quant-heavy areas of finance

[Zeuge]

Besides traditional financial engineering, what areas of finance (or consulting) are quantitatively intensive? In what kinds of positions do you do more than simply manipulate data in excel?

 

[Ken Abbott]

Zeuge, some of the most senior quants I know still manipulate data in Excel. I've been at this since 1983 and I still do...

 

[gbruno]

Risk - you manipulate data with SQL.... Most quant jobs I can think of require at least 80% of data manipulation, there's no way around that.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Besides traditional financial engineering, what areas of finance (or consulting) are quantitatively intensive? In what kinds of positions do you do more than simply manipulate data in excel?

More broadly, you want to take a look into alternative careers that may use the same skill sets as those in finance
https://www.quantnet.com/forum/threads/alternative-career-paths-for-mfe-grads.4412/

 

[ericlans]

Andy,

Are you a quant?

 

[Zeuge]

Zeuge, some of the most senior quants I know still manipulate data in Excel. I've been at this since 1983 and I still do...

I understand that data is a huge part of any quantitative work one will do in the private sector. I was just wondering about the kinds of roles where you would have to use more than (elementary) algebra-level math on a regular basis.

 

[Jacek Podlewski]

In credit scoring one uses some nice statistical tools a lot. I would also claim that at least some more research-oriented actuarial jobs could be very interesting mathematically (besides other advantages).

 

[Zeuge]

I was just wondering -- what kinds of jobs require the use of econometrics?

 

[Jacek Podlewski]

There are many examples - time series techniques are widely used in trading, pairs trading being a pretty obvious example. I personally did a bit of modelling and pricing of inflation-indexed bonds on an internship, and can tell for sure that forecasting inflation using time series is a crucial part of handling such instruments. Linear regression and its numerous generalizations have countless applications, there are separate books on that stuff like http://www.amazon.com/Regression-Actuarial-Financial-Applications-International/dp/0521135966 . As far as I know actuaries sometimes use fancy GLMs, but I guess this is rather beyond the scope of typical 'general econometrics' course at the university (well at least I studied some papers on that but don't know whether it's really helpful in actuarial practice).

 

[Zeuge]

Thanks for the info Jacek!