alt Hacker NewsIm 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.
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> but these days for most people there’s little to no new maths.
You are right. For most people there's little to no new maths.
But not for all. There's still plenty of good quality math to be done in the exotics space. However, there's a bit of Catch 22 that prevents people from doing new math: all the big shops have had exotics libraries since before 2008, and because of the exotics hiatus between about 2008 and maybe 2013, the research momentum was lost. After that, most quants in the space were happy to find ways to use the old stuff, and apply small tweaks at the margins. Most small shops use vendor models (Numerix, Murex) or open source (QuantLib), and people who use vendor solutions or open source are not looking for cutting edge stuff.
But there's still good math left out there.
What happened? Is this a case of the actual job changing, or just title inflation? I’d expect the quants to be the ones doing the math and implementing the kernels…
theres math, its mostly about pulling in obscure data sources, rank and file in alot of hedge funds dont even get to see what actually makes money
There's definitely room for new math but , at least for banks, the process of getting your fancy model validated by internal model validation teams and regulators is so time and energy consuming that most people don't want to bother with using all the fancy math they could use and instead rely on simplifications and simple extensions.
I started my career in derivatives. Mostly vanilla, but I did have a look in the exotics.
Intellectually, it's interesting when you start. There's all these weird payoffs that you are introduced to, and it feels like a game.
The thing is, there's a limit to how exotic things can get. People have already figured out how to price most of the things you can imagine, including all the things that customers normally ask for. Most of the day goes on looking after your hedges, basically implementing the model.
It's like a zoo. When you arrive there's a bunch of different, interesting animals. After a while, you've met them all. There's no new animals, just variations of existing ones.
However the thing that is really an issue is how the business works. Over time I came to the conclusion that the quants in the derivs space are really secondary to the salespeople. How important is the quant who can get the price right to within 1%, when the sales guy can talk the customer into overpaying by 5%? Sometimes it feels like the customer is not even shopping the structure around at all, he just feels comfortable with his sales guy and is willing to hand over a few million bucks of customer money with barely any thought.