Home
Forums
New posts
Search forums
Online Courses
2023 Rankings
2023 MFE Programs Rankings Methodology
Reviews
Latest reviews
Search resources
Tracker
What's new
New posts
New media
New media comments
New resources
New profile posts
Latest activity
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
New posts
Search forums
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
C++ Programming for Financial Engineering
Highly recommended by thousands of MFE students. Covers essential C++ topics with applications to financial engineering.
Learn more
Join!
Python for Finance with Intro to Data Science
Gain practical understanding of Python to read, understand, and write professional Python code for your first day on the job.
Learn more
Join!
An Intuition-Based Options Primer for FE
Ideal for entry level positions interviews and graduate studies, specializing in options trading arbitrage and options valuation models.
Learn more
Join!
Home
Forums
Quant Career
Career Advice
From Academy to Quant research
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="CrossGamma" data-source="post: 295607" data-attributes="member: 43839"><p>You probably applied at IMC as an option trader as opposed to a quantitative researcher. This process for this role (and to a lesser degree even the quantitative researcher role) is indeed not about finding “the smartest scientists”. While the systems of companies like IMC and Optiver are highly automated, the trader roles still involve a decent amount of operations and human decision making. In particular these types of tests are trying to assess your ability to make quick decisions under uncertainty, adapt to changing situations, ability to memorize large amounts of information as it is presented to you, mental maths, statistical intuition, … Optiver for example is famous for having a fairly hard mental maths test as one of their first early round filters. Later rounds would focus on assessing your maths and probability skills through some puzzles and trading games. Even there a focus would still be on speed, intuition and pragmatism - e.g. are you able to make reasonable estimates when appropriate instead of formally working through a difficult problem.</p><p></p><p>And yes - being the best mathematician does not necessarily (I would even say typically not) translate into being the best trader. In trading it is often not about finding the best or theoretically neatest solution to a problem but finding something that gets you 90% there and you monetize on it while the opportunity exists. Many theoreticians can find this unsatisfactory.</p><p></p><p>I see “finite difference methods” and “C++” mentioned here a lot as core skills for quants. While this is maybe still true for quants working on pricing libraries, the vast majority of buy side quants even at options trading firms will not work on the options pricer itself but focus more on market making algorithms, signal analysis, predictions, … While the production implementation is often in C++ and written by developers, prototyping is typically done in Python.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="CrossGamma, post: 295607, member: 43839"] You probably applied at IMC as an option trader as opposed to a quantitative researcher. This process for this role (and to a lesser degree even the quantitative researcher role) is indeed not about finding “the smartest scientists”. While the systems of companies like IMC and Optiver are highly automated, the trader roles still involve a decent amount of operations and human decision making. In particular these types of tests are trying to assess your ability to make quick decisions under uncertainty, adapt to changing situations, ability to memorize large amounts of information as it is presented to you, mental maths, statistical intuition, … Optiver for example is famous for having a fairly hard mental maths test as one of their first early round filters. Later rounds would focus on assessing your maths and probability skills through some puzzles and trading games. Even there a focus would still be on speed, intuition and pragmatism - e.g. are you able to make reasonable estimates when appropriate instead of formally working through a difficult problem. And yes - being the best mathematician does not necessarily (I would even say typically not) translate into being the best trader. In trading it is often not about finding the best or theoretically neatest solution to a problem but finding something that gets you 90% there and you monetize on it while the opportunity exists. Many theoreticians can find this unsatisfactory. I see “finite difference methods” and “C++” mentioned here a lot as core skills for quants. While this is maybe still true for quants working on pricing libraries, the vast majority of buy side quants even at options trading firms will not work on the options pricer itself but focus more on market making algorithms, signal analysis, predictions, … While the production implementation is often in C++ and written by developers, prototyping is typically done in Python. [/QUOTE]
Verification
Post reply
Home
Forums
Quant Career
Career Advice
From Academy to Quant research
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
Accept
Learn more…
Top