Career/Educational Advice - First Post

5) It really depends on which side of the business you join. Esentially
there are profit centres that directly bring in revenue, and cost centres
that are a necessary evil. The producers of revenue always get better
treatment, salary and perks. There are quant roles at both levels, front and
back office. More and more quants in banks and funds have become labelled
support. They have sad lives

Hi Julian,
I've worked in quant positions and in other areas of the finance companies
(banks, funds, consultancies).
Here is what my thoughts are:
1) There is no defined position of a quant, quant team or so that applies
across the industry. It depends on the company you work for and the
experiences you get in a particular role.
2) Investment banks and hedge funds have traditionally been the ivy league
of finance companies for newly graduated quants. Hence they are very
arrogant in who they choose, many but not all PhDs, masters and smart
undergrads could do quant work, but only a select group are hired. Because
of the huge pool of talent applying, these organisations can be very picky
in who they hire.
3) They like to keep the quant blind to the business implications of what
they do. In that way trade secrets are not lost and you can be easily
replaced.
4) Economists can do most things but programme, expect at some level an
economist to be the guy in charge.
5) It really depends on which side of the business you join. Esentially
there are profit centres that directly bring in revenue, and cost centres
that are a necessary evil. The producers of revenue always get better
treatment, salary and perks. There are quant roles at both levels, front and
back office. More and more quants in banks and funds have become labelled
support. They have sad lives.
6) Make sure that you enjoy substantial programming of mathematical
algorithms for senior staff. Many quants are being asked to demonstrate the
validity of their results.
7) The market is pretty bad right now.
8) There are a non-programmer class of quants who sit and structure
complicated financial contracts and then re-engineer them into their
constituent parts. They do esoteric maths, which is a bit like the emperors
new clothes and make huge fees from hoodwinking regulators and clients.
9) Talk to many people. There are lots of opinions out there.
10) If you're very good , you don't need a PhD or masters, just an interest
and programming acumen.

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Julian Lee <julianlhe at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear all,

I thought that this would be an excellent place to post a question on
career/educational advice for a bioinformatics specialist who is
interested in stepping foot into the world of quants. However, if the
moderators feel that this post is inappropriate, and perhaps out of
topic, feel free to delete it.

Before i begin, i probably ought to introduce myself. I completed my
undergraduate degree from the National University of SIngapore in the
field of COmputational Science Specializing in Life Science. My main
areas of study was engineering mathematics, programming, and molecular
biology/biochemistry/structural biology. My first job was at a local
polytechnic teaching science and mathematics to first year students. I
then moved to National Cancer Centre as Bioinformatics Specialist,
where i specialize in the analysis of microarrays, genomic data. Some
of you maybe familiar with R. Gentleman's Bioconductor project, and
I've been utilizing many of BIoconductor's packages in my work. My
main project is in the prediction of chemosensitivity of Gastric
Cancer from genomic data. The biologists are currently validating some
of my SVM (support vector machine) computer model and if all goes
well, i will soon make my first publication!

I have been using R for the past 2 years and am quite addicted to it.
In playing around with R/Bioconductor, I bumped into Rmetrics and am
amazed with the work by Diethelm W?rtz and his team of developers.
That got me interested in the field of financial
engineering/computational finance.

Here are some of my questions, (i apologize if there is some
over-simplification on my part)

1. I have been looking at some masters graduate programmes and they
come in all shapes and sizes. Some are more mathematical (theoretical)
than others, while some are computational, ie NYU's mathematical
finance program versus CMU's Computational Finance graduate degree. As
a quant in the industry, does the content of these degrees matter?

2. How much of open-source technology, R/Rmetrics is being used by the
financial industry? Correct me if i'm wrong, but I'm informed that the
standard tool for quants is C++ and VBA, with a wee bit of Matlab.
There is significant difference among the tools mentioned, but I would
like to gauge how much R/Rmetrics has been adopted into the financial
industry. Or has this been placed into the field of academia? I ask
because I think R/bioconductor had similar problems, most complain
about its "user-unfriendlyness", ie lack of GUI, hence difficulty in
using it in their work (many resort to Excel)

3. Is it possible for someone to be a quant without any post-graduate
training? I've just recently joined this forum, and have learnt quite
a bit (i drew my first stock market graph of the KLSE the other day),
from the use of Rmetrics. Simply put, can someone be a quant from
being and a superb R/Rmetrics user, ie thorough understanding of the
functions, when to use them and how to use them etc.

Thank you
regards

julian lee

--
Thanks and Regards,

Ravi Kalia

Graduate Officer
Oxford University Investment and Finance Society

President
Lady Margaret Hall Middle Common Room

Business Associate
Oxford Triple Helix
http://www.oxtriplehelix.com/business-manager.htm