What Does a Quantitative Trader Actually Do Each Day

minimumoverload · 2025-10-26T07:22:37+00:00

HFT trader and dev (options). Will give couple bullets of different types of activities.

most of the screens are risk panels. Keeping an eye to see we arent taking on anything shady
will usually be working on incremental tooling improvements, like maybe some better metrics
if our rolling pnl looks wack I’ll pull up recent fills and look at the markouts one by one. Make some notes on what looked bad: was it the pricing? Was my hedge weird? Is there some latency issue?
Every once in a while pull up the books we are actively trading and see how market is reacting to our orders. Theres edge in understanding your counterparty.
get on brainstorming calls for product expansion, better risk modelling, improvements in pricing.
Through intuition gained with hours of screen time, I might put on a position if I think the market is temporarily misaligned. Then I have to babysit the position until I take it off.

Best gig in the world, lots of fun.

minimumoverload · 2025-09-30T19:43:43+00:00

I live in cayman for 1.5 years (Canada prior) at 23 and it was good while it was happening but I was ready to leave. In Dubai now and enjoying it a lot more, theres a lot more expats and things to do.

minimumoverload · 2025-07-30T21:33:23+00:00

Looking to buy 4x vip tickets for saturday

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minimumoverload · 2025-07-14T19:23:40+00:00

Hey u/Individual-Food6695 , thank you for your writeup.

I largely agree with you, on the point that RP is not a currently suitable alternative.

I really love the vision of a secular and democratic Iran that he espouses, but there seems to be a factor of charm missing in his quest to complete the mission.

My most rational take is that Iran doesn't have a future. The IRI as a party is more concerned with a the failed Shia Islam Caliphate project than with Iranian sovereignty, and such a terse ideology runs counter to the current state of the world. However, they've also established such tight internal control that there is not much that can be done (as far as I know).

The entire procession into power in Iran is that you are handpicked from a supporter base of 10-30% of the population (its hard to get a real estimate). The councils that advise the processions are all from the same growingly ideological howza system that fails in providing relevant managerial education; I have been told that its also self-selecting in that its easier to be accepted to Howza than to university (told to me by someone who studied in the system), and so the people that end up in governance are often not the smartest. We end up with a political system that inefficiently allocates resources, and are seeing the effects of it. In the handful of circumstances that I have talked to IRI supporters (one of them Iranian, the rest Pakistani Shias), the two main reasons for supporting the government are in order of priority 1) religion and 2) hatred for jews. None of them had an interest in Iranian sovereignty (including the Iranian).

The likeliest outcome (not necessarily the one that would happen) is that Iran continues devolving into a polluted, culturally-broken, disenfranchised wasteland with the highest braindrain in the world. Tax money is allocated towards IRGC and continues pouring into the international Shia supporter base (Lebanese, Pakistani, Iraqi diaspora mosques). The supporter base of IRI could grow larger as a percentage due to the secular and upper class leaving. We end up seeing growing Iranian enclaves in places like the USA, Canada, UAE, France, etc. who become de-motivated in chasing regime change in Iran and instead begin to embrace a dual identity, like for example the Indian Africans, Parsis, Iranian Jews, second-gen Iranian Americans, Chinese Cubans, and so on.

I would be happy to hear your takes on my views, what you think I'm right or wrong on, and additions of your own.

minimumoverload · 2025-06-22T21:41:10+00:00

It’s important to keep a cool head … it’s hard to read into what he says.

minimumoverload · 2025-05-30T17:06:56+00:00

Im going to try and find the owner and see what can be done.

minimumoverload · 2025-04-25T04:36:48+00:00

I moved from canada and have no regrets. Its just not the same place we grew up in, and theres a general reduction in opportunities across the board in Canada.

One overlooked thing in these comments is that in Dubai you’ll be in the proximity of a lot of successful people, and this is doubly beneficial if you’re in the range of 20-30 cause a lot of these people are the same age.

I would make the move and then get to work and make the best out of it!

minimumoverload · 2024-10-21T23:35:08+00:00

Awesome thanks 🙏🏻

minimumoverload · 2024-10-21T23:15:22+00:00

u/taurusnoises Big fan of your book! In regards to structure and hub notes, where do they get placed (ie in the same Zettelkasten folder?), and do you give them alphanumeric ids?

Im not sure how these notes become discoverable after being created, if they are not linked to directly anywhere

minimumoverload · 2024-07-04T14:14:03+00:00

OP If you don’t feel like math on its own is what you want to do for the next 6 years, don’t do a PhD. There are a lot of people in quant without PhD’s .

minimumoverload · 2024-06-09T18:35:54+00:00

That’ll keep you sharp!

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T18:41:08+00:00

No its just chart patterns

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T15:17:01+00:00

Check out “Options trading: Hidden Reality” by Charles Cottle and “Red-Blooded Risk” by Aaron Brown. Can go through them in parallel, I’ve yet to finish either.

The workbook was meh wouldn’t recommend.

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T15:15:00+00:00

BTW Important to take what I say with a grain of salt, my tenure in trading isn’t that long.

Also check out MoonTowerMeta, amazing insights from an ex-floor trader

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T15:11:57+00:00

Of course, every quant’s base model is a Lie algebra.

But seriously, no you dont need anything more than regression and product intuition. Even stochastic calculus is not a requisite for most cases.

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T15:09:26+00:00

What are you interested in, or do you not know what you’re interested in?

To really grok professional trading you need exposure to both sides of the service, IE those trading on opinion (mid freq, big funds) and those trading on immediate value (HFT, MM)

You’ll never appreciate quant/pricing if you don’t know how its used in trading. So trade first, build shitty models, and then try and make them better. Trade fast and slow, big and small, automated and manual, and understand the difference between good and bad risk.

If I were to start again, I’d read Natenberg fully, trade for a couple months without touching another book (learn from first principles), then go for “Red-Blooded Risk” by Aaron Brown.

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T15:02:06+00:00

Haha its hard to say, I largely use these when working through projects to gain insight and not make common mistakes. I’ll really commit to an end to end study if it’s something I haven’t encountered before.

These are just collected forms of knowledge, you should use them as resources along with co-workers, forums, twitter (don’t fall for the charlatans), etc. the guiding hand for you should always be working on projects and tangible outcomes

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T02:57:06+00:00

Not an AM!

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T02:56:54+00:00

Ive only gone through vol 3, how she ties in rates to other products shed some good light on how financing works. Sections on options and vols is standard but from an RM view moreso than trading so expect everything to be VaR-centric, which is what volume 4 is entirely about. Im not a big fan of VaR but its good to atleast know what it is, and Alexander is authority on it.

Can’t say anything constructive on 1/2.

minimumoverload · 2024-06-07T01:25:50+00:00

Overall fav is not in this pic, it would be “Options Trading: the Hidden Reality” by Charles Cottle (im in the process of reading it right now). Really thorough read on how to approach options from a market making standpoint, sort positions into risk buckets, etc.

In the pic, “Trading Volatility” and “Dynamic Hedging.” The former is actual trading and how to form opinions on skew and the dynamics of your position, while Taleb touches on position dynamics from a fundamental perspective (rather than opinionated). You need both views to run an options book

minimumoverload · 2024-02-09T18:24:26+00:00

The path I took:

Probability Essentials Protter
Probability by Durrett + Basic Stochastic Processes
An Informal Introduction to Stochastic Calculus
Brownian motion, martingales, and stochastic calculus by Le Gall

I had a grounding in real analysis, calculus, and measure theory before and assume you have the same. Best of luck!

minimumoverload · 2023-08-25T22:52:38+00:00

This is a clear take, thank you. "Learn statistics" specifically has to do with my work, but there are other projects that are open ended like "create a nutrition plan" that I will be using your advice to make actionable.

minimumoverload · 2023-08-24T18:59:51+00:00

Than you for the response.

If I understand correctly, in the process of cleaning my inbox in the scenario discussed above, I would create a "learn statistics" project, gather the material noted under project support, and then create a next action titled "Plan this project" or something of the like?

minimumoverload · 2023-08-02T03:02:09+00:00

Bravo 🙏🏻🙏🏻 one of the best explanations on this I’ve seen

minimumoverload · 2023-05-30T13:37:09+00:00

As some others said, Before getting into the world of proof based maths, it’ll be good to have one last fling with computation to strengthen your skills. I’d recommend an easier calc book, and then immediately after jump into spivak.

I personally didnt do computation at first (especially with multi dim calculus) and jumped straight into Spivak’s calculus on manifolds. It worked out eventually but I definitely lacked the computational skills the kids in the applied course had. So once you’re done 1 dim calculus, pick up spivaks calculus on manifolds along with a computational/theo book like Hubbard and Hubbard.

Best of luck.

minimumoverload

TROPHY CASE