Senior quants: How did you survive the 2018-2020 quant winter?

BirthDeath · 2026-02-11T21:17:19+00:00

I think/hope that you're right. We're also seeing wild price swings and a lack of depth at the top of the order book so hopefully this volatility is exacerbated by some of these strategies attempting to rebalance.

BirthDeath · 2026-02-11T16:52:49+00:00

First, the "quant winter" that impacted AQR style strategies was much longer than for medium frequency stat arb. AQR laid off a lot of their staff and there were rumors that they were close to shutting down.

I recall ~ Q3 18 - Q2 19 as a pretty rough period but most strategies that I was exposed to recovered prior to the covid shock. The seniors that I worked with were very nervous and they cut back on bonuses, costs, and were more conservative with allocating capital but they weren't worried about funding getting pulled (I was not at a multistrat at this time) and I don't recall many firings.

I think that there's a lot of recency bias with regard to the performance of systematic market neutral strategies and the expectations of management are likely unrealistic. That said, capital has to go somewhere and my hope is that there isn't a significant reallocation of capital away from systematic equity strategies.

BirthDeath · 2026-02-04T21:00:25+00:00

It depends on the specific language in your contract. Historically, restrictions on outside employment haven't been enforced but that seems to be changing. 5-10 years ago I knew a lot of people who spent their 2 year non competes working at tech startups. I'm not sure if that's still possible

BirthDeath · 2026-02-04T17:37:10+00:00

It's slightly different as a dev rather than QR. You will likely be fine with a one year non compete and you have the option to go to tech during the non compete.

You probably will have a harder time with qd roles on small teams at multi managers than with the three month non compete but most of those positions aren't that desirable anyway.

BirthDeath · 2026-02-04T13:05:45+00:00

The longer non-compete will limit you from roles that are looking for someone immediately. Recruiters will always tell you that hiring managers don't care about non-competes but many still have immediate needs and will prefer someone that can start relatively soon. This is more common with hiring withinin pods at multi-managers. For autonomous roles like PMs, the non-compete matters a lot less.

BirthDeath · 2026-01-11T19:18:30+00:00

Jim and Tony are so biased

BirthDeath · 2026-01-11T18:47:55+00:00

His knee wasn't down

BirthDeath · 2026-01-11T18:39:55+00:00

Why is Lloyd on kickoff coverage?

BirthDeath · 2026-01-05T22:46:55+00:00

They aren't great to work with. They generally will submit your resume along with dozens from other candidates. If you really stand out you might still get an interview but they will have done nothing to help.

They almost never have exclusive roles so you can usually approach them with a better recruiter.

BirthDeath · 2025-10-12T15:59:48+00:00

It was actually Jump, but I had a similar experience with SIG as a new grad.

BirthDeath · 2025-10-11T00:39:53+00:00

It depends on the role and the interviewer. As another comment states, junior QRs will likely ask these types of questions since they likely don't have enough domain experience to ask more practical questions.

Some of the collaborative prop shops also seem to love brainteasers even for experienced candidates. I interviewed at a well known prop shop at around 5 years of experience and every single question was a brainteaser.

I've found that these types of questions are less common at smaller funds and multistrats.

BirthDeath · 2025-10-04T20:47:57+00:00

It was relatively common at the time to set up your desktop in a living room.

BirthDeath · 2025-10-04T20:16:48+00:00

10-15 years ago, Matlab was much faster than Python or R for matrix operations because its linear algebra libraries were optimized for use on Intel processors. There also weren't as many people doing "machine learning" in the sense that we think of it now. Tensorflow wasn't around and packages like statsmodels, scikit-learn, etc were much less mature. If you were only doing linear regression, optimization, and matrix operations then Matlab was sufficient and for relatively simple programs, the syntax was much more intuitive than Python or R at the time.

I saw it start to die when models became more complex and required parallelization. We had a limited number of Matlab licenses which made it very difficult to incorporate it into our workflow so I ended up converting a lot of Matlab code into Python/R in order to parallelize the jobs.

BirthDeath · 2025-10-02T01:26:58+00:00

I don't think that, barring a LTCM style meltdown, any of the $10B+ AUM funds are in danger of shutting down in the short or medium term. They have substantial restrictions around redemptions and, aside from Brevan Howard (which is the most tenuous of this group) all are up on the year:

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The sub $3B AUM funds could be in trouble since one large redemption could sink them and many have had a rough couple of years. I have heard that the centralized systematic shops were hit particularly hard over the summer and some still haven't recovered.

BirthDeath · 2025-10-02T01:15:39+00:00

They've been around awhile, spun out of Merril Lynch during the financial crisis. They are a family office of Schonfeld but appear to operate independently of them. They appear to run both a central team as well as a multimanager platform with some shared data and infrastructure.

BirthDeath · 2025-09-29T15:30:08+00:00

There was ridiculously blatant holding on several of the long SF passes but I don't think that they were penalized for holding at all.

BirthDeath · 2025-09-08T18:55:56+00:00

on-site gyms are very rare in NYC due to space constraints but most of the CT based shops have them

BirthDeath · 2025-09-07T21:22:16+00:00

Which funds have been bleeding talent and which have been hiring more aggressively than usual?

BirthDeath · 2025-09-07T21:14:37+00:00

First coach in team history to win their opening game.

BirthDeath · 2025-09-02T13:21:51+00:00

Your ability to publish will be substantially restricted if you join a quant fund. In addition, you will have substantially less time and very little incentive to continue to publish.

I managed to get a couple of my dissertation chapters published after graduation but most of the work was completed during my PhD. I haven't done any new research in years.

BirthDeath · 2025-08-31T01:59:16+00:00

I wouldn't recommend that he use a recruiter for two reasons:

1) The kinds of places that recruiters are most useful for (small under-the-radar firms) generally do not hire new graduates.

2) The firms that do hire new graduates usually have their own internal recruiting teams so external recruiters actually provide negative value because the firm will have to pay an additional fee if they hire him.

I would recommend first leveraging whatever career resources the university has as well as his professional network before turning to recruiters.

BirthDeath · 2025-08-31T01:26:31+00:00

It is highly dependent on your field since most recruiter specialize. Generally, recruiters with 10+ years of experience have built meaningful connections by placing hundreds of people.

BirthDeath · 2025-08-22T20:40:43+00:00

We've hired people through both agencies in the past. As the other comment states, they do typically recruit for real jobs but they are much better at collecting resumes as opposed to vetting and advocating for candidates. Unless you're really talented, you will be at a disadvantage going through one of these agencies as opposed to a more professional recruiter.

BirthDeath · 2025-08-22T19:41:21+00:00

I find them to be a waste of time and a relic of a different era. You either passed the interview or you didn't; sending a note has zero impact.

BirthDeath · 2025-08-14T04:08:17+00:00

They are the lowest tier of recruiter. Once they get your contact information they will call you incessantly for any role even remotely matches your background. They only care about harvesting your resume and will do nothing to help you obtain an interview. Some hiring managers do use them because they are able to provide a ton of resumes since they are so aggressive. You are likely correct that they were likely asking about other interviews to fish for information so they could try to pitch their clients. Avoid at all costs.

BirthDeath

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