Yea, I did mean personality traits, and moreso sale/trading/asset management than pure i-banking/PE. However while the typical wall steeter used to be a libera

Yea, I did mean personality traits, and moreso sale/trading/asset management than pure i-banking/PE. However while the typical wall steeter used to be a liberal arts major, it has heavily shifted toward STEM. At most i-banks, something like a third of headcount are tech. Even many of the front office are engineers, though again moreso in trading/asset management. Nowadays a large part of the competitive advantage comes from better software - a classic example of 'software eating the world'. Anecdotally some of the brightest people I've known were at BGI (now Blackrock), and they all had deep knowledge in finance, math, stats, tech and old school boys club company politics. [my old boss read math cambridge with stephen hawking and created the first and now biggest by AUM electronic portfolio management system for index funds, grinold & kahn literately [1] wrote the book on active portfolio management, etc] [1] http://www.amazon.com/Active-Portfolio-Management-Quantitative-Controlling/dp/0070248826 http://www.amazon.com/Active-Portfolio-Management-Quantitati...