Quants without phds?

[ArturiusX]

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? didn't you read the first response to my question by soko?

in all seriousness, are you saying you disagree with the person you quoted? Because it seems to be in line with your first post. Am I wrong?

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A "top job" in general can be sought without a phd. A standard phd should suffice.

The OP asked if quants without phds existed. I said it depends on what you mean by quants, are we talking academic statistical crunchers or the more practical guys?

[stinkypete]

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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.

[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

[ImBetterAtGolf]

I think it's a bit different than this. While there are a lot of different types of quants (see my comment, above) trading jobs usually are more than just variants of quant jobs. They do tend to be users of models (or no models), but they frequently specify models, too. Quants who work with traders usually write the algorithmic code and may or may not develop the conceptual ideas. The way different organizations organize themselves is too broad to have one answer for this.

Those of you who are interested in being quants have to get comfortable that whatever the specific role may be, the job is likely one of working on research or implementation projects that include a good amount of code writing. Those of you who are more market oriented may find that what they really want to be is a trader.

The OP referred to a discussion with some traders who came to his school. What they described to you is neither unusual nor standard. There isn't a standard.

Dcfrthis. I've read a few of your posts and may have this entirely wrong, but the things that interest you seem more common to the things that interest traders, not quants.

As I did above, I think the decent number of you who are interested in being quants need to develop a better idea of which branch of quant is of most interest and best fits your skills. Yes, this is not easy to do without access to the right people, but you have to try. For example, if you want to develop quantitative equity models, don't waste a lot of time learning stochastic calculus. You should not take major steps without attempting to get a better grip on what you want to do.