alt Hacker NewsI wonder how fun being a modern quant really is. It seems like one of those things that sounds more fun in your head, but the reality is different. Kinda like "studying physics", going pro in a sport, or becoming a rockstar. People see the end result and don't see how much work it takes to get there or what the day to day is really like
Replies
I always wanted to be a quant, until I actually was a quant (internship). The division of labour in modern banks / market markets is so high that the scope of an individual’s work becomes much less than you would expect.
Good instinct. A lot of the day to day is debugging nitty things, reconciling small differences in results, trying not to make dumb mistakes. Almost all attempts to do very smart theoretical novel work fail, often because of extremely mundane engineering and data issues.
Imo the fun quant stuff these days is about predicting returns and not pricing derivatives. As others have said here, the pricing part is mostly commoditised and more about managing software.
What kind of quant?
Trading huge equity portfolios and getting paid a lot? Pretty fun
Pricing structured products all day in a bank that charges you for lunch? Not great
i don't know what the point of this book is - there's nothing rockstar about being a quant. not only do not all quants "generate alpha", even the ones that do are just overworked data scientists. ask anyone that actually works in the industry - fancy math is no longer a thing ("exotic option pricing"). so would "how i became an accountant" be just as interesting? how about (more accurately) would "how i became a data scientist"?
and I wonder how much of your success / failure is luck vs advanced-anything. You could wager 7-figure bankrolls in vegas on blackjack or baccarat and _possibly_ double or triple it. Doesn't mean your equation-solving had anything to do with it (in fact it expressly doesn't in that case).
[dead]
Im reasonably familiar with the exotics quant space.
It’s essentially IT/data work - the days of sophisticated maths are mostly gone. There always was a lot of code, but these days for most people there’s little to no new maths.
From what I’ve seen, post-2008 the job changed significantly, with more IT, less maths, more standardization - basically the job moved from bespoke everything to super industrialized. You’ll be able to have your model work for one underlying and one product, but what’s really useful is for lots of underlyings and many products - and that’s very hard.
That being said, and that’s important, you must understand the maths behind, otherwise you won’t be able to do anything useful.