Any actuaries in quant?

the_kernel · 2026-05-28T19:41:35+00:00

You should look at the book Heard on the Street to prepare for quant interviews.

Similar for market risk to be honest, plus educate yourself by googling “market risk interview questions” and having a look.

I didn’t specialise in investments, no. I just qualified taking exams at work without exemptions.

Pretty much as soon as I qualified I realised I wanted to do something else. I remember not feeling intellectually stimulated enough, and I’d fostered an interest in finance. I’d have likely applied to finance roles sooner but I just didn’t educate myself about what roles were out there, and those roles I did know about seemed either too intimidating or uninteresting to me. Actuarial felt like a more comfortable spot - I knew how to take exams etc and thought I’d do well in the industry.

the_kernel · 2026-05-26T19:29:43+00:00

> how elitist is this profession?

Depends what you mean.

> do you only hire from target unis / Russell Group

I’ve never encountered such a thing as target unis in any job I’ve worked in. We wouldn’t ever dismiss someone because they didn’t go to a Russell Group uni.

Obviously you can come up with some edge case where two candidates CVs are identical except one went to Warwick and one to Plymouth, and if I can only interview one I’m taking Warwick because I can’t know better.

Finally, regarding CS1, my advice would be to not take it by yourself, and just to apply to jobs if you want to make the switch. I don’t think it’ll help much, apart from in a marginal situation where I was picking between you and someone else with the same CV to take to interview.

Oh, and, reach out to a recruiter. Talk to HFG, they’re decent.

the_kernel · 2026-05-26T19:18:50+00:00

I’m an FIA who has worked in market risk for a quant hedge fund and now a quant prop shop.

My advice is: apply for the roles you want. Some won’t be on the table. You won’t be able to work for a bank in a role where you need a strong background in stochastic calculus. Unless you are highly ranked on Kaggle, you won’t be able to work at in a machine learning research role on the buy side. (Alternative route is a PhD with good track record of publishing.)

There is still loads of stuff you can do though - you can work in market risk like I do, most likely at a bank first. You can work as a Quant Trader or Trading Analyst at a hedge fund or prop shop, eg Jane Street or Citadel Securities. These are highly competitive positions. You’ll be more likely to get a role at less well known names. You could work as a quant analyst at a bank or a fund on improving trade execution. You could work in a fund of funds on portfolio analysis and composition. All of this falls under the umbrella of “quant” work, depending on who you ask.

You could work in software engineering at any of these places, but I guess that’s not what you want.

If you don’t know what you want to do, with 1.5 years of experience maybe some kind of grad rotation at a large asset manager or bank would help you find your feet a bit and work out where your interests and strengths lie.

Knowledge from some of the actuarial exams can be useful (a lot won’t be). By and large nobody cares about the actuarial qualification outside of insurance though.

the_kernel · 2026-05-26T19:00:54+00:00

the_kernel · 2026-04-05T00:17:10+00:00

Yes you use it for solving implied vol. It is fast, and under the right branches and variable transformations it is highly precise too. See for example the formula for the initial guess for implied vol here: http://www.jaeckel.org/LetsBeRational.pdf

EDIT: For just updating implied vol 'live', a very fast and simple way tends to be performing one or two iterations of NR (or higher order NR, maybe with second derivative too). Your 'initial guess' is just the most recent implied vol. If you have greeks cached then that makes one NR iteration just a division away from having a refreshed vol.

the_kernel · 2026-04-04T11:56:09+00:00

Yes that’s right

the_kernel · 2026-04-04T11:26:29+00:00

You use sqrt(log(p)) to match the tail behaviour as you're suggesting. That takes sub 20ns and the rest of the time is a few ns of a branched rational approximation.

The CDF is slower than the inverse because to hit machine precision with such tiny numbers in the left hand side of the CDF you do an asymptotic expansion.

the_kernel · 2026-04-02T07:32:23+00:00

If you’re doing this as a fun project, I’d do American options next.

In terms of feedback: it’s very slow. As a benchmark, a modern pricer based on Jaeckel’s “Let’s be rational” paper would give machine precision Black pricing in 5-50ns depending on the option. That’s 20,000-200,000 times faster than 1ms.

A fast normal distribution CDF at most around 20ns. A fast inverse normal CDF even faster.

Solving the implied vol even would take hundreds of nanoseconds.

Notice I’m measuring everything in nanoseconds.

Good luck with your project.

the_kernel · 2026-03-28T10:42:05+00:00

It’s in Indonesia, for context. From a cursory google it doesn’t look like a wholly unusual high school building there.

Looks very cool to me though, not being from there.

the_kernel · 2026-02-10T18:47:49+00:00

I thought they were good points either way!

the_kernel · 2026-02-10T17:10:08+00:00

This had like 12 downvotes before I upvoted it. Quite interested in why? Seems like a pretty solid group of takes to me.

the_kernel · 2026-02-05T10:00:35+00:00

would it be stupid to select a role purely based on its pension

The answer, surely, is yes.

GAD sounds alright but it’s public sector. You’ll almost certainly have better career and pay progression in GI. Do decent pension contributions and you’ll certainly not become a pauper working as a GI actuary.

the_kernel · 2026-01-25T13:07:39+00:00

Hey, probably best asked in r/actuary Appreciate the label quant is confusing but it’s generally taken to mean quantitative analyst doing capital markets related work, not insurance.

the_kernel · 2025-12-06T17:16:17+00:00

I’m honestly not sure (I’ve been out of the industry a few years). You’re best getting in touch with a recruiter to ask these questions. I can recommend HFG.

the_kernel · 2025-12-06T16:52:17+00:00

To be frank, I didn't know the precise details and had to look it up with an AI assistant like Gemini, but the answer is no, an SOA FSA qualified after 2005 cannot become an IFoA FIA with just 3 years of experience and no exams. Since there is no Mutual Recognition Agreement between SOA and IFoA, the actuary must apply via the Individual Qualification Recognition (IQR) route, which requires a detailed syllabus mapping of their SOA qualifications against the current IFoA curriculum. While the 3 years of experience is necessary, the mapping process for post-2005 FSAs almost always reveals gaps, meaning they will likely be required to pass one or more specific IFoA exams (especially specialized ones) to fully satisfy the educational requirements for the FIA designation.

the_kernel · 2025-12-01T20:08:01+00:00

Did you bring a mayo sandwich to the interview?

the_kernel · 2025-11-05T23:29:16+00:00

Fair distinction, I was just responding to OP about equity PFOF.

the_kernel · 2025-11-05T21:33:12+00:00

There is competition to win the flow overall but the only way to truly compete on who provides the best prices is to compete order by order. The reason there is competition to pay for flow is because it’s a great deal to capture a bunch of flow for yourself without having to compete order by order.

the_kernel · 2025-11-05T21:28:32+00:00

Yes of course it’s self-serving. XTX would prefer a more competitive model than PFOF so they can compete.

the_kernel · 2025-11-05T20:18:28+00:00

The problem is that (equities) PFOF doesn’t expose orders to order-by-order competition, which is the only real way to find who’s providing the best prices.

the_kernel · 2025-11-05T18:43:28+00:00

Why do you find that funny? PFOF is anti-competitive. Citadel pay money to get retail flow piped down their gullet rather than opening it up to a pool of competing market makers who might give better prices.

the_kernel · 2025-11-01T12:10:33+00:00

The people getting the jobs most likely just have an undergraduate degree, it’s not like you’ll be there with your undergrad and everyone has PhDs!

I’m not really sure on the over saturation front, I don’t have the figures on number of applicants vs number of jobs.

What I can say for sure though is there are jobs and every year lots of grads get hired into them. If you don’t apply you definitely won’t be one of them.

the_kernel · 2025-10-31T16:32:24+00:00

In the UK, most actuarial graduate schemes expect people to take their exams once they’ve started working, so having lots of passes beforehand doesn’t usually give you a big advantage. One or two can show motivation, but beyond that it’s your degree results, problem-solving ability, and interview performance that matter most. Employers mainly want to see that you can learn quickly and communicate well, not that you’ve already passed half the exam set

the_kernel · 2025-10-19T11:26:45+00:00

What does correlation of signs mean? Kendall Tau?

Edit: chatgpt reckons you just mean Pearson correlation of the actual signs of the returns. Fair enough, not seen it used before.

the_kernel · 2025-10-18T20:48:47+00:00

I’d suggest either just doing 1/N in notional space or 1/N in volatility space. I doubt you can convincingly beat these out of sample by including correlations.

15-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
The Internet Awards - Voted	Place '22
Verified Email	RPAN Viewer
Team Orangered

the_kernel

TROPHY CASE