[DcifrThs]

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To be honest, I don't know enough to say. All I do know is that I would like to try to do something related to finance that will let me use a lot of math (not trivial things though). You mentioned trading... i had some traders from a hedge fund come to my school for an info session. I spoke with them, and they said at their firm they don't really distinguish between quants and traders because they essentially do the same thing. Is this true of most hedge funds?

The reason I asked about quants as opposed to say, traders, is that after speaking to people who may or may not know what they are talking about, I was given the impression that traders did not necessarily use very much math; rather, they just implement trading strategies that say, the quants develop. (This greatly contradicts what the traders told me from the info session, since they said traders and quants serve the same purpose at their place.)

Is what the traders told me pretty standard for hedge funds, or no?

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i think in general the quants will be the ones actually developing the trading models, while the traders will be putting them into practice. but the traders have to have a good understanding of them - and naturally they'll have ideas that can be incorporated into the trading models - so there will be a lot of overlap.

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there are also traders who generate the models themselves. at Lehman they're called Desk Analytics (or desk quants).

the trading they do is mostly specialized (block trading).

but overall, yea, i think quants are typically the researchers and traders (in the more traditional sense) the ones that follow the model to make sure it gets executed.

Barron