5 ms·

It'd be best not to have any single industry be "king". The power careers tend to suck in a lot of people with bad motivations and, when talent is difficult to

It'd be best not to have any single industry be "king". The power careers tend to suck in a lot of people with bad motivations and, when talent is difficult to measure, such as corporate management, starkly insufficient ability. Also, it's not the case that the most talented undergraduates pursue careers in finance. It's more accurate to note that finance is a backup plan for the most talented people, because it's available and pays well. Only the douches specifically tailor their college experience to getting an investment banking job. So to the extent that there are a lot of talented people in finance, it's because a lot of smart people end up falling back on plan B, usually because of the intractable systemic problems and corruption within academia and the sciences.

Alex3917 18y ago
It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learning how to do that. The interesting jobs in finance are pretty hard to stumble across as a backup plan.
- banned_man 18y ago
  I disagree, having worked on Wall Street for a couple of years. Finance prefers that you learn these sorts of things on the job. It's much better received to have majored in math or computer science than business, at least for an undergrad. It's also very unlikely that Soros is going to have an undergraduate building new quant models in his first year. If he's lucky, he might get to write the code to test someone else's models. There really isn't an undergraduate course that sets you up to be a quant, and most quant jobs are unattainable without a PhD. An MFE degree (Master's in Financial Engineering) can give you the basic skills expected of a junior-level quant trader, but tends to underplay a critical component: programming. (Most quant jobs are programming jobs; unfortunately, the lingua franca is C++, and at most financial firms, the quants are strong mathematicians but third-rate coders.)
  - Rod 18y ago
    "at most financial firms, the quants are strong mathematicians but third-rate coders." Truer words have never been written. Various friends of mine who are former mathematicians / physicists now working as quants do rock at stochastic calculus, but suck at C++. Maybe a solution would be to separate the coding tasks from the modeling tasks. A friend of mine recently took a quant position at a hedge fund, and while he gets to do a lot of modeling and data analysis, the actual implementation is carried out by a 1st rate coder with whom he works in tandem. That sounds very smart to me...
    - whacked_new 18y ago
      What's your take on why this is? It is very perplexing to me: my intuition says that strong math almost implies suitability and predisposition for strong programming. Why is this not the case? I am not supplying a guess now, because this comes as a total surprise.
      - whacked_new 18y ago
        Ah, actually, I have a guess; it is quite simple. Please don't read it until you thought of one first. Writing code requires knowledge of code conventions, syntax, and as importantly, the libraries. This is a declarative/episodic memory task, less so of working memory, symbolic manipulation, and abstract reasoning task. The latter traits are dominatingly important in math/physics. In coding there is a mix of the two, with the former taking precedence after the program logic has been deduced. Which brings about the next question. The mathematician part cannot be learned merely through patience, but becoming expert at a language can be. Now, why is it that your brilliant math/physicist friends cannot become such experts? Do they lack the patience? Or, does coding simply not "click" with them? Is there a causal relationship? Now my intuition says there is none, and so we are back to square one: it is perplexing that they are not good programmers, unless there is some personality reason behind it.
      - menloparkbum 18y ago
        People who are really good at math often find programming boring and mundane. I used to work with some guys who had physics PhDs from MIT and they all referred to their programming jobs as "whoring." I've read a few articles about Stephen Wolfram where he makes the admission that he can't stand programming. I'm not very good at math but I'd prefer working through a trigonometry textbook to working on another ruby on rails website.
- Rod 18y ago
  "It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learning how to do that." I strongly disagree. Finance is not Theoretical Physics. In Physics, the best and brightest are in Academia and have access to high-quality experimental data (unless you're doing high-energy stuff, where experimental data is hard to get). In Finance, the best and brightest are in the financial services industry, and the finance academics have no access to high-quality data because such data costs millions. Data aside, the kind of Finance which is taught in college is somewhat of a fantasy. I will be crude and claim that Academic Finance is as scientific as literary criticism... Cutting a long story short: anyone who's proficient at building models (like a physicist or a math-oriented engineer) can build models for a hedge fund without having been trained to do that in college. At D.E. Shaw they like to say that "you can teach smart people how to do finance, but you can't teach financial people how to be smart".
  - Dilpil 18y ago
    "I will be crude and claim that Academic Finance is as scientific as literary criticism..." I submit that you are not aware of what is actually taught in academic finance. What principles of it do you disagree with?
    - Rod 18y ago
      I disagree with the methodology, mostly. I believe that teaching Finance as if it were a hard science is dishonest. I believe that mathematical rigor is no substitute for data and empiricism. I would also claim that a MSc in Statistics may be way more valuable than a hardcore MFE. Just my 0.02 USD.
- jakarta 18y ago
  Soros does not use quant strategies.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    Yes, he does. I've spoken to a few quants at Soros' fund. He doesn't use them as his main strategy, but if he is, e.g. betting that GM will go bankrupt, he still wants a quant to tell him which CDS to buy, or to determine what happens to his portfolio as a whole if X happens to the market.
    - jakarta 18y ago
      let me simplify -- he did not become a billionaire by using quant strategies. He may use them to optimize his trades, but has doesn't actually NEED them. It would have been better if you mentioned Renaissance or one of the funds that are actually driven by quant strategies.

Alex3917 18y ago

It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learning how to do that. The interesting jobs in finance are pretty hard to stumble across as a backup plan.

banned_man 18y ago
I disagree, having worked on Wall Street for a couple of years. Finance prefers that you learn these sorts of things on the job. It's much better received to have majored in math or computer science than business, at least for an undergrad. It's also very unlikely that Soros is going to have an undergraduate building new quant models in his first year. If he's lucky, he might get to write the code to test someone else's models. There really isn't an undergraduate course that sets you up to be a quant, and most quant jobs are unattainable without a PhD. An MFE degree (Master's in Financial Engineering) can give you the basic skills expected of a junior-level quant trader, but tends to underplay a critical component: programming. (Most quant jobs are programming jobs; unfortunately, the lingua franca is C++, and at most financial firms, the quants are strong mathematicians but third-rate coders.)
- Rod 18y ago
  "at most financial firms, the quants are strong mathematicians but third-rate coders." Truer words have never been written. Various friends of mine who are former mathematicians / physicists now working as quants do rock at stochastic calculus, but suck at C++. Maybe a solution would be to separate the coding tasks from the modeling tasks. A friend of mine recently took a quant position at a hedge fund, and while he gets to do a lot of modeling and data analysis, the actual implementation is carried out by a 1st rate coder with whom he works in tandem. That sounds very smart to me...
  - whacked_new 18y ago
    What's your take on why this is? It is very perplexing to me: my intuition says that strong math almost implies suitability and predisposition for strong programming. Why is this not the case? I am not supplying a guess now, because this comes as a total surprise.
    - whacked_new 18y ago
      Ah, actually, I have a guess; it is quite simple. Please don't read it until you thought of one first. Writing code requires knowledge of code conventions, syntax, and as importantly, the libraries. This is a declarative/episodic memory task, less so of working memory, symbolic manipulation, and abstract reasoning task. The latter traits are dominatingly important in math/physics. In coding there is a mix of the two, with the former taking precedence after the program logic has been deduced. Which brings about the next question. The mathematician part cannot be learned merely through patience, but becoming expert at a language can be. Now, why is it that your brilliant math/physicist friends cannot become such experts? Do they lack the patience? Or, does coding simply not "click" with them? Is there a causal relationship? Now my intuition says there is none, and so we are back to square one: it is perplexing that they are not good programmers, unless there is some personality reason behind it.
    - menloparkbum 18y ago
      People who are really good at math often find programming boring and mundane. I used to work with some guys who had physics PhDs from MIT and they all referred to their programming jobs as "whoring." I've read a few articles about Stephen Wolfram where he makes the admission that he can't stand programming. I'm not very good at math but I'd prefer working through a trigonometry textbook to working on another ruby on rails website.
Rod 18y ago
"It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience to learning how to do that." I strongly disagree. Finance is not Theoretical Physics. In Physics, the best and brightest are in Academia and have access to high-quality experimental data (unless you're doing high-energy stuff, where experimental data is hard to get). In Finance, the best and brightest are in the financial services industry, and the finance academics have no access to high-quality data because such data costs millions. Data aside, the kind of Finance which is taught in college is somewhat of a fantasy. I will be crude and claim that Academic Finance is as scientific as literary criticism... Cutting a long story short: anyone who's proficient at building models (like a physicist or a math-oriented engineer) can build models for a hedge fund without having been trained to do that in college. At D.E. Shaw they like to say that "you can teach smart people how to do finance, but you can't teach financial people how to be smart".
- Dilpil 18y ago
  "I will be crude and claim that Academic Finance is as scientific as literary criticism..." I submit that you are not aware of what is actually taught in academic finance. What principles of it do you disagree with?
  - Rod 18y ago
    I disagree with the methodology, mostly. I believe that teaching Finance as if it were a hard science is dishonest. I believe that mathematical rigor is no substitute for data and empiricism. I would also claim that a MSc in Statistics may be way more valuable than a hardcore MFE. Just my 0.02 USD.
jakarta 18y ago
Soros does not use quant strategies.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  Yes, he does. I've spoken to a few quants at Soros' fund. He doesn't use them as his main strategy, but if he is, e.g. betting that GM will go bankrupt, he still wants a quant to tell him which CDS to buy, or to determine what happens to his portfolio as a whole if X happens to the market.
  - jakarta 18y ago
    let me simplify -- he did not become a billionaire by using quant strategies. He may use them to optimize his trades, but has doesn't actually NEED them. It would have been better if you mentioned Renaissance or one of the funds that are actually driven by quant strategies.