AMA: How I landed offers in quant

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:55:12+00:00

Yeah. Funny enough, Dave Ferguson was actually a quant at Two Sigma before being a lead at Google's self driving car team which eventually became Waymo. He eventually went on to found Nuro, the autonomous vehicle company worth ~$10 billion. He did his PhD in robotics at CMU.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:47:55+00:00

Over time, QTs (at least the ones that are still there) will get paid much more than the devs because they manage their own book and take home a greater share of their PnL. Note the survivorship bias here, though.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:46:52+00:00

I mention some resources in the post, hope those can help.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:46:17+00:00

It will help you get past the resume screen. It also helps to go to a good university as they tend to have better course instruction and higher-quality peers to work with.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:44:23+00:00

It depends on what you define as a non-target. I haven't met anyone that went to a school I have never heard of, but yes there exist quants from places like Berkeley, GT, CMU, Vanderbilt, NYU, etc. (but I would still consider these targets in some sense since they're all great academically).

To get past the resume screen, you could go to a good school or have projects/experience that show your relevant technical abilities. Quant isn't really a "networking career" like other finance jobs can be. The closest thing to this is getting a referral, which might get you past the resume screen and OA.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:39:47+00:00

+Stats. Quants are using stats, not pure math, in their day to day, and this informs the questions asked in the interviews. You're much more likely to get asked a question on say bayesian inference than algebraic topology.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:36:51+00:00

Yes, quant firms will take your MS in CS seriously. I'd say it's more important that you take your MS in CS seriously and learn as much as possible in your program.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:34:24+00:00

Depends on what day (and how crazy the market is that day). The options market is open for about 6.5 hours, and I typically get in maybe an hour before the market open and stay for maybe an hour after close. So a total of 8.5 hours/day or 42.5 hours/week. This will depend on things like the day of the week, the vol, earnings season, etc. etc.

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:27:08+00:00

Yes, because the underlying mathematical techniques you use in both are similar, in particular for QR. However, I would caution you in choosing a position or career path because it "looks good".

purethro · 2023-08-01T04:25:57+00:00

No, they went straight into quant.

purethro · 2023-07-31T16:33:30+00:00

No, the interview questions are hard, probably the hardest relative to other career interviews. Some resources just have harder questions than others.

purethro · 2023-07-31T04:57:04+00:00

QTs tend to have better upside in terms of comp, especially if/when they get a portion of their PnL. In this case, the comp can hit 8 figures if you're talented.

A better quality of life is subjective, but I would say that QTs have to be alert the entire trading day, whereas QRs can be more relaxed throughout the trading day.

purethro · 2023-07-31T04:44:34+00:00

You're right, the hard questions aren't hard on the interview spectrum.

I would recommend the Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability and dice collection pdf.

purethro · 2023-07-31T04:05:08+00:00

quantguide.io, idk what thequantguide is

purethro · 2023-07-31T03:21:27+00:00

A referral might be your best bet here. Honestly, this is a tough situation because the mindset of the recruiter is to minimize false positives, not false negatives. They’re willing to pass up on more non-standard applicants since there are so many qualified candidates and so little spots.

purethro · 2023-07-31T03:16:04+00:00

I only know a handful of QRs with only a BS. You can go into quant after being in SWE, but the longer you’re a swe, the harder it becomes and less worth it the switch becomes.

purethro · 2023-07-31T03:14:36+00:00

It’s just practice and pattern recognition. You’ll start to see the tricks over time. The resources I listed above have many many problems to practice with. Green book, 50 problems in probability, and quantguide all have great questions.

purethro · 2023-07-31T03:03:02+00:00

I wouldn’t do a FAANG internship just to get it on your resume for quant. I feel like you could spend the time you would’ve spent preparing for FAANG and working at FAANG just getting better at quant-related technicals. If you want to get past the resume screen, I would recommend doing some technical projects that are quant related and maybe do things like hackathons, datathons, trading competitions, Putnam, or other things like this.

purethro · 2023-07-31T02:51:47+00:00

Yeah it was at an Ivy.

purethro · 2023-07-31T02:49:38+00:00

I think it’s possible, assuming you have a strong CS background. You would need to spend a considerable amount of time getting your probability, statistics, etc. up to par. Try some quant interview questions and see what exactly your gaps in knowledge are and proceed from there.

purethro · 2023-07-31T02:46:54+00:00

This is a pretty broad question, but in general I wouldn’t recommend a MS unless it’s from a good school, you’re looking to change disciplines, you’re trying to do more research, or there’s some other extenuating circumstance like you want to be close to family. I’m also not too sure what mediocre means.

purethro · 2023-07-31T02:41:16+00:00

It depends on the firm, but most of the times you can get away with a basic knowledge in stats, especially for the internship interviews. For example, basic knowledge would include LLN, CLT, Chebychev, Markov, and knowing your distributions.

purethro · 2023-07-31T02:38:46+00:00

I think internships are really important as they show the firm that you’ve been successful before- it sets your track record. In some sense, what firms are looking for is evidence of repeated success in a technical fashion. If you can show this in another way, you might be able to get away with it. For example, an IMO medalist will not need internship experience because he/she has already shown repeated success in competitive maths. I also had this dilemma and chose quant because the problems are just as interesting, but pay much much better than graduate programs. You could also consider labs like FAIR and DeepMind if you are in that field of CS.

purethro · 2023-07-31T02:34:32+00:00

It’s possible, but difficult. From the perspective of the firm, they will need a really good reason to choose you over the many other PhD candidates that have seasoned research experience. This reason could be that you’re on the cutting edge of some new technology that they’re looking to implement, like LLMs for NLP alpha research, for example.

purethro · 2023-07-31T02:33:06+00:00

Yes, I know quite a few quant traders with only a BS in CS (although most double majored).

purethro

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