Quant Research vs. Quant Trading

[another]

Hi, I'm currently a junior quant at sell side. Thinking about moving to the buyside. I feel like QT are closer to the market and could possibly get a better market sense, while QR could focus more on alpha strategy research. I do have a very technical background so let's assume these are both possible choices.
My ultimate career goal is to be a Quant Portfolio Manager.
Questions I have:
1. Would QR or QT better help me achieve my goal?
2. How does the careers of QR/QT compare? What are the pros/cons for each one, and which one has bigger upside?
3. Is there a job that combines alpha strategy research and trading? It seems like QT and QR are only focus on one thing. Ideally I want to be able to trade if I want, but also be able to work on alpha research.
Thanks a lot for any inputs!

 

[Seignioraged]

What do you do in your current role and would you want to be doing higher frequency trading or more lower frequency investing?

 

[another]

im more interested in lower/mid frequency, currently desk quant

 

[Seignioraged]

Then probably researcher, to get broader expertise in all asset classes, portfolio construction, data processing etc.

Quant traders would work more with microstructure, liquidity, flow, hedging, event risk and all them Greeks. .
Depending on bank QR is much further away from market, often not even taking bonus on strategies developed. In my experience from interacting with them it's a less stressfull job but with less reward, much more freedom with tools/programs to use. Sometimes you'll work for research projects for clients and that's can give a good idea of what buyside is looking at.
There's also structuring, acting as the bridge between research and product and depending on how you look at it you get to do both research and trading or neither. It can be extremely rewarding implementing cool new ideas, but also frustrating trying to shoehorn in the grand ideas of research into the mediocre legacy bank infrastructure.

From buyside's perspective at smaller shops you'd be doing work of both research and structuring and likely even quant dev stuff, maybe even trading although many buyside firms outsource that to algos from various banks.

Hope this helps somewhat!

What do you mean by very technical background?

 

[another]

Thank you a lot for the reply, that makes sense. BTW, do you know any place, that will allow you do some discretionary and some systematic?

 

[Seignioraged]

No, but there is a scale. Almost all systematic involves some level of discretionary levers and almost all discretionary involves some quant metric.

 

[Peter Wagner]

Then probably researcher, to get broader expertise in all asset classes, portfolio construction, data processing etc.

Quant traders would work more with microstructure, liquidity, flow, hedging, event risk and all them Greeks. .
Depending on bank QR is much further away from market, often not even taking bonus on strategies developed. In my experience from interacting with them it's a less stressfull job but with less reward, much more freedom with tools/programs to use. Sometimes you'll work for research projects for clients and that's can give a good idea of what buyside is looking at.
There's also structuring, acting as the bridge between research and product and depending on how you look at it you get to do both research and trading or neither. It can be extremely rewarding implementing cool new ideas, but also frustrating trying to shoehorn in the grand ideas of research into the mediocre legacy bank infrastructure.

From buyside's perspective at smaller shops you'd be doing work of both research and structuring and likely even quant dev stuff, maybe even trading although many buyside firms outsource that to algos from various banks.

Hope this helps somewhat!

What do you mean by very technical background?

By "maybe even trading although many buyside firms outsource that to algos from various banks" do you mean that these firms rely on the banks' algos for their trade execution?

Thanks.

 

[Seignioraged]

By "maybe even trading although many buyside firms outsource that to algos from various banks" do you mean that these firms rely on the banks' algos for their trade execution?

Thanks

Pretty much. Buy side is rather broad though and could include prop shops only trading two energy contracts to giant boring insurance companies practically trading a little bit of everything.