Quant Dev Path

[blin]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if a technology analyst at a BB would be a good way to break into the quant dev. world?

 

[DominiConnor]

Maybe, it rather depends upon the technology you use.

(say) 10 years ago, there was no big difference between the tech used by quants and housekeeping IT.
Then like now quants used C/C++ one of the VBA family, and some sort of graphic/calc tool like Matlab. Often they used the same SQL database as everyone else.

Housekeeping IT now has a lot more Java and web technologies in general, typically they use Oracle and/or MS SQL, and their programmers go to a lot more mettings. The head of front office IT at one truly huge bank has had a guy in his team whose sole role is to go to meetings for him, yes really.

As I say to everyone considering the CQF, "you will do more programming in this line of work than if your job title is currently programmer".

Quants now use C++, VBA, C#, KDB, Matlab/R and very little Java.
They don't do "business analysis", and testing is alien to them. User interfaces are a form of minimal gothic, and obey no UI guidelines except to copy Excel and some cool thing they used once. Housekeeping IT at large banks have people who do nothing all day except dream up these standards. At one large bank I utterly defeated a political enemy because he didn't realise just how attached senior management were to the colour scheme they had adopted. I did. I won. He lost.
Yes, and there's politics too.

So if you get a job using the rights skills, it can be an OK place to start, but of course there is the issue of not only maintiaing your math skills, but moving them forward.

 

[DominiConnor]

GS has brand value, and at the risk of dodging the question, which bit of GS ?

It matters now, because of the split into one part which using a proprietary language and one that I understand is going to be a C#/C++ shop.

 

[Andy D.]

and testing is alien to them. User interfaces are a form of minimal gothic, and obey no UI guidelines except to copy Excel and some cool thing they used once.

I have to chuckle at this. Coming from an SE and especially a UI background I can only imagine. I recently saw an application that was being run at a large Public Utility corporation that looked like a three year old had dragged and dropped various UI components from Visual Studio onto a form and then somebody else had hooked it up to the back end.

The laughing stopped when we realised we had to use it.

So Dominic, does it sound like the world of Quants could do with maybe getting up to speed with UI practices? Surely traders and others using the system would benefit from more user friendly interfaces? What's your opinion on this?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

We are a long way till we get there. Are we going to see UX, UI specialists embedded in quant teams? Not any time soon. I can only see the quants, developers trying to come up with UI designs that at best would be described as FAIL.

And I'm talking as someone who tried and failed. Not so long ago, I was working on a trading desk with the ambitious goal of "modernizing our trading tools" which consist of VBA macros/Excel addin/SQL backend.

Yeah, we used Visual Studio, made WinForms, built WPF, making use of the latest .NET gimmick, doing Excel Ribbon widgets.

The more we do that, the more the traders want it to look like a regular Excel spreadsheet. I did pick up a lot of fun stuff trying to be a UX specialist, anyway.

If I have to do it again, I'll leave it to the people who are trained to do that and spend more my time on other things.

 

[Andy D.]

Better to have tried and failed, then never tried at all!

It's often a battle in my experience to push good UI practices in non banking areas as well so I don't think you folks are alone. It often descends into "design by committee" so everyone gets to make "their stamp".

It sounds though like the area would benefit from some good UX/UI experience though, but as you say if people just don't want it, it can be a hard sell.

Out of interest, what are the policies on accessibility requirements when it comes to internal Quant tools?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I believe most big banks would require you to do a "request to use" kind of thing regardless of which group you belong to. Some requests would include getting a sign off by your manager. That applies to internal quant libraries, market data.

You can then download some installation package that customized for your unique computer's ID.

so if your work has nothing with quant stuff, you probably won't be able to just download the good and stack away to use at home.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

On the same thought about user interface, this is what mentioned in an article about future trading system

But if computers are crunching the data, what types of tools will the traders need? Traders at the Summit agreed that the most important thing is not the last tick, but rather better pictures, charts and 3-D graphics. Visualization is going to be important as traders can only get so much information from tabular information.
Looking at charts to predict arbitrage opportunities or detect patterns is baffling, and is not supported by the research, suggested the CEO of the automated trading firm.

What traders will need is a heat map showing complex data and patterns. They may have a gaming console with touch screens to pull up data. Traders wished for a simpler interface, something that will tell them how to implement trade.

http://www.financetech.com/story/story/GLOBAL/btg/ftn/null/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900485&pgno=2