• C++ Programming for Financial Engineering
    Highly recommended by thousands of MFE students. Covers essential C++ topics with applications to financial engineering. Learn more Join!
    Python for Finance with Intro to Data Science
    Gain practical understanding of Python to read, understand, and write professional Python code for your first day on the job. Learn more Join!
    An Intuition-Based Options Primer for FE
    Ideal for entry level positions interviews and graduate studies, specializing in options trading arbitrage and options valuation models. Learn more Join!

Quant trading process?

senoz

senoz

Joined
8/6/09
Messages
54
Points
18
I got questions about Mark Joshi's job descriptions and trading process.

So research quant comes up with the new pricing model. Desk quant implements it(does that mean writing the code?) and the trader use these models(or the code)? What does the quant developer do?

There is also model validation quant who also implements pricing models. How is it different than the desk quant.

Also from desk quant you can move to trading, is it also possible to start from trading or all traders have been desk quants before?

I think clarifying how quant trading works and how each tyoe of quant fits into it would help the folks who are making job applications or considering to change their career, right?
 
A bunch of titles and names to confuse you. If you ask people with one of those titles, they often can't be sure of their title themselves ;)
The only thing that counts is how close you are to the money and hence the bonus pool. You can have any title you want but at the end of the day, banks will look at people as one of the two, the profit generating group and the cost center.
Many of the types you name are not in the profit generating pool. They are in middle office (model validation), research group (research quant), development (quant developer). These people normally don't interact with traders on a daily basis.

There are desk quants who sit on a trading desk (hence the name), developer who are front office personnel who makes sure the spreadsheets are calculating, the pricing engine is working, the data is cleaned.

Don't get caught up on the alphabet soup of the dynamic working world. When you get a job, ask the most important question: which bonus pool will you be in?

If your official title is Code money but in the FO bonus pool, be glad. Or you rather have some glamorous name with the word "Quant" in it but nothing to show but a title?

I won't put too much stress into Joshi guide. It's a futile attempt to categorize roles which are overlapping and ever changing.
 
So now I know the job descriptions do not matter much but as a finance Phd student I am trying to figure out on which part of the trading process I could be more useful.

That's is why I have another question, if you please. Do some of these jobs require less C++ skills than developer positions. As a finance Phd student I am not using C++ much, so I am out of practice. Common sense tells me some of the jobs should require more finance knowledge and less coding skills than pure programming jobs but still I would like to get some info from someone who is working in the field.
 
Back
Top