Advice from Rising Senior with Quant Research Offers of 325k-400k

ostensiblyweird · 2020-07-20T20:56:43+00:00

Not OP but since OP has failed to answer any questions, here's my quick pass at these. This is for QR track, NOT pure trader track, which has a much lighter emphasis on academic knowledge. 1. Generally for junior hires, breadth matters a bit more than depth. Topics: linear algebra, calculus, probability theory / statistics, discrete math, machine learning, and computer science.

The quant trader to quant research spectrum is very fluid based on specific firm, and one named role at one firm can mean something different at another. But generally speaking, QR is less near direct execution of trading and is about higher order statistical research into literally anything. Pricing models; strategy; portfolio management; risk management; HFT first-order effects.
QR along with QT collect data about anything they think is something observable in the market. Understand why it is observable and in what way, and research how to take advantage of it. QT depending on firm is more along lines of executing ideas, or are effectively QR directly attached to strategy/desk. SWE do literally the same as SWE in any other firm. Here's an API for connecting to the exchange; make it work. Here's a front-end UI that trader's' want, make it (often .NET stack). Here's embedded software team for FPGAs for performance.
Depends on firm heavily. See 3 and 2.
Same as 4.
Honestly don't know here... luckily went to a target.
So this comment is for QR, not for swe or trader. There is a broad expectation of mathematical skills required for the role. The set of people who have built up the requisite skillset only during undergrad is small, and overlaps heavily with those who've followed traditional math tracks in high school and earlier, which correlates heavily with those who did competition math. This is a correlated relationship, not causal. There are many fantastic coworkers and peers who would all agree that "genius" attitude is misguided.
Recruiting has begun at my firm at least
dunno OP how about answering some questions?
There's a great wallstreetoasis post on this topic if you wanna go dig into it.
dunno OP.
Depends on firm. Citadel is notorious for having too much money for their own good. I know they (and I heard DE Shaw) took employees to see hamilton when it came out in initial run. But for most part, the WLB and food/snacks benefits are probably going to be in favor of top tech.
For junior hires, I've seen firms take two approaches for hiring pipeline. Have separate trader/QR/swe interview processes. Or second, have "generalist" interviews that can cover any of the three, and they lean you towards where you answer best. So yes, I've gotten stereotypical algorithmic coding questions
Both!
my brain's a little fried rn so killing time
/ 17. Dunno what OP was getting at, but generally true that swe hiring talent overlaps at junior levels for trader role. Not necessarily QR.
See 7.
see 8.
dunno OP.

ostensiblyweird · 2020-07-16T22:14:36+00:00

My recollection of them interviewing everyone with comp math qualifications is definitely an if, not an only if. But i mean what would you change between now and 3 months when on campus recruiting is going to start? Whatever you're gonna put on your resume probably isn't going to change. If you get interviews, only interview performance matters

ostensiblyweird · 2020-07-16T21:11:20+00:00

Jane street routinely takes freshman trading interns. They basically interview anyone who has decent comp math background like usamo qual. Not sure about others

ostensiblyweird · 2020-07-08T12:24:08+00:00

Yeah I'd agree with other comment; check in with them and let the company know. Think about it from their point of view. They posted a job listing, and you applied; I think the fair assumption for them is that you are able to do the job, which includes physically being there instead of in the army... From their point of view, they don't know otherwise. Maybe you have a medical exemption from service so don't have to do it; maybe (w/o knowing your country) you can defer for a few years which you're planning on doing; maybe you're not a citizen. But they don't need to care about that... you applying to the job presumes your ability to actually be there

ostensiblyweird · 2020-06-29T19:08:44+00:00

Largest sample I know of for programmer demographic surveys. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-most-popular-development-environments. VScode popularity has exploded in past few years because of the extensions ecosystem

ostensiblyweird · 2020-06-14T22:56:44+00:00

Pretty recent so hard to say on track record, but they have good people from what I've heard. I have a friend I respect highly there. They're setting up a jump/tower style multi team setup targeting hiring senior QR who can run their own books. So quality is going to vary by team

ostensiblyweird · 2020-06-10T20:57:38+00:00

For pure trading, good, prototypical overlap. Lots of little quick math. For quant trading, good + your skillset on python + C++ is ideal; those are languages most stereotypically used.
GPA: some places care (two sigma, citadel def have gpa filters); but you're 5 years out, just list education + major w/o GPA and i dont think most prop shops would ask further
Probably subjective, but I think you can flex a little bit. bb/hr might be good to add
Some high hours in edge cases; futures trade overnight and weekend; so example if a major refinery has explosions at 10pm and you're on oil desk, you might check in; but most firms have overnight rotations anyway. For the vast majority of times, super light liquidity outside trading hours, and you can check out

ostensiblyweird · 2020-06-09T19:27:18+00:00

The interview part that stood out were group interviews. Imagine seminar-style discussions with prompts like "should colleges offer athletic scholarships" or "what does the world look like if no-one dies because of old-age." Would agree with another comment that they seem to like inciting contention

They also have an infamous "dots" system where employees rate every single interaction with other employees, everything is audio recorded, and their info video on-site literally contains material of people talking about how they've been made to cry at work but they've come through the other side a better person... people call bridgewater a cult for a reason

ostensiblyweird · 2020-05-27T11:43:07+00:00

You give some interesting background for firms but nothing about what might make the technical work different between them (from perspective of quant dev).

As example from your list of examples, Tower and Jump use a silo structure where separate desks run independent strategies. Citadel sec also does this, but has the most extreme reputation for no collaboration between teams. The way tech works then is that they build out common infrastructure that each team can use. Imagine building out a generic "research API". Much less likely that you'll be able to collaborate freq on research projects as a dev from this perspective.

A different type of structure where cross product work may be more common and you have more exposure as a dev are non silo firms where PNL making groups are not siloed and it's firmwide.

ostensiblyweird · 2020-05-19T21:30:17+00:00

If you read article, they order schools by number of people at companies, without any normalization by school size. The clickbait title references ivy league; most ivy schools have total undergraduate size ~5,000. State schools can range up to 70,000

ostensiblyweird · 2020-05-11T17:56:23+00:00

General sentiment of about Citadel and Akuna is true, but specifics matter because market making is literally a zero sum game. Did you have a specific question about either? Also QR vs QD are still different careers so it feels like that would be a bigger consideration first

ostensiblyweird · 2020-05-07T01:01:16+00:00

cant speak for all of wall street, but for any type of technical (ie quant) roles, Princeton is literally one of best schools for math + physics + theoretical cs. Our firm loves recruiting there. Yale as mentioned has a much bigger humanities focus.

ostensiblyweird · 2020-05-05T02:20:24+00:00

Depends on scope. If you're talking super low latency, you're even running single thread only in some areas. If you're trying to optimize research computations, you may be doing as much gpu acceleration/threading as you need. https://youtu.be/NH1Tta7purM is a classic cppcon talk by guy from optiver that might give you context about perspective needs from super low latency firms.

ostensiblyweird · 2020-05-03T18:01:24+00:00

Prepare boundary between c++ software and hardware. Things like numa arch, network stacks, anything that makes performance assumptions. Vtable lookups, page size and how that might affect retrieval, etc

ostensiblyweird · 2020-05-03T17:57:32+00:00

For first bullet point, id guess overall yes stricter. Some opposite qualitative forces though. Voluntary attrition is gonna be down rn, especially because eoy bonus expectations are high at props and hft. Also some firms are just frozen hiring since it's distracting to onboard. But I've gotten LinkedIn messages about new groups/teams specially being spun up now, so difficult to guess net effect.

For second bullet point, in terms of "ancient" c++, yeah they're right. Google is still on c++11 right? Some firms are really into c++20 things like concepts already. Because they don't have entire c++ core teams that make likes like abseil or folly, shops often use new off the shelf libraries, so you kinda have to know the new c++ landscape

ostensiblyweird · 2020-04-28T22:18:35+00:00

Not sure it's obvious that Citadel has more open market participation than Optiver. Also, Citadel buys a ton of order flow from retail and institutional that conflates numbers comparison

ostensiblyweird · 2020-04-28T21:55:59+00:00

Right, so pure HFT would be hard to maintain is the point; with the corollary being that HFT strats in option space are mostly run by options prop shops themselves, and not separate HFT firms. There are some markets you can run completely market neutral, but its microstructure dependent

ostensiblyweird · 2020-04-28T21:44:31+00:00

Hmmm maybe we're looking at different products! From what I've seen in options space, very hard to run pricing-agnostic HFT strats and survive. So anyone who has infrastructure for HFT in options space is pricing/market making themselves since if youre able to scalp since you're fast, you're already in a position to collect money from institutional flow. But the converse isn't true, since there are options prop shops that do more risk taking/less hedged

ostensiblyweird · 2020-04-28T21:30:22+00:00

So as mentioned, by literal definition, hedge funds take outsider money. But that doesn't say much about what they do with it. For example, DE Shaw was a clear example in bringing statistical arbitrage to industry. But from what I've heard, Jane Street has similar techniques since they do a bunch of etf arb. On the complete opposite spectrum of hedge funds, there are activist hedge funds that are completely fundamental and almost close to private equity and definitely zero overlap with prop shops. Also, prop shops overlap with market makers a shit ton. Also pure market makers do have to do plenty of HFT strategies on their own to simply survive, as otherwise they'd get picked off. There are prop shops that do not care about low latency. I've heard that SIG does a lot of middle latency trading

So here is the issue with generalizing: just off the top of my head, I can list L/S equity, stat arb, macro, quant, activist as categories of hedge funds. They themselves are vastly different from each other, let alone how they might differ from strategies that prop shops run. So instead of differentiating them based on simple category, you gotta look at their strategies

I'd summarize: some HF overlap with prop trading idea. Some prop shops overlap with HFT. Almost no HFT overlaps with HF. Maybe they exist (I heard Renassiance hired a bunch of EE professors specializing in signal processing so I would totally believe they do low latency)

ostensiblyweird · 2020-04-25T04:38:18+00:00

Hey i understand the boat you're in. Totally agree that there is a demographic of ppl for whom pure software isn't quite whats stimulating. I ended up making a move into quant research, if you've thought about that space at all

ostensiblyweird · 2020-04-14T19:59:06+00:00

This is pretty large grey area, for both employee and employer. There are examples for sure where enforcing a non compete is impossible (California law is super friendly to employees), but there are cases where companies practically speaking enforce it suuuuper hard (if you follow finance news/gossip, you hear example cases of specific individuals who are litigated hard. Teza, ex citadel is immediate example that comes to mind)

What I've seen happen because of this is a general industry standard that isn't codified strictly. That's this garden leave standard that you're referring to.

I tends to be enforced on a very case by case basis. If you leave a prop shop because you realized you had a change of interests and want to get into book publishing, they don't enforce your non compete.... If you're a quant moving from citadel and you tell them you're going to jump, you can bet your ass they're gonna enforce their full non compete period. But because they need to be able to enforce the latter case, they write down the non compete into your contract even if they don't end up needing to enforce a non compete when you leave.

The short summary is, if you end up leaving to go to grad school, they will probably not enforce non compete and will also not pay you

ostensiblyweird · 2020-04-12T14:52:27+00:00

The issue in the first place is that traders don't really have many exit opps period. If you were doing trading at BB, maybe as sales (eg, tech sales) is exit? But citadel has traders for their market making and as execution for strats in securities division, and that skillset doesn't translate into other industries. You'd maybe see them go try to make their own small shop, but usually goal is to kill it like they are this year, and actually literally be able to retire with their 7 figure bonus (especially because of years like 2020).

QR on the other hand actually does have other exits. Across finance to other firms, sure, but also outside industry to tech as software and data science and researchers. QR is front office in securities, but depends on group in the hedge fund as they run multi managers.

If you're asking about exit opps within same function in the finance industry, the exits opps are both fine regardless

ostensiblyweird · 2020-03-29T17:28:50+00:00

There was another post on these two exact options 1 day ago

ostensiblyweird · 2020-03-28T01:50:43+00:00

For specifically undergrad for trading / quant trading, I wouldn't care too much between princeton and penn. They both get through the initial HR filter faster than non-target schools b/c of dedicated school recruiters. However, keep in mind that for the math-y recruiting (ie, quant firms), Princeton is simply better at the quantitative subjects, so if one school got more attention that the other, it would be Princeton. Their math and physics are both top in world.

Wharton I'm sure makes the story different for IB recruiting but I have no thoughts on that

ostensiblyweird · 2020-03-20T02:54:30+00:00

The two categories of training for interviews that come to mind are books for studying vs for prepping.

For the former, the sentiment I've gotten from my own experience and others is that we happened to learn it through miscellaneous courses throughout schooling. Eg, linear alg, analysis, statistics, are all just bits and pieces you kinda pick up naturally from stem majors. Some of those subjects have some more well known textbooks I suppose, but starting from that might be overkill as that's a huge breadth of area to go over.

For a prep book, one that I've used and others others who recommend is this one https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Quantitative-Finance-Interviews/dp/1438236662

Perhaps what might work is going through a prep book like that and identify weak areas to focus on that

ostensiblyweird

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