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Is a Bachelor's Degree in Financial Engineering a good step to a career in Financial Engineering? No It is inferior to degrees in Physics, Mathematics, Economics, Engineering, the better kind of Philosophy and CompSci degrees. Some chemistry degrees are better, ditto Psychology and you might be...

Although I'm 8.3% as illustrious as Dr.Derman, I believe I have interviewed more quants than he has, and would refine his position slightly... This is a discipline that requires people to be good at algebra, and some people I meet are awesomely better at algebra than me. It also draws upon the...

I'd very easy for someone at my point in life to say "ignore the cost", so I'll say it anyway. $20K should be a tiny % of the area under your earnings curve, less than one part in 10,000, possibly one part in 10^5, add in the 2012 inflation spike, and it might be 10^6 'Harder to get into'; has...

I genuinely don't know what the right solution might be. The Canadian position strikes me more like a closed shop protecting its turf than anything else. Elsewhere I have been critical of Microsoft's qualification process, but...The 'professional bodies' so often degenerate first into lobbies...

We aren't engineers... For a start engineers are qualified to do their jobs... If you pitched up at Schlumberger or Boeing with a one year conversion course slapped on the top of a degree in a wholly different subject they probably wouldn't hire you at all, and if they did, it would be nowhere...

If this is true, and I have no knowledge either way ,this evangelical was so dumb he ought to claim mental deficiency as a defence. I'm a only headhunter, and if someone like me sneers at your cracking skills you're fucked. Yes, you can copy, and probably not be noticed, but p has to be bloody...

This could be really rather important. When Java first started to be looked at as a mainstream language, the promise was made that we'd decouple compilation from execution. By making decisions based upon the environment the executable found itself in, better decisions could be made aobut how to...

I perceive this as part of what people tell me about their risk aversion at a corporate level. The impression I get is that if an outfit is close to it's targets, there is a strong asymmetry in utility between making an extra X above target and making X less (or making / losing X) This...

BBg use a lot of C, worth boning up on pointers and excessively complex variable definitions is good. Also there is a good chance they ask you irritating questions on enums, and try to catch you out on the difference between & and && etc. Also learn the tortoise/hare algortihm

A lot goes to what you want to do with it. When writing code, I occasionally find my 17" slightly claustrophobic, and having used smaller screens, know that would be even worse. But most web surfing doesn't need so much, and when I write text 15 can be fine. Being a perfect physical specimen I...

Of all the things I might do with $10^8, a business school is so far down the list.

I have a Dell Precision M90, 4 years ago when I bought it, was the fastest with biggest screen there was. Bastard thing won't die so I can justify getting something lighter, but curiously I can't buy something with more pixels or much faster CPU. I have the good Dell support plan, not the free...

I have gone on the record before to say that I believe Kerviel when he says that his managers knew what was going on. I am not saying he is an angel, but he has been sacrificed by the French state to protect one of their 'national champions'. I am more convinced by the timescale rather than the...

I tend to aim people at a mix of the books by Daniel Duffy and Bruce Eckel, but C++ requires that you write code. No book and no course (including mine) is anything like sufficient. You must suck in data, screw with it, and get it stored somewhere to serve some purpose. Doesn't have to be a good...

Could u plz explain it further Dominic. are those numbers false ?? or do they include the year end bonuses ? I believe that programs massage the numbers to look good. I'm not sure that Traderjoe is quite right that a 100K loan can be seen as risk free. But...it is a strong signal of their...

sep, that's the wrong question... The right questions can mostly be answered by yourself, They are: What do you enjoy doing ? In what areas do you beat most other people most often ? A PhD is a long time to spend doing something you hate.

I was wondering if the MCSD in VC++ counts ?

I have long since lost faith in the numbers emitted by any MFE program which bear a curious resemblance to ads for cosmetics.

Andy is right that customers have power in this market, if they keep pushing. Since they are already doing that, but we see little movement, my intuition says that there must be forces pushing the other way. I suspect they rationally see first mover disadvantage. If you publish honest...

Joy has seen an example of what I call Zombie Recruitment... Most big firms have internal recruiters, their job is to wander as lost souls from campus to campus in search of flesh. If they stopped going to Campuses, Baron Samedi would take them back to the circle of hell reserved for Simonites...

This might be a very useful book, certainly the more brainteasers you know, the better your job prospects. If you'd like me to review your book, get in touch via Dominic of PaulDominic.com, and it is of course a brainteaser for you to work out why that might be a good idea :)

To put a positive spin on the experience Anthony's friend... This guy has worked hard to get a job, and scored two interviews. Obviously I have no way of telling how smart this guy is, but one signal in this data is that people with his level of ability who worked less hard at job hunting did...

Thanks for the link Marina, and although I didn't know that, it surprise me not at all. There is not an Indian market for skills, or an American one, Britsh one or (say it quietl)y European one. There are skills, and people who want to hire those skills, and given the low price entry point for...

All CQF lectures are taped Certificate in Quantitative Finance - CQF | Financial Mathematics and Financial Engineering course There is an interesting debate going in inside academia about this. I read of some schools getting heavy about students sharing lecture notes citing bogus copyright...

I think Connor is right that the extra piece of paper makes much difference, but the more maths and programming you know, the better your career options.

As Ken says, this is not news, hasn't been for months. It's not even very significant, all firms go through headcount freezes, both in good times and bad. It may be part of something we vaguely see going on in the market, but it's hard to say for sure, and my model is too complex for me to...

Cuch makes a good point, it is difficult, but that is in some ways is a good thing. There may be a seriously good market in GPU tech centred around CUDA with banking experience. It may be quite soon. I make the unintuitive claim that it being hard is actually good because to earn a good living...

I worry about any certification that you can pass by reading a programming guide and some PDFs.

It's interesting that banks usually don't do the same, they chat to candidates, some like GS chat with them a lot.

I believe he is referring to the MPhil at Judge Business School! No, I am not, I apologise if I appear to have given an endorsement of the finance at Judge. Until recently there was the Part III of the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge, which has recently changed to have a more modern name...

To be precise, there was a subject in my engg. dedicated to atomic transactions which are necessarily characteristic of some particular industries Yes, there is a huge pile of elementary CompSci that is absent from banking systems, and ACID is one of them. One of my missions is a couple of...

It's also worth thinking about non-MFE programs that contain the right mathematics. Arguably, the best masters for a quant in Europe is the PIII at Cambridge, which contains no explicitly financial mathematics at all. Some people I respect would disagree and remove the 'Europe' qualifier. It's...

This is interesting, firstly because she is a former partner of GS, and Andy has recently put up a link about unmaking partners. I will dissect this article, which with considerable irony was published by Bloomberg. As a former Goldman partner, I am upset by their accounts. Note she does not...

I believe it was Keynes who said "if you owe the bank a £1,000 you have a problem, owe them a million, the bank has the problem. Of course the numbers are bigger these days, but the principle still holds. Greece has a variation on this, because the government is owed money by literally millions...

I like to think my lectures are intresting, which is what you might expect from a headhunter who teaches C++ :) The cruel and unusual mathematics is I'm told the hardest, since I explain why for the vast majority of r: r+1 == r; r can also == r -1, but for a different set of r (If you can't...

I'm not sure supply will remain constant, but given that there are forces in both directions, I can see why coolharvard comes to that conclusion. Western universities are under increasing financial pressure, which may well lead to a decrease in places. But there is the opportunity for them to...

Education is like buying a basket of options, they increase the set of decisions you can make about your career. Basic Black Scholes tells us that in a more volatile market, the fair price of an option will go up, so we see that the market for education is functioning as we would expect...

There is a complex dynamic here... France really hates the fact that it is not the home of a serious financial market, Germany is torn between a distaste for Jewish finance and a desire for the money and jobs it brings. Britain is pathetically dependant upon financial services. London may be a...

Again we see GS in the centre of something bad, but again the blame that we can apportion to them is less than meets the eye. As clubs feature in the sex suit, so they form an analogy to the Greek situation. If a pair of pretty 15 year old girls turn up at the door of a club with an "over 21"...

I didn't spot the age of the issues, which only goes to increase the possibility that she's doing it just for the money.

I have utterly no direct knowledge of this case, though of course my profession means I hear lots of rumours about various firms. A big problem with this case, is that I don't believe she is telling the truth. To tell the truth, you must first know it, and it's really very hard to get accurate...

Have you looked at mean reversion ?

I know for a fact that "it depends".... :) If an institution is state funded they are often affected by the rules set by their paymasters. This typically requires that 'local' students pay less. The definition of 'local' varies a lot. For Oxford it includes Italians and Greeks, but not of...

I think this is likely to be part of a trend for courses that are perceived to lead to well paid jobs. Simplistic economics might suggest that a recession is a dumb time to raise prices, but that ignores utility functions and agency effects. People who run courses want to run 'good'...

There are actually several questions here when working out in an MFE is a 'good' investment. 1: Does it have a positive expectation of returns. Yes, but note the word expectation, interpret everything I write here in math finance terms, not ordinary English. 2: Is it the optimal investment...

The random walk of my career has led me to interact occasionally with the PR staff at banks, and there is cultural issue here. A retail bank likes to announce happy stuff about new products, creating jobs, etc. Most of which is stolidly ignored by the press. They occasionally act as...

There seems to be a correlation between the cost of the course and drop in numbers, which I guess is not that surprising.

What is it that people think admission numbers mean ? If a course decided to accept 10% more people, the ratio would go down, does that means it has become a worse course ? If a course director decided that Latin was a requirement for quants, and declined the 99% of quannabees who don't speak...

Yes, I did make such a comment, and although I laughed when I saw Andy's post, it didn't really shock me all that much. One system I did years back included a test that sent every possible input price within the 'sane' range through the system to see what it would do. Although of course reals...

Oh wow Z notation, I did that at IBM labs back in the day, but as Daniel says it is rarely used in commercial programmng, and never ever in quant finance. Quants don't do logic, I actually do a remedial lecture on logic as part of the CQF C++ module. The idea of proving a program correct is an...

There are N different modes for Excel use: Firstly, since it's a good environment to teach basic numerical techniques for finance, simple, ubiquitous and cheap. VBA is for traders. C++ is for programmers. Althoughthat's a nice line, I'm a VBA programmer, the two words are are not...

So the advantages should go to Wall Street as far as jobs in finance are concerned? Yes. Actually that applies to pretty much all industries, not just finance. But I do not see that as guaranteed in the future... Obama's allegiance to unions blue collar racism dovetails with the lunacy of tea...

In many forums, I have asked what precisely China can do to the USA though the fact it holds a lot of debt. Not once have I received any answer. China might stop buying bonds, but the only thing it can do is sell US debt, which if it does it too quickly is in effect burning money. , but when...

Being a verbose person, I won't tick the boxes above but talk about the options: Respond publicly and quickly to clarify/explain/refute all points in this allegation. I have met the person who would do that, but would be shocked if they did. I don;t believe UCB has people who can engage in the...

I think the deficit is going to be a huge problem. Agreed, but a problem for who ? The classical way out of this problem is inflation, indeed the default path for many western economies is headed that way because of recent measures and the very strong inflation pulse coming this winter from...

Note that bigbadwolf mentioned Genoa, which was then a city state. It ain't any more. Nor is Prussia, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and France is in no way the state it was then. Those who go one about the rise of country X or the decline of Y almost always fail to spot that the chance...

The trick here is getting the right job in financial HPC... A lot of HPC jobs are as operators, not programmers, and you really don't want to be there. I assume you've sussed threaded C++ ? Beyond that you've hit a point where the ways forward are poorly defined... What I observe is a horde...

Evidence of beating others is good. Legacy languages are ambiguous, in the mind of the person reading your CV, it can look like your English is not good. Also, one of the all time tier one interview fuckups of all time was a Physics PhD who mentioned that he was learning Greek. He was...

This is of course late, and so I've sworn a bloody oath to get this damned thing finished. However, since it's out soonish, we're holding back on shipping V2.

Buy a copy of Walkenbach and learn Excel, do the whole bloody thing, VBA especially. Create a CV that says in effect "I'm a shit hot Excel guy, who also knows a bit of finance, you want me to help sort out the clusterfuck of spreadsheets on your trading floor". Pay me $1K per week and some of...

It's an interesting set of ironies. Chinese people are more motivated to get their kids educated than average westerners, but in the PRC are subject to an educational system that seems to have been created by white supremacists in order to screw with their lives. The PRC wastes the talent of...

I don't know enough about you to give a really precise answer. It must be said that neither of them are seen as top flight quant schools, and the 'rank' you talk about refers to the university as a whole, so that basically means brand to put on your CV. Also, the place you study and the place...

I've heard this about the new entity as well, that's a clusterfuck on a truly evangelical scale of stupidity. I'm not a fan of Slang, but to replace such a nearly ubiquitous part of the technical infrastructure is several years of very hard work. Even translating the code directly is intensely...

My blog points to the best thing written about quants on Wall Street I've seen this year. It's more than slightly cynical, but you do need to read this before you get a job.

Both books should be within your understanding. However, C++ is an applied craft, how much code are you writing ?

I note that the CQF is not on this list, even though you've reviewed it ?

I predicted this as a trend even before Volcker. "Too big to fail" has two meanings, both false. Too big to be allowed to fail has caused much pain, but before the crisis most people thought that the huge firms gained useful diversification through being in all kinds of banking, enough that no...

Sadly Alain, I don't even get a cut of CQF fees myself, just per lecture. Since I've now declared my interest in the issue, I should say that the CQF is pitched as an alternative to an MFE, and so is orientated around practical skills rather than as prep for any other qualification. However...

MFE programs talk a lot about acceptance rates, but they contain little information. They say nothing about content, and little about reputation. First, lets do a thought experiment... Imagine a course that has a 50:1 ratio of applicants to places. It moves to a new building, and hires a...

When I was at Dresdner bank (we all have skeletons in the closet), they did this, but it was run by their HR. They hired a consultancy to produce a list of bad words (yes, really). But since the aspiration was to be a tier 1 global bank, they asked them to do all bad words in all languages...

I don't believe anyone's grad outcome numbers. *But* I'm an old cynical headhunter, I know better, as do most people here, but we are not the target audience. When I was a newbie there were vast arrays of shit I didn't know, and I might have been fooled by this randomnness. That being said, I...

I'm not even a real economist and I can't predict future demand. But as I've said elsewhere, gross supply / demand levels don't alter the way you make decisions once you've started along this path. It was competitive at the top of the market, and will be so when you graduate, your decisions...

Although FX rates can in theory go to zero or infinity, (and occasionally do), they exhibit substantial periods of mean reversion.

I agree about supply and demand, indeed have said so here and on Wilmott.com However the demand is much greater than the 20*50 from whatever list of Top schools you happen to believe. Also one has to separate demand for people with the job title "Quantitative Analyst" from demand for quant...

It's not just high frequency trading, it's also high volume where you have large time series.

I've used a non-multitasking phone and found it mildly irritating, a full computer like that would be a pretty toy, not a tool. As the pre-sales show, there is a good market for pretty toys, bought a few myself, but not from Apple. I have a Sony ebook reader, which has an essentially infinite...

I must say that I'm sceptical about the idea of paying for internships. It is of course rational for the student to do so, if it is part of a path to a good job, but I have to wonder what sort of jobs this will find for you. People here on QN have very specific needs in terms of internships...

Ilya, you should exect each attempt to fail, but the cumulative probability is useful, even if the marginal is tiny. I said it that was so that you would not try it once or twice, find that it fails and deduce that it can't work. Part of the "in" is to accept that this is not going to be...

At various times and laces it has been common for PhD to be part of a career structure. This has been true in Chemistry and Engineering. Often it is the case that one needs access to resources that could not possibly be held by a university. A decent % of applicable science PhDs are sponsored...

I'm sorry if I offended you, not very sorry of course since my role is to warn people where I can of poor decisions. Just to reassure you, I'm normally ruder about this course, I wrote the short version. I don't see any PhD with that sort of title being the ideal route into being a quant. It...

This course belongs to the very small set that I recommend to no one. UCL is a top tier place, this is not a top tier course. It's not "financial computing", it's "lectures we can give that we can sell for 3 times the price than if we called them 'introduction to IT" Of course none of...

Here's one to puzzle over given two numbers x,y I want to find out if their product is too large to work with the numeric type I'm using. Like all good interview questions, it scales... So given N numbers, how do I work out whether their product gets outside the range ?

Part of the reason not to buy yet is the non-standardisation of technologies. Some work by polarisation, some by alternate shutters on the goggles. However, at a conference last autumn I saw a screen that required no glasses at all on the iShares stand. Seemed to be some sort of fresnel lens...

Daniel, I assume you mean a rational basis for that move, as opposed to politics ? Some OSS systems are dropped after mergers or because of the desire to have "one unified system" Some proprietary systems look good on the resume, and I've seen that be a choice in systems. Global support is one...

Andy is right, I haven't had a printed CV in quite a while. Thus I think that if you want to push harder, that is what you ought to do ;) When conventional techniques aren't working, you either stick with in the faith that they will work, or you try something else. Since I habitually use faith...

As someone who helped the guy who was writing the Waters article I am upbeat about OSS, but see the Oracle acquisition of Sun as a backward step for OSS and for users of s/w in general. If you've ever done business with Oracle, you will know that they didn't get to this position by helping...

I'm not sure why you think that the majority of production code runs on Unix ? A large % to be sure, but not a majority. In some areas like algotrading I'd accept that position, but I read job specs as part of my job and Unix is not the primary target. In quant work, I'd assert that > 70% of...

The problem with universal law is that not only are humans not smart enough to choose one, undergrad maths can show no such decision can be made. Acceptance of your own limitations should be a critical aspect of ethics. You are asserting that if the insurer is acting rationally and...

I believe the circulation of Wilmott mag is a bit higher, but it is reassuringly expensive :) I agree with those that say the quality of MFE grads varies a lot, I have personally spoken with a greater % of the world's MFEs than anyone else, so I know this to be true. But a critical problem is...

Connor is right, when I first came into financial markets, the single most common background for a trader in London was to have graduated from Sandhurst, the British military academy. Now it is tough to get in without a masters level qualification, indeed the average newbie trader going into a...

I wouldn't say you need to learn Visual Studio, but in my opinion it is the best environment to learn C++, especially since it is free for students, and the express variant is free to everyone. Stefan raises the point about cross platform development, and in my experience >90% of code never has...

Has anyone here actually used a Fermi ? But when they get it out, I think it will help the market mature, the next heavy lift is getting people to write good for it. This is not trivial.

Andy's advice is sound, and to build on it, I'd take two disciplines in parallel: Making yourself better at this work, and getting better at interviews. Working through a programming project, learning new maths, and getting into the detail of various financial products are all good. As is...

I have to declare an interest, being on the faculty of the CQF. It is usually easier to do the CQF part time than an MFE, because the CQF doesn't tie you down to specific hours, and does not conflict so much with your day job. Biomedical eng. covers a wide field, perhaps you could give a feel...

To me, a core issue is that C++ does what you tell it, Java et al do what they think is best.

I leave arguing about whose course is better to others, I have views of course... But my day job includes giving objective career advice, and the reality of the situation is that the smart choice requires that you analyze yourself before you analyze the course.

Spam is indeed a problem, I run the quant group on LinkedIn and I have to delete 4-5 people per day.

I would expect it to be more demanding than that, though it would not be a bad idea to start with a vol calc. If I were starting off a test at this level, I might ask you to find the coefficient in a mean reversion process, see how you coped with spots of "bad" data, then chuck a regime chance...

OSX is rare in banks, but various Linuxes are out there is reasonable numbers. Since the Mac doesn't have a useful spreadsheet, that is not going to change soon. You don't need to know VB, it is a useful skill, but your time is probably better spent fixing the holes in your C++ I counsel VBA...

Some will reject you, but if you can do C++ well there will be jobs.

Since we don't work on cattle market style job applications, I can only forecast what I think the question really means. 1: Can you write coherent English ? I'd guess >25% of people will write something that is at least partly gibberish. 2: What do you read ? As we say in the Guide, someone...

You might squeeze into a quant dev role if your C++ was very good, have to say that is a higher filter than it sounds.

Spotting a bad headhunter is quite tough. One other firm who now often gets viciously bad comments worked with me back when I had a real job, and I have no complaints from that experience at all, even though they are generally thought of as the worst. I can't think of anything better than...

We don't work with JPM. I think what maxrum is saying is that entry level recruiting at some firms has been taken over by HR. This happens every few years, then when they can't stand it any more, they switch back.

I don't think it does any harm, yes it may make them feel "weird" if they don't ask you back, but frankly that does not matter to you. As Ken says, most times it will make zero difference, but I will share that candidates do get forgotten about, especially if you apply directly. Remember that...

I have to declare an interest here since I teach C++ on the CQF. IT is about the most common background for CQFers who are currently employed. As you say, the majority of the lectures are held in the UK, but can be viewed at a time and place that suits you, which actually works out well for...

BigbadWolf:I'm not sure. Here in Norway the man heading the Oil Fund (~$300bn) makes a measly $1m a year (if memory serves). I As a HH I meet a lot of people, and I find some very smart civil servants working hard for pitiful money. Britain is almost unique in allowing non-nationals...

Quant work is not especially ageist, the current record we have is someone who switched from being a non-financial civil servant to GS at 41. But... There are costs and risks in this transition, which include lost pay for a year + fees. You can do a part time MFE or the CQF which mean that you...

The European game on bonuses is driven by several factors representing incompatible national self interest. The short version is that any state that implements these measures fully will cripple its investment banking sector. Since there is no plausible way to enforce them evenly, there will be...

Eugene has a point about the ethical issues, and it points to a basic truth about the justification for our line of work. There are a range of products that offer people the chance to cash in assets like life settlements or equity in their homes. The rates offered are often really very poor...

Darling says the government will investigate bonuses, and that I find interesting. If you've read my workon this, you'd see that there is little evidence that anyone currently understands the bonus systems at major banks. Great effort is made at all levels to hide and obfuscate the distribution...

The 3 masters will indeed unnerve some employers. But you have to make sure that this does not leave gaps, and it is dangerous to assume this won't come out in the process anyway. Presentation will be more important for you, and the trick will be to make them seem coherent. The PhD actually...

I will post a review, when I get a copy...

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11) This is an outstandingly bogus article, what happens when arts graduates attempt to understand anything except celebrity gossip. >It is the hot new thing on Wall Street, The...

Alain is right. Your resume sets a level of expectation, and you must be prepared to answer questions on any part of it at all, in depth. Thus it's a gabling game. If the level of skills claimed is too low, they will not interview you, and if it is too high you get blown away. Threading in C++...

With your background, getting a job will be easier than for most people, but sadly that comes at a price that it's more likely to be ѕhit than for other people. Would you please explain more on these please ? In context of what ? Thanks. You've got IT skills, and many will try to suck you...

zhouxing is right that sustainable advantage is usually impossible. AT mostly works by exploiting inefficiencies in the market, and by their nature, they go away. I disagree however that competitors asccurately know what you're doing. Certainly that happens, but the dynamic nature of both...

Primitive algo trading got blamed for the crash of 87, and we still have a legacy of obsolete and/or dumb rules from that, coupled with a lack of any idea of what rules would be good for the future. Puco has a point about crowd momentum being an inherently dangerous thing, but I believe that...

I came across requirement in high frequency AT where they need IT people to support traders and AT applications. This may well be the hole I mentioned, waiting for you to fall into it. It is very easy for someone with your background to fall into tech support roles, especially someone with...

I am close to finishing my Ph.D in Computer Science and plan to look for a job in Algorithmic/Quantitative trading. My Ph.D is in "Analysis of Algorithms". I've done that sort of thing, very little of what I did was relevant in any way to algotrading ? >Essentially, I take algorithms that work...

Anyway I prefer the Pet Shop Boys. Proof you can be great musicians without the trappings of a drug dealer or the sexual morality of a catholic priest.

Some bits of CS are very specific about PhDs, and yes the use the "top school" term. ...but no, like pretty much everyone else they don't define "top school". I do not speak for UBS, but there is no policy on PhDs that I've ever seen. They see that as evidence of what they are looking for, but...

I've had the opportunity to talk to a few journalists covering this, and my previous life has given me a view of GS, and how they protect IP... I of course talk to some of the stream of algotraders leaving GS, and so although I have no first hand knowledge I have access to an interesting stream...

You won't have difficulties to find candidates in these tough times I bet. Hopefully not... The spec is to filter for good people which means we will earn what we get paid.

Well, ...,er, ..., um, ... red face, ..., shuffling of feet, ..., because he was this staggering musical genius who was the zeitgeist of the age, and who was the epitome of all that was tawdry (oops, I meant touching). Yes. Mr. Jackson was good at his job, big deal. He was a sexual predator...

We have been asked by a large investment bank to find unusually talented entry level analysts for a unified quant group based out of NY, HK and London. The groups is responsible for analytics for trading, risk management, market making, algotrading and structuring across both the fixed income...

I had a question. Are UBS and Deutche Bank hiring for their quant divisions, especially international students who need H1-visa? We're not allowed to say the names of the firms we recruit for, but one of those definitely is...

I will bet real money this does not make it to court.

That is not necessarily true, if a company finds somebody that can produce money for them, they will jump through any kind of hoops to hire him/her. As a headhunter I have to say that only applies when a manager has met you and decided that you are that good. I regularly get told "no one we...

Evolution Why is it that when someone is poor abuses their body with drugs to the point that they die young this is seen as a criminal act, but when a rich guy does it, everyone comes over all sympathetic ?

bigbadwolf, there is a dynamic in ex-pats that I do not fully understand, but my samples imply that the situation you state is changing... Even before the current clusterfu сk, expat packages were in real decline, some that reached me put the moved staff at a serious financial disadvantage...

Excellent post, thank you.

It is ironic that a right wing brain dead Creationist ensured that America let in lots of coloured people, and that a smart black guy has specifically ordered that many coloured people get fired, and then thrown out of the country. Do these racist arts majors in the Democrat party really...

Actually, I was at one firm where they sacked both my boss, and his boss. I don't think it was for hiring me... They ended up with no one left to fire me. I do however part company with the Adminator on trying to impress your new boss. He's right that the decision on your survival is mostly...

I've a great admiration for Peter, not only does he do good stuff, but he is enromously generous in his time. We were at the Global Derivatives conference two weeks ago, and over several days I never saw him except he was helping someone to understand something.

I don't believe the AP thing about girls and maths. Two reasons. In cultures where there is no particular push towards boys, they still do worse. But the big thing is sampling AP and other news reports. Examine the next 10 reports on "sex A is better than sex B at ...." I will bet you real...

I don't think being far from financial hubs is fatal, indeed my colleague Paul Wilmott uses his surfing logo a lot in his big book of banking. BigBadWolf nails it when he says $29K is a big ask for a program with no reputation. Perhaps I'm still jet lagged, but I can't find any real info on...

It is one of those odd things, that "Computer Engineering" courses for some reason are often more hardcore than "Software Engineering". CE is probably more attractive to potential finance employers, not least because most SE courses suck. About 20% of SE grads complete the "Kozak Protocol"...

yzia seems to have a well hedged strategy. However, if he wants to be a quant, then you need to do more of the "theoretical" Econ courses, since they contain more of the maths and concepts used in quant work. That's a trade off, since Accounting II is more useful in the general market, just...

I'm with those who say that education is critical to your survival in the market. As I have said more than once I've made some career decisions that were so dumbass stupid that I now tell them as jokes over a beer. Education helped me get past these (mostly) intact. It doesn't really matter...

>Last week at the Fordham MBA orientation, those who are concentrating in finance were >approached by the co-director of the MSQF program (I know, a sore subject in this forum) and it was recommended that we take it to enhance our skills, marketability, etc. I had to go and drink a coffee...

IlyaKEightSix is right, there is no "formula" for defining a qualified quant, whatever that actually means. As a headhunter, I have stolen staff selection procedures from many domains, and I don't believe quanting is more diverse than law or medicine. A doctors, lawyers and accountants have...

Almost all medical errors are caused by qualified doctors. IlyaKEightSix cites NNt's pilots, but again almost all plane crashes have a fully qualified pilot at the controls. Is the answer to plane crashes to put unqualified people at the controls. Or for medicine to hire nice , but...

In the UK, HBOS, one of the largest mortgage banks has been trashed, some blame short selling, which may or may notr be true. I share some thoughts about how you could do this on The Register: Bear squeeze blues: How to destroy a bank • The Register

I'm not so sure that Lehman will die. Obviously it's not in the best health, but the discount window is available to it. I do not now see liquidity taking them down, so for a complete collapse we need to think of a new thing to hit them. That's obviously far from impossible, but I do not yet see...

fcandeli has clearly demonstrated why so many "phyiscal" engineers want to become financial engineers. I hear variations on this theme frequently. But wise people here have said that this is not the same as knowing you will be happier in this line of work, indeed this is not a single work...

I did actually write a guide for pretty much this sort of problem. MaxRum is right, networking is good, as is working hard on your CV. Internships is an issue, not just for P/T NYU people, we're thinking about this.

Just to underline Andy's point... Although $25K has some utility, it is not the prize. The prize is being able to say to a top tier employer "I beat a lot of other people in a trading competition". That's worth far more than $25K. If I were forced to price that, would be more than everyone you...

I'm not sure that I know enough about you to advise. As I recall the September classes are remedial, so it is variable whether you need them. What have you done with your life ? What do you want to do with it ?

I can say as someone who used to work in IBM's labs, there are things you can learn at IBM that are very relevant to quant work... I think a higher degree in stats can be useful, though I am less happy when I hear about packages like SAS being used. That is not because SAS is defective, but...

I'm with the people who sensibly point out that a PhD as a purely finance career move sucks. Yes, there is on average higher lifetime earnings, even allowing for the lost earnings years. In my guide I go on at length about using your math and finance skills to model how to run your life...

Paul Wilmott Introduces Quantitative Finance is exactly what it says on the label. It addresses much the same ideas as Hull's book to much the same audience. As both a CQF Alumnus and a lecturer on the course I have to say that the CQF is vastly more than PWIQF. I jokingly refer to Paul...

I think it is good to find this work "fun", I might even say essential if you want to be succesful in any line of work. One of my standard lines is that you spend more time with the people you work with than the ones you sleep with. Doing QF for money alone is like marrying an unattractive...

It can be stressful being a quant and the average hours are higher than in many other occupations. Stress however is not an objective state, it is more to do with your reaction to things. Different people react differently to the stimuli. I know people outside banking and many of them seem far...

Depending upon how quant you want to be, the one then it's C++, but a lot of corp fin etc uses VBA. Fortran exists in banking, but is not a frequently demanded skill

Although VBA is of course very common in banking, I think it is more something that you ought to be able to teach yourself. Yes there are some subtle and complex issues in Excel but you won't get those out of an introductory course anyway.

kapil354 is right, ratings do matter, which is why I get annoyed by the many **** ones that I read. I do however disagree with bigbadwolf about how you get to be a "good school", however that is defined. Many people base their opinion solely on fuzzy ideas about the school as a whole. That is...

I guess it is not the spread that's screwed with them, but the securitisation process. They've used historical data to determine which tranche has a given % of default. One can make some AAA out of even the worst pile of toxic debt, but of course that is a zero sum game. There is always a...

I really wish I could agree more with BigBadWolf. Sadly these lists get read, and thus some people who make some decisions will be believe them. We could poll 500 recruiting managers, or rather we could ask them, but to persuade that number is a serious work item. Merely mailing them would...

I am not a fan of such lists, but this one is high in my list of bogus lists. We can think of several methods for ordering MFE programs, but let us be clear that 4 non-entities do not represent a consensus on Wall Street. Also at least one of these people has a vested interest, but this is not...

An awful lot of strat work is programming, indeed a lot of people get drawn into GS as what they perceive to be math-oriented work and in fact is computer wrangling.

"Crazy Directories in VC++ ?" What ? OK, I'm an old git, and given the audience of this forum, I suspect this anecdote is actually older than you are. I first did C in 1982 (yes, really). At one lecture the head of the CS department gave a quite passionate attack on students who were dumb...

As Samuel says, it will help you think better about programming which is always good. But it is not directly relevant, but I think it rarely hurts to do maths that interests you. The question I have is what are your other options ?

BR, I have heard nothing good about the Fordham program at all. I have heard some pretty bad things as well. It was the first MFE I ever warned people against.

Since I do not hold a Chinese, Indian or French passport, I realize that I will have a tough time Interesting point... Certainly I have had managers specifically ask me for more Chinese (with a complex filter), and more comment on the quality of French graduates. Indian IITs enjoy a good...

One has to be clear what is "programming". It is not merely mastering the syntax of C++, or reading an understanding a book like "Java for Dummies". To excel in software development, you need to think in a richer framework than you code. It's very unlikely that we will see Turing in banks any...

Woody has a point, and mostly that has been consumer preference. Improvements in technology have mostly been swallowed by choosing to drag around more metal. Although buying a better made European or Japanese car makes sense for the individual, let us not think it makes any useful difference to...

Thanks in advance for offering to post this information. There is surprisingly little high quality data for people to make such an important decision.

Yes, it is used a lot, though not universally. STL is tricky to interface to Excel, and a substantial amount of C++ comes from a time before STL. It is however, whant many hiring managers regard as a baseline competence if you are to claim C++.

In various books and websites you will find C++ code that work in modern C++ compilers. That applies especially to MS VC++ which two versions ago started to be much more compliant with the standard. The notion of a Std, ie "Standard" namespace led some implementors to think that it should be...

The large retail banks have the same sort of need for OR etc as any other retailer. Optimising prices vs turnover vs profits. Also retail banks do risk management. Yes, really. I know people who do this. Actually, that's a lie. I guess there must be some American banks who use maths to judge...

I wonder if we're looking at the right question ? Could we rewind back to what you feel you are best at, and then work out where you will succeed.

As an homage to Emanuel Derman, I chose the title of "My life as a parasite" for an article I did for efinancial careers. Finance jobs, banking jobs, recruitment in investment banking & in the financial markets It is interesting to see how the response is quite different between candidates and...

NNT's book is a good idea for grokking the mindset of quants, but if you take up this line of work, arguing about whether it is genius or bollocks is a good way to start an argument at a bar around a quant conference. My Life as a Quant by Derman has some insights to the work itself. But I do...

I'd like to focus first on the maths part of your background. CS has a lot of discrete math, logic, etc which is not that useful for QF, but can be some indicator of your general math ability. I always find it amusing that most quants are almost wholly ignorant of logic :) Part of the CQf is...

I've not heard that much in the way of complaints.

Many people who I respect see the ratings agencies as a major factor in the Credit Crunch.

Having spoken to Moody employees, and staff of other ratings agencies I can understand how this happened. Most of you will be aware that in the Latin alphabet, the letter after "A" is "B". If this concept is challenging to you then you either work for a ratings agency, or this is your natural...

"Of course you would need a large bankroll or at least no how much you can "gamble" given the size of your bankroll in order to protect yourself from random fluctuations from the mean." Examinator might find the Kelly Criteria an interesting thing to learn about relevant, and if you read Bill...

DC i don't know how big a HH you are Nor do I :) I diclosed the way in which I get information so that people can weight what I say appropriately. If the fact that nearly everything I hear about MFE courses is 2nd hand from people who've attended them causes you to weight my opinions lower...

JCrew is right, I make that assumption explicitly. I would actually even think about taking my simple model a step further. The original skills necessary to benefit from a top course have a market value. Therefore I believe that there must be some level of opportunity cost/earnings would should...

$60K equates to the tax on (about) a $160K income, and so it's still a good deal, and of course there are lots of loopholes. But the confusion is not helping London's position one little bit. Brown is very unlikely to stay PM long enough for this measure to really cut in. Increasing the length...

I apologise, if I 've got the number wrong by 10K Rather than pretend I didn't err, I will rejig my analyis down by 10K. This does not alter the outcome seriously. since I was not talking about living costs, but lost earnings. Also as a % of lifetime earnings a difference $10K just is not an...

I am not sure why most of the posts from Baruch guys sound like thi I am not a "Baruch guy", I've never even visited it, and have no stake in Baruch at all. Though as full disclosure the course director bought me breakfast once. I hope you agree that a brand delivers premium quality education...

"On the contrary I pity this old man for putting up such analogies." That is just cruel, you'll be old one day, then you will know how it is :( But I win because my significant other is prettier than yours. Old != Past It. Andy is right about the money affecting academia badly. It is not only...

At the risk of duplication I hear bad things about the organisation of this program. Phrases like "we asked for a refund" and "horrendous". The TA's were somewhat less than respected also. One set of information I got was so bad that I have to talk to my lawyer before I post it., and for...

IlyaKEightSix is wrong. It is not the case that the ratings agencies do not know what is going on. It is worse than that. They simply could not understand what is going on even if you sat down and explained it to them because they simply lack the intellect and training. There are people in...

I think there is an opportunity for an "Open Source" hedge fund. You say exactly what you are going to do, and do it. Your compeititve advantage being efficient execution. Transparency will be attractive to some, managing only 1% of this market is quite a tidy sum... As for fully "black" boxes...

As I say in our Guide, you should only do a PhD if the topic itself is something you feel will interest you for 4/5 years.

"Honestly, the only place that I could see the language barrier being a problem for somebody is in the job finding process." That's a pretty big "place"... And it is not the case anyway. Quants have many types of job, a very common part of the work is explaining things to people, so important...

Must say I'm a little disappointed, and am experiencing serious problems in getting the window to redraw. They've clearly tried to optimise redraw on Paint messages too hard. Excusable in a newbie, not from grown up developers

Bizarre assertion about Indians. My job brings me into contact with every nationality, including a few states that aren't even recognised. Indians are arguably the most polite group I deal with, indeed within several major groups within the subcontinent almost any disagreeing with someone is...

America has one of the highest rates of illiteracy in the developed World, indeed behind some of the undeveloped world as well. Of course that's the population, not any given individual. As Poirot says, grasp on English, it not of itself the only indicator of intelligence, and since America has...

Perhaps there should be some sort of book on the subset of English used in banking ? Arbitrage and illiquid may be English words, but the average English person would not recogiuse them. Some suggestions for useful phrases: "Of course the client money is safe" "I only meant to buy $100,000 of...

Perhaps the best time to ask a headhunter like me is before you sign up :) I assume this is one of their math/finance programs ? First up you should start trying to get an internship sooner rather than later. My call is that next summer will be the coldest market for interns that we have seen...

Thanks for the link, I hadn't known about this course. I must say that I rarely find problems speaking with French quants. OK, I speak French a little but so badly that the Academie Francaise has banned me from using it within metropolitan France :( I don't think it's a bad thing to have it on...

You won't equate to a banking quant of 7 years. You are most of the way to some interesting roles in algorithmic trading, which can be very lucrative. Almost without exception all people with your sort of profile come in as newbies. Sometimes at the high end of newbie, but newbie anyway. With...

I agree about language skills. In my position I get to hear some quite terrible tales of lecturers on expensive MFE programs who are almost impossible to understand. As a native English speaker, it's easier for me to understand accents since by luck I'm in the "middle". But since a large % of...

The requirements ? First up you don't let anyone in without a suitable maths and programming filter. The maths would be quite similar to a generic quant, but with less time spent on proofs, more on visualising and comprehension. For the CQF, I worked out a core of C++, which included patterns...

There is a hole in the market for a quant/developer masters. The syllabus for such a thing almost writes itself, and there is clear demand, yet no one does it.