A different opinion on quant’s job презентация

My experience at Raiffeisenbank trading desk
2014-current – electronic FX market making
2018-current – FX Volatility Trading
2020-current – Rates derivatives/Gov. Bonds
Big focus on OTC market making / price prediction
Leading unified cross asset team of developers and quants
Huge experience of quants / developers interviews from all major institutions for HFT and derivatives Trading / Asset management (smart beta) / Corporate data scientists

Classic quant areas (in banks and funds)

What is impact?

Why impact is high where it’s high?
Essentially equals to starting your small business from scratch.
No easy franchise “free money/ PNL”
Requires full ownership of the strategy lifecycle:
raw data (+connectors)
preprocessing
how research would translate to production code
production code monitoring/circuit breakers
post-trade analysis/strategy decay
Owning a strategy (business) requires life commitment.
Only after years of experience (if you survive for that long) you can learn to relax on vacation/ weekends. Good quote from someone working in HF “If you are asking how much days off company offers per year, you probably better search something else”
No matter how good your ideas/ research are, if the end PNL/ production code didn’t work out – you will be fired in X month/ years (depending on organization)

Unconventional skills required for
high impact / low impact quants
LOW IMPACT (aka pricing/ risks/ reg.reporting/ debugging 20y old C++ code)
Learn who of the traders/ sales are the most important/ active and be useful for them –
this will make them think you are irreplaceable and they can rely on you => not be fired in the next layoff
Make large and unreadable C++ codebase, which people would think you are the only one who is able to support
Make journal papers with completely useless results in order to promote your organization
(aka quants marketing)
Learn to speak and communicate – PhD guy can be outperformed by BA dropout who communicate his thoughts many times during a day instead of waiting for 2 weeks to present a failure result
Speed of iterations (and your small code infrastructure to support that) could be more important than single ideas (=> prepare for huge amount of failed ideas/ projects)
Be open to criticism and throwing out bad ideas immediately (“don’t marry a strategy”)
Think about end-to-end. Good example of question: is it worth even researching this idea/ strategy, if it would take 10 person/ year developers time to implement?
HIGH IMPACT (PNL related)

Quants should not only focus on finance
Some anecdotal examples
(same for developers/ not only quants)
Top 3 RU IT Company (aka low impact) – engineers/ data scientists mostly do their job (what they’ve been told by senior business people without challenging them) and it’s very hard to get fired for underperformance. Those who are not satisfied with slow/ no impact approach – are hired by Raiffeisenbank ☺
Top 3 worldwide IT company – some data scientists interviewed claim “who do not make big $$$ progress in each of their half year review are fired right away without exceptions, those who does – obviously would get paycheck closer to HF level”