Suffering from an acute case of quarter-life crisis..help needed.

[SlumdogMillionaire]

Hey Guys,

Been a long time lurker on the Qnet forums, Kudos to all for such great content and discussions. As the title suggests I need some guidance and advice on the dilemma I'm facing. Long post but please bear with me...

Complication :I turned 25 couple of months back, and feeling an existential crisis while changing fonts on a client ppt (I was an analyst at a management consulting co.) left my job to figure stuff out/travel/get in the right ‘rat race track’ at least

I want to understand will an MFE do me any good?

Situation : I'm a Civil Engg. graduate from top 5 Indian Uni (BITS Pilani), my maths grades are shit (Cs- not that I hate math, just that I was interested in other stuff) but I passed within first division (cum laude or magna cum laude in US, I guess).

My long term goal is to be someone like Ruchir Sharma (portfolio manager for emerging markets fund/ author of Breakout Nations) or at the very least be able to start/manage my own fund in India.

Experience/Pertinent Skills:

Tech : worked at a tech startup with friends for ~18 months during an outta college, we got incubated, raised money etc, long story short, I taught myself to code (web programming only) and to pitch to investors.

Consulting : I left the startup because it felt I was always playing catch-up in the tech world, since I had no 'solid' grounding in CS. So I joined a Global strategy consulting co.s India office as a research analyst, analyzing oil&gas and maritime sectors, got a chance to work with a couple of fortune 500 Co.s. Picked up some VBA

Finance : Cleared both levels of FRM, and am a Level 2 candidate for CFA ( I liked the statistics and market risk/structured products part of FRM much more than anything in CFA).

I am not a super-coder nor do I want to be one, coding for me is just a tool to get data, wash it, and analyze it better, that is I can never imagine myself writing a million lines of code or maintaining/building tools etc. I am an analyst at heart, and just want to have enough scientific depth to explain my investment ideas succinctly to a scientist/client/trader/mathematician/highschooler

 

[Gavin L]

I am no expert, but I don't think an MFE would be highly appropriate in your situation. From what you say, you weren't and aren't quantitatively minded from the beginning. Having looked at the MFE cirricula and interview books etc., a person pursuing an MFE should come from a quantitative background (or at least have quantitative tendencies) - and I'm not crapping on civil engineering, but the reality is that they don't teach analysis or statistics in civil engineering courses.

A person who pursues an MFE should be wanting to work as a quant. You say you want to work as an asset/fund manager. Perhaps an MBA would be more appropriate. The MFE would prepare you for 'super-coding' (well the good ones will teach scientific computing applied to finance, anyway). You have already answered your own question - if you are an analyst at heart, you are not suited to being a quant analyst, and this is what the MFE prepares you for. I would say you have made it clear that an MFE is not for you. An MBA might be a good investment.

 

[MayurB]

I'm no expert too but I see answering this post as an opportunity to improve an image of a quant I have in mind.

Disclaimer: I am a wanna be quant, from India.

From what I see (in a very raw sense), the investment management industry is moving slowly towards using quantitative investment ideas to manage funds. With the available set of tools (or open source codes for that matter), I don't think one needs to develop something from scratch (veterans please correct me if I'm wrong). Tweaking them would be important given that you ensure proper data is fed to it as you mentioned and that is what you may want to ask yourself if you are ready to do that. To explain your investment ideas, imagine teaching them to a computer to validate them on past data, leaving some bandwidth for you to research new ideas, read academic research may be and try it out. I see MFE to be a good option in such a case.

From what I know, I may be wrong again, an MBA may not give you the desired scientific depth required to convince your intended audience. You may need help of quants to help achieve it. So again, you need to see if you want to be the one who presents or the one who provides the underlying convincing material to present.

P.S.: More than expressing my opinion, I'm trying to get my image of a 'quant' straight, so please feel free to critique.

 

[SlumdogMillionaire]

Point taken @Gavin L .. I must admit while writing in detail I too started feeling the same, but wanted a second opinion, because I was confused seeing courses such as Princeton Mfin or other risk mgmt. MFEs in Asia (Singapore etc)/ Canada which are not that heavy on coding. But you are right if I see the profiles of top 10-20 hedge fund/asset managers most of them are MBAs, PhDs or PhD dropouts (but that could be because there was no MFE then).

@MayurB as I see it now and as explained by Gavin to pursue an MFE/ be a quant you need to be a coder at heart, i.e write structured code, build stuff from scratch and replicate the same in different languages if needed dependent on trade execution strategy, the kind of stuff you are saying: tweaking, backtesting etc is outsourced to India.
As I see it the MFE is the link between the PhD (Idea machine) and the trader, therefore needs to be able to understand the math and take note of the latency/execution side as well.

 

[Gavin L]

You might also want to look into the CQF as an alternative...

 

[Andy Nguyen]

The future of financial industry will be heavily influenced by regulation and more regulation. So if you want to have a long lasting career, follow @Ken Abbott and read everything he has posted. Free advice from a top Wall street executive is a God send for people outside of the industry like most of us here.

In case you have any doubt on what he has been saying the last few years, it should be clear now
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/business/dealbook/new-rules-transform-wall-st-banks.html

 

[ygmwy]

Forget the math. That's not your strong suit, and quite frankly, it's overrated. Consider this instead:

If I gave you a million dollars to invest, what would you invest it in? If you can answer that, then go put some skin in the game, and put your money where your mouth is. If you don't have those kind of guts, then you're not cut out for portfolio management or trading.