tell us about your job

[Officer Farva]

What do you do? Quantitative Analyst for Long/Short Global Hedge Fund

Do you like it? Kinda. It ranges between low stress and easy to high stress and impossible, as much depends on mood/success of principals.

What makes you in particular well-suited or poorly-suited for your work? Well-suited: Majored in a combo of math, stats, and comp sci. Use all three, esp comp sci for data analysis and risk templating. Can figure complicated stuff out. Able to understand what my principals want most of the time. Poorly-suited: Somewhat lazy, will drift if not on critical project.

What kind of people do best in your work? Focused, math and comp sci saavy peeps. But you can't just be a nerd as there's a lot of nuanced personal interaction in a high stress situation.

What qualifications are necessary for people considering work in the same field as you? Some kind of quant background, preferably with CS. I jumped in straight from college (though I went to a top 5), so experience isn't neccessary.

What is a typical day like? 6-4, M-F. Get in, surf/email, run a few risk screens. Code some VB. Talk to manager in 10 minute meeting. Eat catered lunch at desk. Fix someones computer problem. Mess around on BB. Read about Monte Carlo sims. Try to implement it, screw up. Run some screens for the analysts. Screw around with my RSI model.

What kind of problems do you encounter? Waking up on time. Figuring out "correct" way to do something, such as a VaR calcualtion, or more importatnly, the meaning/usefulness of it.

What are the biggest (most common) sources of frustration and elation? Getting discouraged when project I've worked on gets tossed by boss.

How much do you make? $70k plus large bonus depending on firm performance.

How much can one expect to make in your position?
Prob like 50kish entry to a 1M plus for someone with a working model. Entire firms are run by quants. Check out DE Shaw. Head dudes are all quant analysts and prob pull 100M plus.

Mike