other countries, the system by design was set up not to make it easy for foreigners to protect their IP. Am I the only person here who knows this ?

Georgina: Are people with PhD in physics still hired at financial firms, as quants? Yes, fewer but still is a common thing, most of the decrease is general softness in the entry level end of the market, not an aversion to physics PhDs. As for whether it is optimal to do an MFE on top of a PhD...

Asian education is partly shaped to deal with the bulk rote learning necessary to learn the primitive Japanese & Chinese forms of writing, it is simply not possible for anyone, no matter how smart he is, to work out for himself what a given symbol means. It's top down and structured which has...

I am sorely tempted to use my database to survey hiring managers, see what they think. That of course only gives us one part of the picture, part of the joy in my life is occasionally they ask for people who've done an MFE at Cambridge. ...there isn't one, which kind of shows the power of...

It may be that engineering physics is a better than average PhD to do quant work, because it depends upon what exactly you did and to some extent where you did it. Some engineering is exactly the right kind of maths & numerical analysis and at the other extreme some engineering/physics PhDs...

One thing I don't yet have a good measure on is the "impressiveness" of an MFE if you bail out and do something else. By that I mean that if you do (say) a masters in history at Cambridge, employers will generally assume you are basically smarter than most grads and remember that many jobs...

I may be one of the people guilty of emphasising "technical" skills over stoch calc, that's because I'm assuming that anyone here who cares about my advice has studied things that he's been told to study and that he's done his best and got there. So I focus on things that give you an edge or...

I fear Darth that your advice is on the dark side. The information on university web sites for business oriented masters programs are about as honest as those for anti-ageing creams. Consider the following statements: 87 % of Fordham alumni say that it helped them get their jobs. 87% of women...

JesseLevermore, given that far less than 1% of Africans go to the USA for education and that there are no top ranked universities there with a quite miserable average many would like to, it is not unreasonable to suspect that only an elite get to the USA. Of course "elite" is not quite the...

helpteye: You say "Your argument seems most logical, however, you fail to account for the possible effect of harsh events like slavery, colonialism, imposition of new cultures, etc;" At the risk of being called racist, that's the sort of whining self pitying nonsense nonsense I expect from black...

purplyboy : There are easily >1,000 new entry level quant jobs per year, but of course MFEs must compete with other types of qualification. No firm "creates jobs for MFEs", they have work to do and people apply for them, it's a labour market and as such is not a deterministic process.

bansalmohit I don’t do MFE endorsements, but it is on the record that I regularly attend lectures at Cass and Barny and I do not disagree that the PartIII / MASt at Cambridge represents remarkably good value. I’ve taken a little time to look deeper at the wretchedly bogus FT rankings. First...

I wish you were wrong Andy, if we were to take at face value the questions on forums like this, the primary criterion for evaluating an MFE program seems to be the reputation of the university as a whole based upon how many people it rejects.

Daniel is right and FPGA is even more hardware dependent. That's a big reason why I've pushed the idea that to be a good developer you need to understand more of the hardware and what the CPU does with your code. Of course housekeeping code, like GUIs can be written in Java or VB and data...

If I could get all CVs in the modern version of Word format (>= Office 12) it would make quite a lot of tasks easier and faster. But I can't, and since there are several Word formats and several PDF extra work has to happen anyway. Some automated CV parsers have problems with PDFs (others can't...

Job title inflation is greater in front office A risk person with front office experience will tend to get better career options and money. Risk is on average more stable than trading and some of what we see in pay is survivorship bias and given that the better risk jobs are easier to get...

So he got fined a pitifully small amount and was banned for one month ? Also the present tense is used, so he's still working at the firm where he screwed up. Hardly cruel or unusual punishment is it ? Also why, exactly did the CME system accept these orders ? It really really is not...

There are indeed quants in risk management, some very good ones as it happens, though the average is worrying and the variance frankly terrifying. There is a political legacy because of how risk groups have evolved at many banks and many heads of risk are not even vaguely competent to do their...

I agree with Connor that this is a really bad idea. You don't share the real reason for your grades and I guess I draw the job of asking why you believe that you will do well in this line of work ?

If money is a real issue, it's worth looking at masters in statistics which are a lot cheaper.

In some ways, it's more interesting to ask why there is so little of this ? Why are there >10,000 people teaching Calculus 101 ? Some parts of university level education requires that you are taught by someone at the frontier of that field, but very few 1st or second year undergrads are up...

Snuff by Terry Pratchett and an as yet unpublished book on the philosophy of probability.

The issue is "can this language help me express what I want the computer to do ?"

I can speak Cantonese. Actually, no, that's a lie, I barely speak French and my German causes natives to laugh out loud. But if it was critical to my life, I could blag my way through a 5 minute video, indeed at webcam quality I reckon I could do lipsync. It would be a lot harder to fake my...

Rajeev, bansalmohit I'm not allowed to endorse any given finance program, but oddly I am at liberty to condemn anything. Imperial has two career departments, one is a bunch of peasants who write to recruiters like me with the apparent goal of pissing us off and the other seems OK by UK standards.

I was sent this by a partner at a huge us law firm and whereas it's optimised with respect to lawyers it applies to MFEs just as well. http://www.rollonfriday.com/Blogs/ReadBlog/tabid/144/Id/861/Default.aspx

Manchester is not a top school anymore., LSE is on our watch list for a downgrade. Although I have a professional interest in the cout of MFE programs, I confess that stdin process mystifies me, some want essays for reasons that make no sense to me at all. You sound like you've got pretty much...

I find the idea of Oracle "championing" anything to be at variance with my experience. Note how they are now screwing with Java Linux distros so as to make their O/Ses seem more attractive. Of course that's not enough for many people to move to an Oracle O/S, but as long as the number >0 then...

If a teenager took at C++ course and didn't say he found it "challenging" then I'd be worried, but Andy is right, there is a certain mindset for being excellent at programming part of which is doing stuff for it's own sake, a pattern that I believe carries across to excellence in almost any...

It says on your avatar that you're new round here, so I'll share my standard advice for choosing subjects. What do you enjoy doing ? What are you better at than most other people ? What seems to offer the best income ? That ordering is not coincidental and the terms are related; it is really...

Risk seems to be the strongest area at the moment.

If all we are talking about is branding then we have to take into account where you did your undergrad degree. You also have to ask yourself why you can more easily get in to do a MSc than a PhD...

It will hurt your chances a bit, has to be said.

"recognized" is a tricky term and about as subjective as it gets. I "recognize" part time finance PhDs from Birkbeck but not Imperial even though on most rankings Imperial is rather higher. Also there is a grey area where some people switch from full to part time PhDs, so I "recognize" a...

Zeuge, already we are seeing jobs in China where they pay more than the US, not that many of course but the trend is up. Material standard of living is a complex issue and heavily affected by personal preferences, but on average $X in China is worth more than in the USA. I believe that the...

To introduce myself, I'm a headhunter who specialises in people who do maths to banks... I'm with Andy here, from the info you're sharing you will be late 30s /early 40s before starting work in a bank which is a definite possibliity but a more than slightly risky bet with your career. Is it...

As a unAmerican I can't help but see this trend as largely good... Too many Americans have no experience or even idea about the world outside it's borders, the % who have even never owned a passport is nearer that of a reclusive dictatorship than a developed country. Many will come back...

Cython has variable typing which means that going back to Python is tricky, but yes it does seem to be in a sweet spot between performance and productivity. It's in a few banks already.

...but not a very good economist... If you wanted to do good, pretty much independent of what you meant by "good", that would not be an even vaguely optimal method.

At the risk of starting another language war, I must say that I don't believe as strongly as KaiRu that FPGAs are the future, certainly they are a part of the future, but GPUs are better for some tasks. It is the case that more HFT is done in C/C++ than GPUs and FPGAs combined, some even use...

31 is not that old for a PhD. The next CQF batch starts in January, when do you finish your Phd ?

I think the thing you might want to start with is wget, a tool that downloads a site into a collection of files. Or alternatively you can build from scratch using serf. Both are optional part of the Cygwin package and thus workson Windows using it's libraries. Although the tools diverge for...

The thing is that there is inevitably a correlation with the S&P since they both reflect a view on future of the economy.

One factor to take into account is which courses your bank will pay for. At some of course it is zero, but many CQFers are paid for by their employers and your HR department will have its own views.

If you had "a process for determining future stock prices," you'd sell it? I have finite capital, a bank has greater capital and access to at least as many instruments as I do. It can therefore make more money than I can, so taking a rake off of a larger sum seems optimal to me.

Assuming that your certainty is well founded (and legal), then you must have a process for determining future stock prices. Since it is a process, it is presumably repeatable and explainable to a 3rd party to whom you can sell it.

Reminds me of someone being interviewed by my last firm. She was asked about a "blip" on her academic record, which in itself wasn't enough to stop her getting the job. She replied that she'd been out partying the night before and her hangover stopped her getting a good grade. No job offer was...

Possibly the path of least resistance is quant developer.

A lot depends on what you mean by a "quant", but accounting and finance degrees rarely have enough math to prepare you for this line of work. Also there is a strong correlation between the inherent maths ability of a candidate and the sort of degree they do and yours is one where the correlation...

albo, I don't believe we disagree that much, I was reflecting what the students want, not what I see as good. I also agree that the focus on PhDs, MFEs and other academic qualifications is not idea for the industry or the staff and I see the emergence of "quantitative finance" undergrad degrees...

A university is not a monolithic entity... When attending the installation of the new head of my old schools maths department he was bemoaning the way that so many of his most talented students go into finance. There was a bit of a silence amongst in our group broken by me explaining that umm...

1: If retail FX traders are losing money, it follows that someone else is making it, question is can it be you ? Some FX algo traders are making real money but the nature of this activity is that any given strategy either fades or gets mined out. Some FX traders are executing trades either...

Both have value and are close enough that it should be driven by your current skills and ambitions. If you have a heavy maths background Data mining could be great to give you coverage in an area you are weak but could prosper in. Conversely Statistics will help someone with an strong software...

Is a refinement of this "don't get caught talking about bonuses ?"

As Anthony says, it is an asymmetric expectation of payoffs and not in your favour. That of course is not a good thing, but my job is it tell it like it is, not as it should be, it only takes one religious nut in admissions to screw up your application. Alexei's point about the diversity of...

Here are 7 Rules of bonuses I have observed, there may be more, any suggestions ? Law Zero Everyone lies about their bonus First Law Your bonus is a function of how much they want you to stay based upon your performance and the market, and nothing else at all. It is not a reward. Second...

Ah, Fordham, it has gone quiet on that front... Although I post on Quantnet, I am of course not in any way part of the organisation, so that "reaching out" didn't reach me. When they dug themselves into a hole I sent various mails to them, but of course I'm only a Quant recruiter so they never...

What is "gambling" ? There is no such thing as a risk free instrument, even cash may be stolen and certainly will suffer from non-deterministic inflation. A simple, long term holding of a mix of blue chip equities can vary in price by enough to ruin your life or make you affluent. Arbitrage...

At the risk of saying "I told you so", some time ago I did point out that as cash cows MFE programs would come under pressure to increase their size to help the general budget of their universities. Doubling student numbers without compromising quality is not that hard to do, many resources...

I agree with Amanda that engineering can be at least as sexist as banking, and would refine her advice as taking the time to work out what "better" means in the precise context of this job. It's easy to wrongly order priorities and quality vs time and which things your management care about...

bansalmohit :But now with the finest educational institutions going to countries like China we might see a major change where the next Google and Twitter are born. Is US victim of its foreign policies? Yes, but not the one of its government. Forgive me for saying this, but only an American...

I find MS SQL quite a lot easier to use and in particular sucking data in is rather easier. A depressing % of my life has been coercing data into a DBMS, MS SQL reduces that pain. Be aware that of all the systems vendors I have ever dealt with, Oracle are easily the most maliciously actively...

We've had a thread about the existence of sexism but to me it's not the issue we should discuss. I'm more interested in strategies in dealing with it because society is beyond my control but advising people is something I can do, but I do not feel the counseling I give on this topic is as good...

Yike Lu brings up a point, that it is a labour market, and that it is hard for an employer to pay much less than others for the same quality of staff and it becomes an irrational choice when they lose staff because of it. A perception I see in both women and their employers is that women are...

Georgina, I have anecdotal evidence that identically performing women get paid less, but I have never ever seen clear data. In all the cases I've seen the numbers there is considerably arm waving and nonsense like "equal worth" whatever that means. That doesn't mean I don't believe it happens it...

Ilya, maybe but I don't know your last name.

I teach ethics on the CQF, (yes a headhunter teaching ethics to bankers, go figure) Part of my argument is that the world is not only non deterministic, you can't realistically know what is best for most other people. Yes there are some obvious bad things, but in general it is tough. In...

Amber makes an interesting point but it's a complex issue. In the early days of my last real job I was perceived as arrogant (who me ?) and not meshing with the team as well as I should. So I took to picking up coffees for people, an easy fix since I drink more than most anyway. The trick in...

Excellent, thanks for the link. They certainly aren't sloppy and I particularly like number 7, the Hagan Blount one. Part of your application strategy should be to have multiple resumes a risk management technique that is much the same as "don't put all your eggs in one basket". A weird CV...

I've never been a trader, but you have a grace period where you can say, "I'm new here, could you explain how this part of the business works ?" without looking or feeling foolish. Use it.

Stupid mistakes can kill your application Over at The Register I talk in terms of IT resumes, but as you'd expect much of it is the same for Quants. We are in interesting times and even in good times the best jobs are competed hard for and despite the skepticism I hear that "I'm a quant, not a...

I agree that it's wise to make sure you have somewhere to run if Plan A goes belly up.

I agree abut the attitude, quite odd, why do you need to tell us Cambridge is in the UK ? BTW I'm not American like many here, this is not a cultural thing. Why did you under achieve at exams ? Be aware that to get a job, more exams are in your way including interviews where hard questions are...

As Andy says that piece was "opinion".... The typical case is X% of the fixed part of first year pay, AKA "contingency" recruitment. There is typically a cap. Then there is "retained" where a fixed fee is negotiated, more senior appointments work like that. In house recruiters do a large %...

ilya:My issue is with employers just enlarging the labor pool they can select from via work visas. That alternative is that they send the work overseas which I suspect you don't want either. Alternatively they don't and are undercut by those that do, or they hire less good staff. If you reduce...

Protestors, taking care to dress "city gentleman" more than I normally do, complete with poppy. (For US readers, the traditional way of showing support for ex-servicemen in Britain is to wear a paper poppy for the first half of November) They talked reasonably about their issues and I think...

I suspect the timescales for the Oxford offer don't give you a big enough window to go through the application process anywhere else before you have to decide, so I see the question as whether you take Oxford or not. I think one has to ignore the current economic shitstorm, not because it is...

adt, you are correct which is why I asked why you were thinking of Cambridge. The JBS program is not a quant course ) I hear tell they may do a quant MFE at some point but I can't find out when. Apparently people take my opinions seriously enough that I'm not allowed to endorse MFEs, but the...

Although I have reservations about the LSE, I don't have an issue about their acceptance rate and I fail to see why you you sh0uld either. If they accepted more people w9uld it be a worse course, could they "improve" it by randomly rejecting people ? Also I'd like to ask what quant course you...

As soon as I work out how to attach files to Quantnet posts I will put up some lecture notes I did on how to call C++ from VBA. Provided pointers don't scare you it's not too hard.

I have to ask whether you are taking this seriously as a signal ? Some people are going to be good at this line of work, other are going to be less good and I don't think I am surprising you by saying that banking is a competitive game, so have you spent real effort finding the kind of job in...

This is pretty much on the money, but a few pedantic points... Beware that headhunters who work on a contingency basis will claim to "own" you with respect to a referral to a firm for a specific period of time -- it could be 3 months; it could be longer. That's typically enforced by the bank...

Sadly, I'm just about to leave for Florida so won't really have time to speak to the protestors. Both BBW and Anthony make good points and one thing that has not come up is how much criticism has come from inside the industry. I go to a lot of conferences and talk to a good number of people in...

My point is, during ALL human history, the ONLY time we tried small governement, no income tax and low regulations, the richest natio of human history was born. On the CQF I teach a lecture which I was persuaded to not call "Remedial Logic", but this comment illustrates why it is necessary. You...

All parties are coalitions of people who share much less consistent views than they would like the outside to believe. Movements like the Tea party or the Occupy crowd aren't actually all that different and beyond things that people care about are the many many things that any given individual...

Kristi, obviously the protesting guy is more "intellectual" in the same way that a graduate of a Bible College would come across more knowledgeable when confronted by my 7 year old son. He spouted cliched bullshit, but the corporate guy was too ignorant to point out that he both misquoted and...

martingaletrader:Yet another school tries to make money out of its brand name. I agree, but the question is whether this is a bad thing ? I don't know in this case. Historically brands evolved to allow customers to know with confidence that what they were getting was of a defined quality and...

He will be missed, it is something of a cliche but reading his book did genuinely change my life for the better and I am far from unique.

Now, that's a very good question. There are N issues: Firstly, my olderson has enrolled in the AI course, but that is not the same as saying he went to Stanford, in particular it means all he had to do was lie on the application form since apparently it did not occur to them that a 10 year old...

BBW, I feel embarassed that since I am the one around here who is loudest about programming skills, I've been loose about how you actually acquire them. Yike enumerates goals, so I would like to offer advice on how to get them. 0: programming is an imperative craft, you are doing something to a...

Yike and Andy are right, as a quant headhunter I'd start by asking you to take some time and ask yourself whether this line of work is for you. A couple of people I've known discovered that (like me) they cannot stand sick people, an unfortunate characteristic for a doctor who has spent years...

I've had that, first you need to see a proper medic, when you're taking medical advice from a headhunter on the Internet, you cannot always be guaranteed a 100% accurate diagnosis... I suspect your problem, like mine is not medical but psychological. Eyes normally rarely actually ever look at...

MRoss analogy to doctors is pretty good. Fact is that most doctors do no research, they are problem solvers, consultants and business people. In talking to quants I of course see survivorship bias, those who are still quants are those feel that's the best option for them, but I think most are as...

Do structurers need to have deep understanding about the market? Some do, certainly they should, but it's not so much about the market as the customer's perception of the market. Do they have to form their own views regarding where the market is going? Yes, but they then have to ignore them...

Structuring does not currently seem the place to be, but it is not going away as an activity and over time I expect it to grow back most of what it is currently losing. Sales intersect with structuring as does quant work, but there's a different mix of skills. Sales includes activities like...

What this chart doesn't show is the creation of any financial institutions or the growth of players outside this oligopoly... I can show by the same mechanism that the human race will die out within a generation by the simple expedient of ignoring those being born. Blackrock is the first that...

The thing about states of any kind is that their job is "fixer of last resort". There's dozens of activities in the commercial sector that cannot be allowed to break down, pumping sewage, generating power, phones, food production and many more. That's not as BBW implies fascism but what I...

I think I disagree with BBW that these people are "confused", I think each individual is not confused but that the media give the impression that this is a coherent group. First thing you need to understand is that protesting is fun, there's dressing up, hanging out, a bit of shouting, enough...

Yes, much of what I say about Java applies to C# and for that matter to Python, Ruby et al. The cited article was written for a general finance jobs site, I would have phrased it differently for somewhere like Quantnet. The price of all skills has a decay function, you are in effect trading an...

Enrollment in British CompSci programmes also dropped hard. I agree with BBW that many poeple can't be taught it usefully in schools, fine teach the ones that can learn. I cannot play the guitar, as in I can't fly, tried and my teacher just gave up. That applies to everything aside from core...

Earlier this year I did some headhunting for the BBC... They wanted people to talk about bonuses and as you can imagine no one wanted to talk to the BBC except the PR people at banks whose job it is to say nothing. However we developed a protocol based upon the one they use for dissidents in...

Oddly up until this very moment when I read this post, it had never occurred to me that risk is modelled in terms of Greeks, which to me is ironic.

Much of this thread demonstrates why my firm will never ever publish our blue list that evaluates programs. The connection between QN and Baruch is well disclosed and the methdology is open, which I commend given that I have long concluded that the only way to explain MBA and similar rankings...

There's an interesting ethical issue here, something that intersects with my work both as a headhunter and educator. At what age do you treat people like grown ups ? In most places that's 18 which means some critical decisions about your university education are made when you are legally a...

There's an interesting ethical issue here, something that intersects with my work both as a headhunter and educator. At what age do you treat people like grown ups ? In most places that's 18 which means some critical decisions about your university education are made when you are legally a...

I'm writing a "How to be a Rogue Trader" piece for The Register, I believe it is the most cynical thing I've ever written.

One effect of outsourcing has been the interaction between capital and labour in production. When you produce goods or services you must choose what to automate and what to do by hand. People need paying but machinery costs money up front. If we take a machine depreciating at 10% and cost of...

Was this the Brainbench test ?

I've no problem at all imagining a Greek default, the question is whether that means it has to leave the Euro... Although Greece is a guarantor of the currency, it's a tiny % of the Euro land economy, so I do not see any reason why it must be kicked out and I don't believe it will choose to...

I can see why you're doing this and do not think it is a bad idea as such, but part of me thinks you ought to be modelling some physical process.

Rudy Giuliani is a one hit wonder, a mediocre mayor of NY who was dimwitted enough to allow a major disaster management centre to be in a known major terrorist target and oversaw plans for disasters that were tragically inept. His one achievement is not sitting in a corner crying after 9/11, but...

We don't recruit for Google, indeed until Ilya wrote this I had been under the impression that they didn't use external recruiters at all. But it seems that they don't handle the process element of recruitment better than the average bank.

Actually as a headhunter, and mentioning no names I will share that there exist quite a few people with the job title of Quantitative Analyst at Google. But it is a good question. A job can be measured as a series of discounted cash flows, indeed I've been engaged by a bit of the UK government...

Daniel, just because a single currency is desirable does not mean the cost of it is worth the benefits. ItalUK, giving power to Eurocrats is scary, so is dentistry or cancer surgery. I must say I have no time at all for the "small countries will be crushed" idea. Any number of smaller...

Rishab, you've predicted how I suspect that the Eurocrats will try to make it work. I draw examples from history... The USA is in effect the result of multiple currency unions, where the currency used by various states/territories/purchases was unified wit the dollar. The states were given no...

If anything S&P have over-rated the stability of a Euro-bond It's not just the weakness of the weakest member, it is basically saying to the majority of Europeans that no matter how much they spend, or how uncompetitive their economy, the Germans will bail them out. So it's not the weakest...

I'd like to agree with Alain more, but I must say that the correlation I observe between how smart a CompSci PhD is, and how much he earns is not great. If someone told me it was actually negative, I might even believe him. There exist certain skills like signal processing where smart CS PhDs...

Fenzo, a serious problem for people like me is that Chinese education certificates don't correlate with reality all that well. It may have more graduates than any civilized country but the average quality ain't good, made worse by the fact that the education system is corrupt as well. Indian...

I regard "based on photos" as a shabby form of diagnosis, and combines the ability to say things that are almost certainly untrue with a decent legal screen. Jobs ain't well which is sad but the Tech industry is well rid of this scumbag. He is not in any way responsible for any innovation and...

Collating all the results, cleaning the data took more of the summer than I expected so before we start the Herculean task of mailing PDFs to 120,000 people, I'm going to be streaming them on Google+ as they come off the production line and as they look interesting and trustworthy. If you want...

Entry level pay is surprisingly hard to extract accurately because of the effect of partial years, and we don't analyse at the granularity of the EU since the variance is so great as to cause it to be meaningless. For London Year 1 Quant Developer Pay is in £K Base Bonus Benefits High...

As a headhunter I will share that no employer has ever mentioned the Ti-89 as a skill they'd like to see from candidates. So by default I agree with the regression analysis.