From a review on Amazon

  • Thread starter Thread starter Noko
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Noko

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I have been in front office development for 10 years. The author should be more realistic about his assumptions about getting a quant job. 1) your chances of getting a role as a proper quant are slim to none without having a phd. 2) Add Ivy League school to that Phd. Trust me I have read all the books the author mentioned, I have a MSc in Fin Eng, worked with many traders and PM's. If your smart enough to understand stochastic calc and heavy stats, but don't have Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, NYU etc.. go learn C++ and go into business for yourself don't waste time. There's alot of nepotism on Wall Street which is why there are very few funds that have serial correlation in returns. Its not how smart you are rather its where you went to school and who you know.
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This caught my eye as I was looking through a few books. Obvious grammar mistakes aside, how feasible is it to actually go into business for yourself right after finishing a PhD in mathematics? This is, of course, assuming deep knowledge of stochastic calculus, arbitrage, general statistics, etc.
 
Noko said:
... how feasible is it to actually go into business for yourself right after finishing a PhD in mathematics?
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What kind of business are planning to start? If you have plenty of seed money you could do a lot of things.
 
alain said:
What kind of business are planning to start? If you have plenty of seed money you could do a lot of things.
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Me personally? I don't know, I'm not even starting my graduate classes for another year. Current interest is in basically just *not* credit derivatives. Black-box trading is also of interest, but that can cover so many things.

euroazn said:
Yeah, the hard part is the seed money...
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I've seen various numbers thrown around about the proper amount of seed money, from $50,000 for a small operations to millions upon millions to start a certified hedge fund. Of course the latter would not be my goal as a fresh PhD graduate. Realistically though, what kind of amount are we talking about here?
 
Noko said:
Me personally? I don't know, I'm not even starting my graduate classes for another year. Current interest is in basically just *not* credit derivatives. Black-box trading is also of interest, but that can cover so many things.



I've seen various numbers thrown around about the proper amount of seed money, from $50,000 for a small operations to millions upon millions to start a certified hedge fund. Of course the latter would not be my goal as a fresh PhD graduate. Realistically though, what kind of amount are we talking about here?
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If you just want to sit at home and trade then even $1000 will get you started. If you want to trade as a hedge fund, the current asking price is a standard $150M. You can goto a prop firm with your money($25K at some firms, and 0 at others) and get a decent leverage to trade and use their infrastructure for a % of your profits.
 
Alexei Smirnov said:
I would imagine McDonalds would smile on the opportunity of you buying franchising rights...
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Clever, though this is all purely hypothetical. A career involving quantitative analysis isn't even my top career goal. It is, however, a higher priority back-up, which is why I want to know more about different options, even if they are a bit out there.

Edit: involving quantitative analysis in finance*
 
man, by the time i finished editing two more people posted already! :(
 
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