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Signal processing is also useful. This is a domain where even if you work in some other language like C#, Java or Slang, they look down their noses at you if you don't have C++ skills. Doesn't hurt to know about Kelly criteria. Currently the only directly useful work on the subject I know of...

I think the thing to understand here is that **** happens. Nothing actually works. ... all the time. I counsel you to read http://www.darwinawards.com/ the Dawin Awards (with apologies to any Creationsts around here). In it you will find people able to misuse toasters, cars, hammers, and...

As a headhunter, I will tell you that a lack of C++ skills will stop you getting some very good jobs. But QF is a diverse career, some people spend their lives fighting VBA or Slang, and a common case is where you have to learn on the job. Hard to look your best here.

In my experience, people who cannot articulate their thoughts rarely are having good ones. Someone famous once said if you can't explain what you're doing to a child, you are a charlatan. As you might be able to tell from the volume of my posts I am a rapid typer :) I didn't see the posts, so...

A lot of British programs have substantial ethnic Chinese proportions, especially in science/IT/maths and economics. Finance programs are specially popular since London is now the top financial centre and has a more rational visa policy than other places. The change has been that PRC people are...

I don't think a job is the right way of getting one's English up to speed, certainly it would take time and energy away from study. It's a social thing, mostly. Chinese people tend to stick together in groups, helping each other with homework and spending leisure time together. It is of course...

Am I allowed to tell you what I think ? Ah what the hell... Foreign candidates do not have more problems getting hired in London. I've had British born managers complain to me about some of the British courses and asking to see more Russians, French and Chinese. But Chinese candidates are the...

Andy is right, each school implies a bet on which city you think will give you the best career options. I get in trouble every time I say "X is a better school than Y"

A decent % of working quants are at least partly self taught in stoch calc. I'd like to question quite whether it is optimal for you to take it up at this point. You're set on being a quant one day, but that's not this year or next. So why not get as good as you can on the taught subjects...

I fear that fffk may be being a little over sensitive. I am not aware of any serious attacks on the OR course, certainly I have not made any. Perhaps indeed some people have got it wrong in detail which is more forgivable, since most programs are very short on published detail. Quote: "If you...

1: CFA is rarely enough to get you a quant job of any kind. 2: Nothing is a guarantee of anything, but it can help get you an OK job 3: I teach on the CQF, so have to declare an interest but again it can help 4: Managers prefer actual qualifications 5: The question is wrong. Do you want to do a...

Being an old git, I'm used to this sort of arts graduate rubbish. I guess it's about the 5th wave of this crap that I've been exposed to. The central problem with having an arts "education" is that any form of creativity or imagination is crushed out of you. Instead you must regurgitate what...

V3 will have change you can believe in. We will come together as one nation under a groove and cast out the discredited mistakes of the past. I'm actively looking for feedback, new sections you want to see, areas you think waste space, and where you think my creative interpretation of English...

It's got past me :( sin 360 = sin 0 =0 However arcsin is not a one to one mapping, so arcsin (sin (360)) is countably infinite set. But that does not satisfy me much, so what's the trick ?

That GPA curve is in the right direction, I'd worry more if it went the other way. I think you need two things, to get into a good program, but also to get one that is good for you, personally. First up is whether you should be doing an MBA or a MFE. What is your motivation for choosing MFE ...

"are IT departments really that bad?" IT people get small random bonuses, poor career progression and management whose principal skill is golf, occasionally seasoned by accountants who aren't any good at accountancy. But in ordered sets you have a worst, even if the set is bad in aggregate...

I can't speak to the content of the refresher, but if DEs are new to you the MFE course is going to hurt. As I say in the review on my blog, Stefanica's primer is both a help and a filter. It's also worth commenting upon your goal of being a "top player" in the Baruch program. Your classmates...

Sobol sequences are pure maths used in quant work. Also you do not need to emphasise the "pure".

"focus" is an important term that I'd like to focus upon. Almost everyone in this line of work started off in a different direction, sometime quite radically so. One guy we placed did serious work fighting global capitalism before joining a large bank :) But he focused on his previous line of...

As a headhunter I do see a small % of CVs as terrible as this. The technical term we use is "JP Morgan IT department" I suppose a good GPA might help, but it's going to be tough to spin this. Good managers accept that people do not focus like a laser on education that leads them to a quant...

Out of that set I'd pick Sydney. Why have you chosen Australia ?

Some of you aren't very smart. Some of you are lazy. Some of you simply don't get finance. Some of you may genuinely believe that Intelligent Design is the right way to explain the diversity of life on Earth. Your future may well then be working for a ratings agency. I was at the Global...

Fat Tails immediately reminds me of Taleb Guilty as charged. Rouge Traders is title of a movie. Trade/Off sounds like Face Off. Which is why it is so attractive to me. Are all the events/people in the book took place in London? No. The very rough outline is to mirror things that have...

"but it's not easy for (first-generation) immigrants to assimilate because of alien cultural mores." And this is my problem, how ? I'm sure there is some more politically correct way of responding, but my responsibility as a headhunter is to advise, not sort out your cultural issues manually...

One solution is to find out which golf course your IT manager is spending his time, and get him to install a less obsolete version of Excel. You've got a shit old version, Excel 2007 has been out for a while now (the hint is in the name), and it can do million row series.

The guy running the Baruch program has written a book http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Mathematics-Financial-Engineering/dp/0979757606/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210840549&sr=8-1 This will not only refresh bits of maths you may not have used for a few years, it should be a good reality...

To a significant degree the two directions are merging, certainly there are people of both types in both camps.

Copulas were very popular during the good years of Credit derivatives, so although this has been a valued skill, I think it's price is in decline. I'd go for this order: Stochastic processes Time Series Stats Copulas But be aware that to prosper as a quant you need at least some of all these.

It seems you have a good knowledge of C++, but I wonder if you have yet built the equlivalent ability to drive it ? I think you're most of the way to where you need to be to get past interviews, except for having worked on larger, more buggy lumps of other people's code.

Game theory has uses in quant finance. It's not a primary skill in what banks have on their job specification,s but the conversations I have with hiring managers put it as a useful skill. Your subset will serve you well in interviews, but of course the practical applications are usually...

(Elsewhere I'm known as DCFC) AI is a pretty broad field, some of which is directly applicable to finance, some isn't. Classical logic is rarely applied to finance, indeed most quants are so wholly ignorant of even basic logic that on the CQF I have a remedial lecture on it, else C++ will bite...

If you dumped me and a bunch of other English speakers in China, I've no doubt that most of the time we'd talk to each other. Indeed, once in a bar in Sydney, I bumped into several people I knew, before I realised it was the "British" bar, that even in an English speaking country. Chinese is...

Well said Andy, that's the reason I say show them the money. There's lots of poor role models out there, left wing racists like to send black sports men into schools as examples of what they might achieve. I have occasionally considered using my position to do some social good in this way...

I do take a little exception to the view that I only said "show them the money". I go on at some length about the diversity of jobs that use quant skills, and that needs to get that across, especially to girls making decisions about careers. But... As someone who conveys messages as part of his...

My area of research will be 'Target Tracking', which falls under the more general field of non-linear estimation (which itself is an area in control theory). It's all about statistical inference, Kalman filtering and what not. Am I right in believing that a lot of this will be directly...

Why not just offshore quant work to asian countries This happens, less than you might think, but it's slowly growing. The vast majority of Quant work is collaborative between traders, IT, risk, etc, so offshoring is a lot less attractive for many tasks, and certainly it's very hard todo the...

Maybe the issue is not that women don't see the money but that they don't value the money as much as guys do. I think it's both to some extent. I may be an exception but if I were to join MFE program it would be from the love of knowledge and not rising my paycheck. That's not rare, but there...

Alain and John are entirely right, how can you expect to get through an interview if you can't talk ? Depending upon luck and wind direction you may be interviewed by 12 or even 20 people at Goldman Sachs. That's the right hand side of the distribution, but between you and any job there's 3-10...

I agree, poor English skills hurt some ethnic groups big time, Chinese people have the biggest opportunity to improve their career options by spending more time outside their group. Also, it's true that this is not a problem that is specific to students of finance. I first observed it as an...

I'd just like to make part of my position clearer here. I like finance students doing projects where a bank gives them a "real" task to do, and provides a bit of guidance and feedback. We've helped set a few of these up, and it has been good for everyone. I would go further and say there are too...

What do you think is the reason why the majority of quants are foreign-born? You want my view ? You won't like it. The USA has been as net importer of talent for all it's history, originally because it was a new country, but now because it's education system's quality is often 3rd world. Even...

Thin client apps not the future? As my picture shows, I'm old. Thin clients come, they go. Fat clients come & go as well. Distributed apps wax and wane, the number of tiers in the architecture grows and shrinks. The "Network Computer", remember that ? So crap Scott Adams devoted a good chunk...

As a headhunter I struggle to care about the difference between the two labels. Hold a gun to my head, I might pick Fin Math, or not. What matters more is what you learn, and show that you've learned in your study. Quality of program matters, as does reputation, but not the subtle variation...

I guess we're looking more at the $100 Meg level then. There is of course nothing with a prior probability of >1% for this. I guess that's the % of MFEs that will hit that net value. However, there is a line of work that in the next decade will produce more than 1% 10^8 ers. In most of...

The top paid career is programming. There are more billionaires who can debug code than solve PDEs, or who trade any type of financial instrument. I cite Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Ziff, et al, and of course a respectable number of traders can do serious programming. Next after programming...

As a straw poll, how many people read a couple of pages of google hits on their MFE courses before handing over the money ?

Some employers ask about GPA or degree grade/class. You are going into a field that is highly competitive even when the market is good, so at Baruch your work rate needs to go up. Some parts of EE are of zero relevance to your future in finance, but with all due respect you don't know what...

I have to declare an interest here, since of course I teach on the CQF, and my partner Paul Wilmott runs it. (That's why we're called P&D) I've not heard of the CFGC, but the very little info I've seen on their site indicates that it has at least the makings of a useful course. My ignorance of...

Tigga makes a good point about research, and although the first few hits on "fordham msqf" on google are by them, I manage get a couple of entries on the first page. It's a tough call for the students on the current course, there are all sorts of sanctions that Fordham staff can threaten them...

One thing that you get from an established program with a good record for the people coming out if it is a better shot at internships. But the Fordham program is not only new but looks as if some academics met in a bar to work out how to grab some of the easy money they see others making. It's...

Actually of course, the question "if a tree falls in an uninhabited forest does it make a sound ?" is badly posed. It should be "how do unobserved data in the lumber market affect my hedging ?"

Read our Guide ? Here is a block of filler text, only here because the quantnet system won't let me type in short messages..

I suppose the first thing to do is work with your current supervisors to find a course somewhere else. What is your current PhD direction ?

This thread does throw up exactly why my firm has not got into publishing a formal list of the relative quality of MFE programs. I don't think Baruch is being misleading, but it is possible to be misled if you compare the stats directly with another school that happens to use a different basis...

why we need to send dominic our resumes for exchange of the guide? It is one way we help to grow the set of people we talk to. But, just to make it clear, we never ever send your CV to anyone without you giving permission to send it to that particular firm. is it true that the guide is sortof...

I've sent Guides to everyone here, using my personal email account in case my business address is somehow the problem. I apologise for this, and if you have not received it by the time you read this post, PM me and I'll get it to you another way.

At this point, it's very hard to get a finance internship anyway, so don't let that stop you making the most of the Yahoo experience. Certainly you should do the internship, as Andy says it has a lot less value, but it still is good. First up, you need to hedge your chances of not making it into...

Fredcheck, that is a very good curriculum to put on top of CS skills. Whether it beats Pure Maths is quite tricky. Objectively it is more useful, but as a headhunter I have to share with you that the label on your degree can matter a lot in getting an interview. There is a significant and...

If you're great at C++, I suspect that filling in some hole in another part of your skills portfolio is optimal. Forgive me for saying this, but the odds are that the best IT investment of your time is probably more C++, not another language. Unless you are really really good at C++, the sort...

Andy has a point about the reading list. One thing I've been trying to research is the drop out rate at different programs. I have absolutely no hard numbers, but people tell me of 25-35%, which is an expensive thing to go wrong. Since I don't know Kunal, I hope he won't be offended if I...

In the "financial industry" there is a lot of Java, but in quant financ it's pretty rate. It's behind C++, C, C#, VBA, SQL, and Perl. In the last month I have spoken to more working quants who use F# than Java. If you already have Java skills, you are a useful part of the way to learning C++...

There are some jobs in C#, though it's a long way behind C++ and VBA. VSTO is less shit than it used to be, but I have yet to meet anyone who actually likes it. Like Tigga, I am interested in how "franchise" MFEs work out in practice.

Actually, that is a good point. When I first came into banking, the people that ran large firms were very driven on acquiring and maintaining the best possible credit rating. Was quite normal,, sub-optimal, but normal. We swung too much the other way, and no doubt will swing back again.

That's pretty good in this market.

There is some Python out there, commonly as rwinston says to prototype things, and used in production when a bit slower doesn't matter much. But as Andy says, the scripting languages are often used as data pumps, sucking data from one system to another, changing the form as necessary. Because...

Hull's book is more the "Good News Bible", the sort read by Creationists, rather than the King James variant. Quant jobs lean towards maths grads rather than CS, and be aware that many CS courses are extremely dumbed down. A simplistic test is whether C++ gets taught as part of the O/S internals...

I'm sorry but a course that has "quant" in it's name is not being honest with you if it does not do C++, but does accountancy instead. I see no numerical methods, which will hurt you. Yes, you can be a quant who just uses VBA, and I have no issue with its use in teaching, indeed I think that...

I am of course in favour of picking those types of mathematics useful in quant work, but... First up, you may not end up wanting to be a quant, it's years away, people change, so does the market. Also, if you are clear this is where you want to be, stick to only those course with a high math...

I've read the new language of Fordham's pitch for MFE students, and I must confess that it seems to be not entirely straight even now. Projects with a bank are a good thing, but are a long way short of an internship, and when my eye is caught, I get quite precise about English. "With" a bank is...

1Gb is easily enough to run Visual Studio, and I wrote elsewhere, MS will give you their full pro development site for free. http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/02/21/free_microsoft_dev_tools/ Matlab will work in that space, so altogether I think you're OK. Must be said that I would only take a...

Just out of curiosity, why is C++ considered so much above Matlab in finance? Several parts to the answer. Firstly, Matlab has issues that does not make it suitable for many production environments. Matlab has strengths in finding the answer, but is far weaker for the more comnmon quant task...

I'm a headhunter, and worked with Trader magazine when they were doing a recent piece on women in this line of work. I suspect "notable" is going to be a mix of interesting backgrounds as well as academic excellence. I would say up front that there is a window here. The banks are not all that...

Birkbeck is on our "good" list, but only if you are applying for jobs in London, since it's almost unknown in the USA. It's relatively cheap, which is good. Your maths need to be checked out, and probably upgraded if you are to make the most of this. Sadly, people will question your undergrad...

It's good stuff, and I would counsel that one must listen to customers, just not too much :) Many quants lack communication skills to a degree that measurably impacts their ability to get the sort of job they want. You are supposed to be an expert, which includes the ability to explain what you...

I'm a headhunter for quants, and I have to say that you don't fit the standard pattern at all. There is a path into the kind of finance that would value your skills, but I don't know enough about you to call it a better future than where you are currently headed. I could see you as a...

We have a large investment bank looking to hire a very good quant who can bring to the role both C++ skills and an understandings of both pricing and risk management. The salaries will be pitched at a level to attract the necessary quality of QD. If you're interested, let me know...

Contrary to what you may have been reading recently, some firms are still recruiting. Our client is a household name bank, expand and acquiring new business, and is looking to take on highly skilled quants with development skills in C++. If this sounds like you, drop a line to...

It's just so different in NY and London. Last year we managed a big entry level recruitment event for an IB, and I innocently referred to them as "bright young things". The head HR honcho froze me with the sort of glare Cate Blanchett uses in Elizabeth on foppish courtiers. I didn't do it...

Being extra critical, I'd call working at S&P a fate somewhere between an assistant circus clown and IT at JP Morgan. The internship record is good.

Yuriy is right that banks should not ask, but that raises a different set of problems. You need to show that the extra time has been used well, in terms of you progressing and showing that you realised your potential. The legal issues mean that they don't ask, which means it is up to you to say...

VB.NET is not like anything else, it's not even like VB all that much. As a founder member of the VB User Group I have to say that I hated VB.NET the first time I saw it. Then hated it a bit more, and then settled down to a quiet distant loathing, hoping that somehow it would just go away. I'm...

I have no knowledge of Rutgers bloating internships. I suppose, all other things being equal, I'd pick Rutgers, but that's making a lot of assumptions about you.

I'm glad you have the self knowledge to work out things you aren't great at. Optimisation, especially classical methods has some demand, as does signal processing. Multi factor optimisation in the domain of market impact models is also worth looking at.

I agree that a good undergrad course with decent quality students can achieve the same level as a MFE. If you cut out of a maths degree all the stuff that has no relevance to quant work, and shove in financial maths and bit of programming, it could be done. A big problem would be marketing the...

Discussion forums are like modelling pools of liquidity, and there is a natural gravitation towards sites that already have exchange of ideas. The numbers of posts and readers drops exponentially as you move down from Wilmott.com By the time you reach the 7 or 8th site, they are dark corners.

I agree with the wolf, that a 7 year hole is hard to climb out of. But... We do see a trend of people trying to move into finance, without leaving the West Coast.

Well, thank you, I suppose at one level I was hoping you'd come up with counterexamples. To be fair, it is not restricted to CS. I see physics PhDs who are essentially doing the same thing with large sophisticated, yet obscure equipment.

As well as being a headhunter I teach the C++ part of the wilmott CQF (long story), so I have to delcare an interest. Knowing C# will help you with C++, and a bit of dillgent study will sort that problem out, though not as quickly as you might like. Given you've 8 years in s/w, what language did...

I agree about the selectivity of data sets, and it's a hard one to call. For instance Fourier analysis is a perfectly respectable math technique, but is insanely useless to use on interpreting a yield curve. However, that does give me an idea for a valid bit of research, based loosely upon the...

It's going to be tough to do this well. It is easy to forget that credit derivatives have their basis in managing risk, and in particular moving it to those parts of the system best able to cope with a given structure of risk and return. Thus what we have had is the equivalent of a medicine for...

I suppose I would go for the CS PhD, on the grounds that you can learn the finance as you go along. I can't say it brings light to my cold flabby heart as a headhunter though.... I've been talking to CS Machine learning PhDs recently and one way they go wrong is that it may be the Machine that...

As a headhunter, I flatly do not believe that anyone gets $500K straight out of school unless they are someone who was a respectable earner before, and took a year off to study. That's not very uncommon, but even then 500K is not likely. Currently the highest we have seen for someone with no...

Atito, the system is new so it is entirely possible that I'm wrong, so if you could point out what exactly I screwed up on, I'd be grateful. I based my calcs on the very latest stuff from the Home Office, and have re-checked it since. You get points for being young having $5000 a masters...

To be fair to the GD people, as I understand it they have stopped trying to maintain a ranking list because of the sheer volume of programs these days. It's very very hard to do this to an adequate standard, I did a basic calculation on this, and to get our stuff into something I'd be happy...

I see very little demand for VB.NET in quant work. VBA is pretty common though.

Do you think that you can master those areas in just 1 or 1.5 years? Given that amount of time, I strongly believe that a typically good student can only grab those in a recipes style. I think that is reasonable analysis. To me a "master" is someone in (say) the top 10% of a given profession, a...

It does make a difference between highlighting C++ over C# People will consider C++ developers for C# roles but far less often C# for C++ jobs.

The quants I talk to about leaving JPM don't mention Java, though they have mentioned C# I don't think it's widespread there. Remember that IBs are huge things, and for instance JPM has hugely important SmallTalk applications, some F#, and VC++ 6 which is barely C++ at all. Demand for Java is...

My point about "placement rates" is not that I really believe anyone is lying (except maybe Fordham), but that I see this as a single transaction, not a filtering process. Someone buys a MFE course for $X where X is a non-trivial lump of cash, and like all good finance types I care about the...

I agree with Andy that in times like this, there is little that can be achieved by what people say. However saying the wrong thing can have bad effects.

Actually, I am not sure I believe anyone has "close to 100%" placement rates. If you include people who drop out, I fear it is rather lower.

Go on, tell us who that was ? :wall

I'd love to help on the placement stats, but no single HH firm has that sort of coverage. I certainly agree with Andy's notion that those who have good stats will tend to shout them, since if you are selling something for $60,000 it's good to say how it helps. But even then it is historical...

These days, C++ is the fodder of community colleges and service courses in non-compsci degrees Indeed that is often true, which is why CS degrees are falling into disrepute. Although it has a valuable niche in real time, finance, graphics and game programming, it is unlikely that any Comp Sci...

"takeover" can be a subtle thing of course. If they get the right to a certain number of seats on the board, and a strong say in who gets hired, then it is not a formal takeover. They may even go for some for of warrant which can give them most of what they want for low political risk. Also...

UCLA is a better known school, but even so it is just so very hard to guarantee internships. It could be done, but at huge effort. I could imagine an established program working its alumni network effectively, but of course that's not an option here. The C++ issue at several universities is the...

I'm assuming that you'd be "Tier 1 (General) highly skilled worker" ? Isn't it just so nice to have a major government officially call you that ? Being Britain it is the Home Office that deals with foreigners who want to be in Britain, not the Foreign Office which deal with Foreigners who don't...

An interesting development is that DMK's postings on Wilmott.com have all been deleted. This was done from his user ID, not by the moderator. So has he been "leaned on" by his professors ?

Sadly, it is often the case. In this spirit of openness, that's why we do the Guide... Given that we have Wilmott.com, the biggest of the quant websites, it would be easy to hose out job adverts. Actually, since part of my background involved far too much work with Markov Chains, I could easily...

I am 25. Does it mean that I can only work in England for 3 years before I hit 28? My mistake for not saying it correctly. The British system is points based, and once you are in, you should retain the right to work, and after some years (5 ?) get an option on a passport allowing you to work in...

Assuming you're under 28, the new British regulations would give you the right to work in London once you get your MFE under the new points system. But if you want to work in a smaller financial centre like NY, then you can push at the larger firms. They of course prefer people who don't have...

says "Fact: Some of us got interview opportunities from JPM under the help of the school, at least one got the internship offer. I am not sure whether the "complaining" guy knows that." I'm sorry, is this supposed to be a defence of the program ? You were all promised internships, one got an...

The OP does indeed describe himself as someone who complains, and in my position I get this all the time from many sources. So could you respond to the issues raised ? 1: how many students have got internships ? You were promised these, yet I'm told this has gone badly wrong. 2: What have the...

You might want to apply to Bloomberg who are almost always looking for network people. Some of the stuff they do there is useful to banks.

dstefan enters an interesting area about large vs good programs. As a HH I do have to say that the two terms are not entirely opposites. A non trivial factor in getting a job is whether people have heard of it. Bigger program implies greater familiarity. That's one reason our internal list of...

Sadly I have yet to talk with an alumnus of the IIT Stuart programme. But the description looks good. I think it is unique amongst finance programmes in that it may require you to do a basic C++ course before you start. Many programmes like Fordham claim they can turn out skilled MFEs where no...

International qualifications are an issue at masters level. The vast majority of people do their first degree in their home country, and it's quite clear from where I sit that there is a wide variety of optimality of the selection processes. But there is no real standard for what a MFE program...

You are not alone in not seeing how Fordham can claim credit for these people. As I say, it;s like the way Rolex would like you to believe that a $10K watch will make you a great sportsman. Fordham goes further, and to quote their website: At Fordham, you will experience the same Jesuit approach...

If a program costs 40k (i.e. Fordham) but gets me a starting salary of 60k with raises that will average out to greater than 5% each year, then attending the lower tier program is a much better financial decision than sticking around as a teacher. The question is whether you will get this job...

Actually, I've just noticed that the ad on this page talks of Baruch's 14% acceptance rate, so clearly MFE programmes know that exclusivity has value. You would not advertise a film as "Die Hard 17, only 14% of people allowed to watch it", though as I understand it, Basic Instinct 2 actually...

Andy is right that students do not do enough research on MFE programs, but I've tried to research some and found no real data at all. We have looked at the idea of some sort of poll for rating MFEs, but that has problems. The biggest is that almost no one has done more than one, so comparison...

I've got shot at for this, a couple of people claiming that it's some spite against Jesuits. Yes, really. I have only partial info the quality of the Fordham course, odd but bad things like accountancy and VBA instead of C++. That is not uniquely bad, and would have merited only a passing...

How ethnic diversity is London compared to NYC ? It's a different mix, and very hard to call which is more diverse. Banking is extremely diverse in London, turn up to a Wilmott finance focus, and you see more diversity than in most firms politically correct recruitment brochures. London has...

You may be right that it's 5, but the number has changed more than once before, and I'd bet it changes again. Among the Schengen countries (Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, etc.), there are no real constraints to moving around. But Schengen is not the EU, and even there's petty...

Is there a quota like H1B ? How long does it take to obtain a permit ? There are no quotas, they were considered and rejected. You get the points, you get in. Work and citizenship are indeed decoupled, indeed currently you can be a British subject and not allowed to work, which is pretty...

I've talked to a variety of UoF alumni and they seem surprisingly good. Actually my surprise ought to be an issue for you. UoF is not a highly branded university, and when I've mentioned it to hiring managers they do not seem awfully impressed. $15K is a good price, and the curriculum looks...

Do you care to give a layman explanation of the British immigration applied to foreign workers as opposed to American immigration law applied to foreign workers ? I'm assuming you mean the programmes set up for economically useful people, like Baruch grads ? The British system gives points for...

Spending $$$ and a year of your life on an MFE will convince many managers that you are interested. Obviously experience in an investment bank is good, retail banking will not help at all. You imply that you are in Britain, and given that British retail banks are run by shambling morons and...

Everything to do with transport is more expensive and lower quality in the UK. Although there is a TV tax, you do get 4 high quality TV channels free, and which have no adverts. (There's also three free crap ones as well). Major sports events are free on TV by law. Yes, really, no, the...

Immigration is no more popular in Britain than in America. However, against the popular misconception, in Britain, money wins. Lety's do this simply. Next time Baruch students assemble, look at the faces and listen to the voices. How many bog stand anglo-males are there ? Access to...

Can you do c++ ? Here is some extra text because I can't post less than 30 characters

MS has been giving away Visual Studio Express for some time, but now students can get VS 2008, Expression,. SQL Server, Windows Server, and some other stuff free. It is however a big download. http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/02/21/free_microsoft_dev_tools/

DCFC, do you think CQF really worths the $$. I have first to declare an interest, in that I teach C++ on the CQF, and my business partner is Paul Wilmott. If you are within the bounds of not knowing this stuff already, but knowing enough to understand it, then the expectation for most people is...

The maths from your EEE background will be useful, and Java is close enough to C++ that it will help you get up to speed. Java is surprisingly rare in quant finance, though more common in generic housekeeping IT. Having better C++ will help a lot.

As a headhunter I note two things about Baruch which makes me think well of it. 1: It teaches C++, apparently to a respectable standard, which really helps get a job. 2: The staff have a genuine interest in getting their students placed in jobs, which sadly is not always the case elsewhere...

FOQuant:any tips on what employers like to see By necessity any advice I have is based upon 2nd hand info from hiring managers, so there is noise in my signal. They like "creativity". That is of course hard to define, but any algorithmic strategy out of a book fails directly. They want to hire...

I think if you're smart enough to do QF, I rather hope you can cope with $ vs £ symbols all by yourself :) Actually, nearly all financial textbooks use $, and aside from legal stuff that's outside the scope of most MFEs, there is very little difference between London and smaller financial...

Damned right Andy. Microsoft's PR people are going to be setting up an interview with the VSTO people, who I imagine like what they've built. Feel free to vent any more. Robert Heinlein, the engineer turned SciFi writer talks of some products that reach a perfection that can only be surpassed...

joe_bradly is right, asa headhunter I will share that it's rare that VA is demanded in a job spec, though for trading roles, competence in Excel is seen as positive. A good % of you will be doing internships, and I'd counsel you to pick up a good Excel book and learn enough VBA to get by. I...

I agree, a lot of the low hanging fruit has been eaten, and we're not in a time of easy profits.

You do have to leave CA, although there are roles on the West Coast, the ratio of entry level people to jobs is truly bad. Why not start on our reading list, and see how this line of work suits you before making any decisions.

We talk about this sort of thing in our Guide. I guess you're going for a quant developer position ? The amount of "quant" in this is very variable, you can get some positions merely be having read and understood Wilmott if your C++ is good enough. "good" in this context includes STL with some...

A McCain-Huckabee does look so inevitable, as a balanced ticket. Indeed the whole thing is shaping up remarkably like the last season of the West Wing. A charismatic, honest Republican candidate is unelectable, so gets some Creationist jerk to lend his support. The Democrat candidate is young...

A big bit of the game that seems hardly covered is the game theory of who is VP to who ? If Obama pulls ahead, would Clinton agree to be VP ? She's just young enough to retry in 8 years time. Obama's younger, and his lack of experience is clearly a factor for those who are not committed to a...

You have some of the basics for algorithmic trading. Personally, I'd see if you could get transferred to MS research in Cambridge who have good links to some large banks. I'd look at signal processing, and of course you will need to learn how to program in C++. Sadly, it is the case that I've...

Surely the way to get around Creationist immigration laws is for Baruch to set the semester to begin earlier ?

I really don't like politics but I read somewhere that the size of your wallet is directly proportional to your inclination towards the right Makes sense, but not as an economic term. America has about the highest correlation between wealth in generations on the planet. Not only higher than...

Is it not the case that under risk neutrality a Republican vote is worth the same as a Democrat ? Under winner-takes-all, there is a surprisingly large chance that you personally get to choose the next Republican nominee. Although millions votes may be cast, the difference will be much much...

Good advice Gw. However, before you enter a room and criticize the advice of people inside I suggest you find out a little about their background first. Indeed, I delude myself that I have some vague idea how this game works. The question gave too little detail for anyone to give a strong...

As a headhunter, I have to say that 500K is two years is not all that realistic, and the distribution includes numbers 1/5th of that. With all due respect, you haven't done maths or C++ for 10 years, it's going to take serious effort to get up to the average in this game, much less pull ahead...

There is not a clear boundary here. I talk to people who have "quantitative analyst" on their business card whose work is essentially looking after a few buggy spreadsheets. Nor is it constant over from one month to the next where "theoretical" quants can be debugging C++ or sigting through...

Must be said that I've seen the "I am a hard worker" line used to good effect, the trick is to be believed. Like every other claim you make at interview and in your CV, you should have at least one example of it in your life. Achievement is a function of sweat and brains, and on paper it can be...

It is certainly true that OO came from Smalltalk, though patterns came from many places. Recently I interviewed a CS grad who claimed that the great innovator Apple had invented GUIs, had never heard of Smalltalk, and had done O/S internals in Java :( C++ is not an OO or pattern language. It is...

I think the thing you need first is Visual Studio Tools for Office http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905533.aspx VBA is basically an older version of VB, so most business logic code will just work. However, VBA allows you to be very sloppy about the types of variable, so that will bite...

Carl puts it well, and of course many other jobs have >60 hours. S/W development is in this area, as are many other types of engineering. vbranov is right that one's productivity can be greatly increase but in a competitive game that typically means you achieve more, not that you work less. Also...

On most of the popular tech websites there have been increasingly hysterical posts about Microsoft killing off VBA. Although not loved by quants (or anyone else), VBA in Excel is the glue that holds together a large % of financial markets. I always counsel newbies to get vaguely competent in...

It is not necessary to move to NYC, but it is tough to get a role in the Bay Area. Currently the ratio of candidates to the market is higher on the West Coast than anywhere else at all. For the avoidance of doubt that includes India. An EE can get a job directly without an MFE, indeed there...

I must say in my capacity as a quant headhunter that the original list up there is just rubbish. The ordering is plain wrong, and there are places which ought to be up there as well. That isn't to diss vaibhav, since every other list I've seen published fails miserably, indeed we go as far as...

Realistically you will be at least 35 before you become a quant, since there is preparation to be done. That's not too old, and in many cases it is not the age itself that is the issue, it is what you have done with the time. Making it up the tree in academia means that you have shown yourself...

As a HH, I would chip in, that some employers would be interested in this sort of project, even if their stuff is (usually) more sophisticated. A couple of pointers : How are you hedging or at least putting limits on how much you lose ? Are you optimising return vs risk ? What measure are you...

I am a headhunter, my word is learn more C++. Then when you've done that learn more C++ Matlab questions at interview are rarer than a rare thing that they don't make any more.

Problem with any contract is enforcement. When someone leaves, how do you know if they are using something they should not ?

There is some use of consultants, but most of this based upon a manager using a contact he knows to be good. Intellectual property is an issue, but a bigger issue is the sheer effort in getting an external up to speed, relative to the payload of any work they might do. At P&D, we have been...

OK, we have now checked that there really should not be anyone who asked for the Guide who did not get it. All Cvs will get read by a real person after the surge has died down. Please let me know if you have sent your CV and not got it, and I will personally send you a copy.

I must say, I am yet to be convinced about the merit of undergrad quant courses. Although some finance can be handled at undergrad level, or even pre-university, I worry that people taking these courses lack math depth. It is even the case that some firms have an official policy that any...

One well known firm went through a phase of asking candidates to prove Pythagoras theorem. A surprising % floundered, in illuminating ways. Some tried to remember the proof, and rather in the way of remembering the words of pop songs you liked when you were 15, there were gaps where candidates...

Financial time series are so noisy that classical finance theory started with assuming that it was entirely random. However there are models that come from market microstructure where you can detect processes going on and exploit them. Also there are signals in terms of movements in underlying...

No MFE covers StatArb anything like well enough, so there is definitely a gap in the market. Also as a HH, I perceive demand that seems to have increased monotonically throughout turbulent times. In StarArb/Algotrading a quant is closer to the money, which is also good. Highest paid entry level...

Although a large % of QNers will be taken directly by banks, some will deal with HHs, and that is why our Guide has a section on dealing with us pimps. Frankly as newbies you are more easily lied to, since your ability to spot being fed a line is compromised by this being a new game to you...

WallStYouth, I have a blog piece on this. Basically you've been 3B'ed. Dominic's Blog

It will be interesting to see if the banks have employed decent lawyers on this, or even if they have thought to ask. The law on deferred and accrued bonuses has changed in interesting ways since last time this sort of thing happened. My very expensive lawyer is looking forward to a lucrative 2008

F# does indeed show promise, but only one bank I know is using it for production work. To me it nicely shows why I'm cynical about Java and C# for quant work. Although they have good points, all three languages are very similar, which means to me that they are unlikely to offer the sort of...

Sadly I don't have any way of mapping QN names to real people, so I don't know who you are ?

I think the mysterious saves are due to the fact that VS saves your code to disk before compiling or debugging it.

As promised we have totally rewritten and greatly expanded our Guide to Getting a Quant Job. Yes, it really is 137 pages this time, and yes it still is free. We have adjusted our advice to current market conditions. MY INTERVIEW IS IN TWO DAYS TIME...

It does of course depend upon what I mean by "competent". It is not necessary to be an ace C++ hacker, but 60% of quant work is fighting computers, and C++ is the dominant languages for good quant jobs. To an extent any definition I use is correct because it is me as a pimp who decides whether...

It's more detailed now :) You seem to be headed in a quant developer direction. I'd just refine the "speed" bit. Latency is an issue, which interacts with speed, but is a different thing. Various forms of numerical analysis like quadrature, monte carlo, finite difference et al will also help...

Actually I'd finish off learning C++ rather than try to gain a new language in the time you have left to study. > 80% of the people we see coming off masters programmes with "C++" on their CVs are not able to demonstrate basic competence in the language. In the Guide, we are big on the fact...

SQL is useful to a quant developer, though rarely is it critical to getting a job. There is however a signal in how much an interviewer asks you about SQL, the less quanty the job will be, and in general it will be a less good job.

I have no idea about admissions committees, being a pimp, but if you keep up the poker skills a few managers would be intrigued enough to get you in to see if you really are that good. I worry more about your maths than poker.

I have to say that someone who has done no maths since being a teenage is going to find it very hard. Also, SAP is pretty much the least useful IT skill for quant finance, we have precisely one former SAP person on our database, and he gets by since he isa master of C++.

It may sound arrogant, but your research didn't find Paul and me, so it's not there yet. I had to re-write the Quant Dev and IT parts of Guide 2.0 three times from scratch before I got rid off the vast horde of ifs, buts, and maybes this entails. Short version boils down to what sort of...

The Wilmott CQF can be done remotely, and is currently around 100 lectures, all of which are videoed. There apparently has been quite a hard debate in academic circles about students taking recordings. My personal view is that you can't stop them, so live with it, but not everyone agrees. As a...

Europe has 3, maybe 4 financial centres. The City of London, Canary Wharf, Mayfair and perhaps Edinburgh. Europe's 5th most important centre is Dublin which contrary to what the corrupt fools in the Kennedy family might tell you is no longer in Britain. As a simple rule, being outside the UK...

I agree, and Guide 2.0 explicitly says that for things like internships "you should press every button you can find". This is run by the EU, which means it will be at least partly screwed, but well funded. Note that there are no headhunters there, they don't like us any more than we like them...

Must say I can't quite see this as the most perfect event in the world for quants.

An important issue with the ratings agencies is the quality of staff. Who here sees working at S&P or Moody's as a job they aspire to get ? They don't pay well, and the management structure offers weak career paths to people with a quant background. Very roughly, you can expect more smart...

You'll get the Citi brand on your CV which is worth a few points, and you will be at a level where it's problems are mostly above your head. However, the most important advice I would give you is not to turn down any other job unless and until they give you an offer letter. Verbal does not...

We observe that GS does seem more likely to go for toin cossing and stopping brainteasers. However if you're going soon then I would not try and learn very much more that was new. One of the most common failure modes at interview is not from a candidate failing to know a particular thing, but...

Bloomberg licences come in several flavours, and you may find that the academic licence you have access to has limitations like the number of series that can be downloaded. As for Steve Dalton's book, I think you can assume that it works with Excel 2007, because we were on the technical beta...

There is more of a shortage of good quant developers than most other types of entry level quant position. There are no courses to produce them anywhere. As for "staying in China", if I as a white Westerner had said that to a foreigner, I would run the risk of being called racist. It is possible...

I wonder what the motivation of the HH was, it may be an honest appraisal or he may have been softening you up for a less attractive job. Of the jobs I work on, only a few % are dreamt up by me, the rest is the bank/HF/AM wanting a person to do X. It does lead to the game theory of playing is a...

I went to the London event, was good, and I counsel any of you that can make it to attend. This is very current stuff, and a good networking opportunity. The job market has not collapsed (I've seen collapses, this ain't one), but you need to make sure you sharp.

The part about competing headhunters handing out our Guide is true. If you haven't read it yet then you need to know that our copyright is on every page, along with the name of our firm and our contact details. We thought about getting our industrial strength lawyers involved and crushing them...

Can you program ?

Thank you all good folk.

I didn't hear what this guy said, and I think he's right. But in a narrow sense. First up there is a difference between your team needing your skills and valuing. Speaking as someone who has been hanging around in banks sine before the average quantnetter was born, I will share with you being...

My favourite Quant Developer quote is "this is how we turn mathematics into money". As quant you will spend 60% of your time doing some for of programming and C++ is easily the most common quant programming language. There is a lot of number crunching in C++, solving PDEs through finite...

In the new version of our guide, out early next month, I spend several pages on choosing a PhD. I have a special highlighted section that says choosing a PhD as a career move sucks big time. There is a high probability of dropping out, and you may be buying 3-5 years of misery. I enclose part...

The technical issues for a Chinese FDIC can be solved relatively easily since it can simply hire people from countries that already have one. I know civil servants who also help developing countries with this sort of stuff as part of general international cooperation. There is even an...