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I wouldn't dispute this - I'm sure that many finance people are pretty brilliant and have very strong math backgrounds. That said, I met a lot of folks who wor
by geebee 17y ago
I wouldn't dispute this - I'm sure that many finance people are pretty brilliant and have very strong math backgrounds.
That said, I met a lot of folks who work in finance who make a lot of money and absolutely do not have a strong math background.
Of all the folks who make substantial salaries (let's say above $250K/year) on wall street, what percentage do you think could, on the spot (or within a few minutes of consulting a book or web site), solve a simple differential equation, the kind that you encounter in an upper division undergraduate math class?
- anamax 17y agoIf you really think that math is both necessary and sufficient for success in finance, get into commodities trading and show us.
- yummyfajitas 17y agoTo clarify, my claim isn't that everyone in finance (or even above a certain pay scale) has a strong math background. My claim is that many of the engineer cum quants are doing technical work (not simply paper pushing) in a difficult environment.
- geebee 17y agoI agree with you that "engineer cum quants" do hard math work, but you're not really comparing similar groups anymore (your original claim was that a "typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job"). My impression was that quants almost always have an academic background in math or physics, but I don't think this level of math is typical for most of the folks in finance, including many who make gobs and gobs of money.
- yummyfajitas 17y agoOops, I was unclear. I should have specified that I was comparing engineers cum quants to engineers qua engineers. (These are the two groups of people we were originally discussing.)