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Quant Scene in Latin America

Joined
10/20/13
Messages
17
Points
11
Hello
Do any of you know any information about the quant scene in Latin America specially in the countries with big economies like Brazil, Mexico and Chile( I include it here for sophistication reasons rather than size). Is there anyone who works as a quant(specifically derivatives trading and such, no vanilla finance) in any country of Latin America?
Bye
Miguel
 
Hi Miguel,

I'm Colombian and working in Argentina, Buenos Aires. They have recently created a new group of quants ( we are 6 at the moment ). They are looking for quants right now. The specifics of the job is something I cannot mention, but feel free to contact me if you are interested.
 
Thank you very much Daniel,

I'm going to take the C++ course soon and I had seen the video because one of my coworkers shared it with the group :) .

So the company is from India and its name is Crisil. The job is more of a testing and documenting, but it also has some model/algorithm development. I believe it has an incredible future and they are now looking for candidates. The requirements for the job are the same as for typical Quant jobs, i.e. PhD with programming, highly motivated candidates and etc...

Any specific questions do you have?.

Alejandro
 
Your Spanish is very good, just the accent says you are not native speaker. The last sentence is tricky because if you change the "o" for an "a" in huevos it would be a very funny mistake, but you avoided it. :D
 
Hi all!
Very interesting responses from all of you. After more than a month without an answer I though this was going to the graveyard.
@agomezh I was not expecting that any information came out from Argentina. It is known that the Argentinian economy is not doing very well and is very backward, that´s why I didn't included it in the sophisticated group. But, after seeing the CRISIL web, we are talking about global markets. So, I´m not surprised. Probably, after seeing PISA scores and the analogue for adults, Argentina has the second best skilled manpower in LA and it's cheaper than Chile and Brazil. You certainly have UBA and Bariloche as very important sources of skill. Right now, I'm not interested in jobs (I think I don't even qualify since I have no PhD although I'm cooking some papers..), it was just curiosity and some kind of expectancy of the future. From my "naive" perspective, being a quant seems very glamorous. Almost as good being a professor and definitely a lot better than being a postdoc. I have talked (mostly online) with postdocs in physics from developed countries and the competition is brutal.. You can also read about this stuff in Hsu's blog.
@ Daniel Duffy
Your Spanish is great! the program that it's linked there has very interesting topics and it's very funny. I had no expectation of hearing about those terms(copulas and fat tails wtf!) in Spanish.
 
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@Mitor , don't know your profile, but if it is interesting enough I would give it a shot.
@ Daniel Duffy , yes I agree, the training that you received was pretty good!.
Let me know if you need any more info about LA, I'm trying to learn more about Colombia and Argentina which I believe have great potential, but the markets are not so developed.

Alejandro
 
Hi all,

I just found out that there is going to be a conference in Bogotá Colombia ( at the university where I studied math ) in Actuarial science and quantitative analysis. I post the link:
http://www.matematicas.unal.edu.co/newsite/fcweb/index.php?id=98
Please let me know if there a better place to make this conference known to quants around the world.

I'm not organizing it, but I'm willing to help if you have questions about the University/City/Country :).

Thank you!
 
Hey there, pardon me for bringing back such an old post. I'm from Chile almost finishing my studies in Mathematical Engineering (kinda mix of theoretical math/statistics/applied math & modelling) and I've been looking info about the Quant Finance scene in the region. As far as I know the need for quants in the industry goes attached to the development of the financial markets on any country so it is not surprising that not many stuffs have happened since the last time someone wrote in here.

As far as I know the more sophisticated financial models in Chile are used primarily by Asset Management firms, Pension Funds (which are a extremely important part of the financial system here), some huge mining companies like Codelco and BHP and that's it. I completly ignore whether there are some Hedge Funds currently stablished in Chile since I couldn't find any info regarding this.

What is the current situation in the rest of LATAM? I Imagine Brazil and Argentina might be a little bit affected by their current political and economical crisis so most probably not much has move over there.

Kind regards, Alberto.
 
Hi Alberto,

Is there a particular country that you are looking to move to professionally? or are you thinking about pursuing further education (Master perhaps)?

A disclaimer, I work within the LATAM space (in US) but not specifically in quant finance. Since I am in the US, my understanding is more of an 'offshore market' perspective. But will share what I know. Hopefully others will chime in as well.

For MNC and foreign enterprises dealing with or operating within this region, there is a real need to manage the risk associated with this exposure, FX/IR. For Brazilian exposures, they can do so through local market instruments (swap cambial) or through off-shore exchange-traded (CME) instruments in the US. In Mexico, there is an active TIIE 28 local benchmarket IR derivatives market. For bespoke exposure and/or balance & accou, they can go to the EM or corporate desks of investment banks operating out of NYC. This could be some of the most interesting derivatives work you can do.

If you want to remain local to work with say the Asset management, pension funds, insurance companies, there are quant work opportunities in investment, hedging and enterprise ALM groups within this type of companies. Note that most of the local bond markets are created to serve the long-dated duration needs of these firms. This is from my knowledge of this type of companies in US and I would imagine similar type of work would exist in LATAM. I don't think there a great of need for quant work in the local Latam equity market, as the volume and liquidity just aren't there to support the various quant trading strategies.

Good luck!
 
Hi John. Thank you very much for your answer. It really clarifies me a lot about the LATAM quant scene.

So I am currently finishing my thesis for the trading desk of one of the major banks in Chile and I've working precisely on Fixed-Income Markets so I've learning about IR risk and their derivatives.

My final goal is to find a position in the U.S. since I think my academic background and professional interests are more correlated with the quant scene over there. However in the short-term, I will try to get a full-time position in this bank (hopefully on financial/market risk) in order to get experience and to save money to pay for the graduate program.

Thanks for your answer again and kind regards!
 
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