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Would MFE be a right choice for me?? Pls. suggest.

Binit Kumar Bhagat

Binit Kumar Bhagat

Joined
9/20/12
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I have an Engg. degree from a top notch Engg. college in India and a 6+ years of working exp. in which last 5 years I hav been in Prop. Trading in US markets. I am considering MFE from Singapore or US. Do you think its a right career move for me?? Could I bag an offer from a hedge fund or HFT or Algo Trading firm after my MFE?? My GRE score was 1360 (Q-780) last year.
I have some points (as I learned on the net) for comparison:
1. Spore costs less... US costs almost double(only Baruch) or much more than that.
2. US jobs offer more salary no doubt but in the current scenario US has its own risks whereas it's easy to extend Visa for job search in Spore (pls, anyone with more info on this??).
3. Quality of education in Spore is not bad at all maybe US is still better.
4. Spore too has almost all the top notch finance firms as US.

Please feel free to suggest me wherever u feel I need to change my view and u may add some more dimensions to it that I m missing.. My Quants is good and programming out of practice but definitely I m not afraid of it.
 
Hello Jayanthan,
sorry for the late reply. I am already a trader. I want to move to Hi-tech Finance, so I m looking for a good MFE program.
 
Hi Andy,
I m so sorry for such a late reply..

Andy Nguyen said:
What is the exact role you want to do there?
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As I m a trader I would definitely look for jobs close to trading. To be frank, I want to do a Master in Quantitative Finance only because I feel there is a need to go hi-tech in order to be in the field of trading.

Andy Nguyen said:
This could hinder your prospect as HFT is highly technical.
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Thanks for giving me the insight Andy, but please explain what exactly does it take to enter an HFT..

To be honest, I had a feeling that ANY MFE degree would fetch me a good Quant position and I was pretty serious about Singapore MFE degrees, however, of late I have decided to refrain from applying to those courses. Andy, any suggestions from you would be of immense help (from choosing course or University to anything).
 
4. Spore too has almost all the top notch finance firms as US.

yo true spore is a major financial center and also has the most stringent monetary policies - in terms of high-frequency tech it's still par below US. rules and regulations, bureaucracy and slow implementation of infrastructure are the reasons why algo trading is at 38% level vs 60% in the US. http://blogs.sungard.com/globaltrad...change-to-offer-new-benefits-of-algo-trading/ Stats could change but I don't expect anything drastic.

Quality of education is reasonable but in terms of experience with financial markets... well I wouldn't comment much. I'd expect plenty of maths courses to make up for the deficit. Heck, SMU's Applied Finance is not even more than 2 yrs old.

i'd say go for it. But bagging an offer from hedge fund/HFT/Algo in spore? Tough.

Maybe you can look through the job postings available on US and Spore sites and judge for yourself.

 
Thanks all for all ur inputs.

Keith Tan said:
Maybe you can look through the job postings available on US and Spore sites and judge for yourself.
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Hey Keith, cud you pls put some light on it from ur point of view.. I have checked with a guy in Spore doing MFE.. He says it's like there is a general online test (Quants and DI) that screens students according to their ability.. then the firms decide whether to call someone for interview... another disadvantage of Spore is: there is no internships.
 
i've not heard of such platforms for the online test.. maybe it's for a specific target audience or member.

you can check out sg major and popular job sites:
www.monster.com.sg
www.jobstreet.com.sg
http://sg.jobsdb.com/sg
and even linkedin jobs.

there's internships in spore, but the tieups are mainly with nus/ntu/smu and the polytechnics, so you wouldn't hear much about them. if you're talking about quant internships, there could be junior/associate positions but it's really, really hard to find. if there's available positions, employees usually refer themselves or their friends first. so job seekers need to make cold calls.

i just realised you don't have computer science background. are you comfortable at bit/byte level dealing with microseconds and network protocols to execute efficient algorithms at the split of the second? doing things like monte carlo simulations and such?
 
Binit Kumar Bhagat said:
Hello Jayanthan,
sorry for the late reply. I am already a trader. I want to move to Hi-tech Finance, so I m looking for a good MFE program.
Click to expand...
What is "Hi-tech Finance"? I think people here misunderstood what you were saying and they are thinking about high frequency trading. However, you might mean something else.
 
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