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India ought to be far richer than China per head, it has a better educated population, English is widely spoken and has a legal system, something China doesn't even seem to be trying to build. It has a rather more entrepreneurial culture, and the government hardly ever murders 20,000 people at a...

There's nothing wrong with using R to help teach stats & time series. R is really quite common in finance, so much so that the issue I point out as a headhunter is that R skills don't add very much to what people will pay for you.

How do you force someone to learn though? Incentives, both positive and negative. Strong ones. Poverty in and of itself is not an indicator of crime. Agreed, though there is a correlation and illiteracy is a very good predictor of getting a criminal record. It is poverty mixed with broken...

There are worse things that the riots BBW forecasts for these evictions. Actually troublemakers are typically not popular in their own communities, so the risk of riots is less than you might think, but... There needs to be a proper process for this, review by the courts, evidence and...

BBW keeps using "multicultural" as if this was somehow a cause. He needs to look at the TV coverage... The gangs looting shops are of mixed skin colour, their religion is not clear from the video, but the lack of ethnic division is clear. The rioters have not fought much amongst themselves...

The big British cities -- all multicultural -- are becoming ungovernable. That's laughably false, go look at the helicopter coverage, yes fires and things thrown but the police will just turn up at their houses and arrest them. It will rumble on for a couple of days then go away. One thing...

As someone who both writes for as well as reads The Register, I would draw your attention to the first line of John's article, where he shares that few think it will be of any use and to the best of my knowledge no-one has actually been prosecuted under it. The Reg doesn't have an "editorial...

Actually Huxley are one of the best recruiters on the planet. Only this week they wrote to me to inform me that they have once more won the Best Recruiter award. http://hereisthecity.com/2011/07/27/huxley-associates-best-hr-recruitment-firm-2011/?z=07213 It must be true. I wish to say on the...

An interesting factor is China, they have been diversifying away from the USA for a while, and if they stop buying US debt then yields will go up big time. I think Anthony is right about the fact that neither party cares more about the US economy than their personal chances in the next...

groy asks about the suitability of the course for people with no programming experience, and reading such things makes me feel mildly sad. How can anyone reach this stage in a science education and not have done some programming. I mean just loops, variable types, functions, not LALR in C++ or...

I agree with BBW that algorithms and a good understanding of programming is mor critical than the vagaries of any single language. If you can't learn basic C all by yourself then frankly you are not cut out for this line of work. But algorithms by their very nature require you to think in a...

Ah this, I wondered when it would come up. P&D was first asked if we would sponsor 1410, then it was deemed "inappropriate" to have a low life recruiter associated with it, after I'd agreed rather attractive terms for them. As it stands, I'm not even sure if I'd be allowed to go and watch.

Newhaven is right that the British government before WWI spend really very little on social programs. As a student of the pensions time bomb, I'd like to share with you who was responsible for state pensions in Europe then the USA, anyone care to guess ? Bismarck, yes that Bismarck, Hitler's...

Anyone who doesn't know what CERN is should not send me their resume for any job, and certainly not for HFT. Other Q's: 1.) Would firms hiring Algo Traders want to hire people who have worked at the NSA for the same reasons they like CERN people? Yes though of course it would vary with what you...

Actually, it is flatly untrue that the world cannot attain the level of wealth currently enjoyed by Americans. Instead of looking at GDP per head, look at the resources consumed to make each $ of GDP. America uses less energy to make a tonne of steel than either India or China and it's hourly...

Ditto Australians and New Zealanders, the people of the Falklands, Belize a few other places.

fina I am a headhunter for quants so I have no credibility and my background is essentially anecdotes that I've heard in bars, though I'm proud to say that a few of my lies are ones I made up myself. The picture on the left is heavily photoshopped and isn't even me, I'm fatter and older than that.

The most "valuable" course is a function of where you are, but I guess the ranking is : 4 3 2 1 5 5 is firmly last. Matlab is hugely common in finance, but it doesn't really help you get a job, and since it's easier to teach than C++ I fear it is >1/3 of the probability.

"don't tell any illegal immigrants this info, I don't want to start a mass homeless movement" There are relatively efficient informal networks for illegals to share information and of course they watch TV. They know that begging is an option, they don't want to do it which to me is a...

When I've been to Norway, I've found them to be entirely welcoming of foreigners. The right wing Christian psycho who shot their kids was protesting against that, and with commendable resilience Norwegians have resolved not to close in. Actually that's pretty predictable, Norway is about the...

I pick the idea here that some favour deterrence, and to me that seems to be a serious attack on the quality of American people. To be a deterrent, one must ensure that illegal immigrants face not only worse consequences from being illegal, but that also the probability of being caught...

That's a good point KaiRu, they may be interviewing you because of some internal politics that say they must.

I think we need to drop the "fairness" word. These people are in the USA, the question for the government is what is best to do about that for the USA. America has a catastrophic skills shortage and a large % of its high crime rate is from uneducated people. It is an observed fact that a...

My first thought was the same as Connor's, that this was what I tend to call "cage rattling", but if the team are bored then it seems to be a genuinely boring job. Is this Model Validation / Risk ?

PDC is not directly relevant to most Quant work, but there are some great speakers. True Story: some years ago MS invited me as a writer to a PDC. Two days later in the midst of a bitter coffee time argument over vtables, i hear "found him !" and several MS PR surrounded me. They apparently...

A good question is "How did they help when you hit a problem understanding something ?" Unless you are very much smarter than me, you occasionally get lectured on something that you just don't get. Also many students get tangled in issues to do with their first language vs the arcane English...

Andy says "If they are direct jobs posted by employers, chance are they are legitimate." and I can see why he says that. In the olden days (2005) a direct job ad would have come from the firm's HR. That's often not true now, they have "in house" recruiters supplied by recruiting firms. Or to...

What sort of things does your PhD cover ?

What is it that you can actually do ?

AI techniques are widespread in banks since things like optimisation and search have a lot of background in machine intelligence research. To my certain knowledge all the main firms use AI in their prop trading, as do a lot of the smaller ones. joel_b talks of 'trust'and there are several ways...

Zero is the easiest level to model :) The difference between commodity/energy markets and financial ones is that you need to know a lot more about the thing you are modelling. Dollars or shares can be moved in an instant to or from anywhere, and dollars are all the same, oil is not. Equities...

If it's a poisson process then by definition you can't predict. So the first part of your project would be to find out if they really are poisson, and I'd be looking at a power spectrum analysis of the size of jumps, and your filtering should be adaptive on what delta corresponds to a "jump"...

This is a question around optimal ignorance, to identify what you should learn next we need to know what you know now.

Andy is right that Quant jobs tend not to be like that., and Anthony is right, I've done 50 hour days outside banking. My wife is a lawyer and that can get pretty time consuming, at one point "our people" made a lunch appointment so we could actually see each other. Hell it's a Sunday, and here...

Since the financial sector is shrinking, this might become a problem in the coming years in my opinion. Although things will change the financial sector will come back in absolute size though will probably decline as a % of the global economy. China has a less sophisticated finance sector than...

As the guy who wrote the Wikipedia entry for that, is a headhunter, and who has actually had the job title, I have to share that there is no clear definition, except in the book I've written with Paul Wilmott on quant careers, and it's both circular and self-serving to reference one's own work...

I appear to have some usefully large number of invites, so email me via Dominic # PaulDominic.com if you want one before I hit whatever limit there is.

I quite like G+ through for some reason I'm not allowed to have more than 5262 friends,and before you ask I can't work out why that precise number. Seems a bit function lite though.

There's a whole pile of IT work that is pretty much the same at JP Morgan as at WalMart, though typically JPM pay better. JPM's a bit of a special case in that it's tech is surprisingly shabby Fact is most developers in corporates in most lines of business are hacking away at monolithic...

This is a really shit article, written by someone with apparently zero/negative knowledge of academia. My father in law was a distinguished law professor and was paid for by a huge telecoms firm and so many acdemics are in that position that in large universities there is in effect a price...

I don't imagine that its a surprise to Daniel that C++ for interviews is really not the same thing as teaching you to program. As I recall he came to my talk on that subject a few years ago, which for political reasons got called "C++ with confidence". I had the best seat in the house, unusual...

Canada has spent decades getting this right and has been a major importer of smart people especially ethnic Chinese for more than a generation. The difference between Canada and the USA (and most other countries) is that Canadian immigration policy is based upon what looks like being good for...

Jojo's point makes me think of what will happen with such vastly different pay & income levels in the EU Note that I say both "pay" and "income"... Tax rates in different EU states are going to diverge greatly, and it looks like the places with the lowest pay (Ireland, Greece, etc) will have...

Eckel's book is one that I often suggest for their first C++, so it is nothing to ashamed of, but it is a first book on C++ Also of course C++ is something you do, rather than something you know, so lukaszz needs to write some more code, it not clear if his coding has been in C++ Sounds like...

With all due respect, it is the wrong question. If you've mastered core Quant maths then you should identify those areas where you are better than most other people.

Anthony, I can phone some people with really very impressive job titles and I guess one of them would give an internship to one of my kids even if they weren't geniuses. They can decide to not employ someone (like you) and take on my kid. Because of who my sons parents are they don't actually...

I find myself hostile to unpaid internships, and I believe his experience is quite reasonably focused on finance. I know of interns who got paid more than their fathers who had 'real' jobs. The media industries of course are worst. Some firms would literally cease to function if unpaid interns...

Alexei is right about how gmail trashed yahoo mail etc. However I disagree that Yahoo et al could not make a better product, I believe they chose not to. There's no overwhelming technical reason why they couldn't provide more space, they did not believe that doing so would make more money.

I occasionally get called as an expert witness for certain aspects of work and technology in banking and had to explain to a lay audience how stressful it was to work on a trading floor as a quant. I decided to use the example of a case where I had to write quite tricky code with no help for an...

It is of course trivial to program Outlook to send emails datestamped at impressively late times of night and at weekends.

For whatever reason Google have not invited me, but it will be very tough for them. What they have failed to crack is how to leverage their vast user base through things like gmail. Google could trash FB like it wasn't even there, but it won't. I apologise for using the "E" word to a mainly...

As Ohad says, 24-25 is actually about the average age of starting in this line of work.

As well as Aytan's points, I'd like to say that in any market, you don't get better suppliers than consumers. There exists one HH firm who has a scandalously bad reputation who is also one of the largest and growing. That's because you give them business, not me. Aytan's right that you have to...

I see the problems in government as mostly engineering. Firstly in chemical engineering: If you look at the way that candidates are chosen, it is by activists, this is true of all democratic (and theocratic) systems, the US however has a process that applies efficient fractional distillation to...

ikyaka nicely illustrates the points, I'm what an American would call a social liberal but an economic hawk, but even then the granularity of any political party can't represent my views on the things I care about. I generally regard anyone who agrees with the whole platform of any party as...

I suspect the reason so many think that Greeks don't "care" about default is that so many of them think that the consequences will fall mostly on others. Also some are looking at very bad personal outcomes, and may be entirely focused on that and you can see their point. We also see the curse...

I have some time for a Brady bond style solution and having some experience of re-profiling of government debt and there is a clear issue about what exactly is a "default". If Greece forces creditors to accept less cash or forces a different repayment schedule then that is a default in terms of...

Be aware that banks are installing s/w to monitor any social media activity that occurs on their machines.

Having spoken to a good number of Quants, many don't want to be a trader at all.

Sounds like you've got the right attitude and a bad break which is a lot better than the other way round.

I do hope that you're not embarrassed about not spotting the demise, one thing I've found in this business is that very few people judge the probability of such events with an useful degree of precision. That's on both the positive and negative side. What were you doing for these people ?

Having studied under Paul before it all went tits up, he was saying pretty similar things before. ...and yes people kill people, not guns. Americans more frequently kill each other with furniture than Europeans kill each other with guns, knives, terrorism, poison and every other type of murder...

physecon I see fewer such questions than you do, and I hope we can agree that they struggle against the tide of "reputation" questions. You're right that I'm an old pimp, but I had a real job before; in fact several, and the thing that got me through some quite astonishingly bad career...

I hate pretty much all of Andy's list Number of applicants I don't give a toss, this is a function of the marketing ability of the university not the quality of the course. Number of admits My tosslessness increases: I'm one of the billion people who learned the ABC from Sesame Street, doesn't...

Bluechimp's bang on the money about quality of placements and even my database doesn't answer that question properly so I am very interested in RolledUpAces comments. Maybe there is some database or survey but mildly diligent research by my firm has failed to locate it. I'd be really grateful if...

Don't do a PhD as a straight career move.

The OP is a troll, don't feed him.

No, being a quant is on average better paid.

All figures are in $K and subject to some change as we get more numbers in. New York Base Bonus Non-Cash Benefits Total Comp 160, 111, 21, 292 California Base Bonus Non-Cash Benefits Total Comp 144,74,20, 238 Chicago Base Bonus Non-Cash Benefits Total Comp 136, 47, 20, 203 Average USA Base...

A lot depends upon what you think a country is for... Do people own the country, or does the country own them ? One has to separate what is in the interests of a government and what is good for the people they govern.

As someone who's worked as a journalist, part of my education in that was the "they would say that wouldn't they ?" test. Imagine you run a small business (say) fixing computers. A big TV channel turns up and says they are making a program about Wall Street computers. Do you say : a) "we're a...

It has become the social norm among Chinese students. If you are Chinese then you have to clump together with other Chinese. I can accept that happens, and which is why I favour trying to stop it, this habit does not serve them well.

Although few people are as scathing of the way some finance courses are marketed, I do not yet quite see why he thinks he is subject to deceit It never crossed his mind that he’d pay $47,000 a year to live in an almost empty country inn It sounds like he has better accommodation than I had at...

According to my Quant pay survey 18% of those who do quant work did engineering as their first degree.

Cutting entire departments such as journalism, pre-historic studies, latin american studies, etc Hard to see that as bad. Journalism is a profession that is vastly over supplied, pre-historic studies is an OK subject, but as I recall the USA is really quite near hundreds of millions of people...

I include Actuary because in some firms they do work that in other firms would have Quant as the job title. The fact that I've addressed the survey to a quant audience and got actuaries replying reinforces that decision. I cannot honestly say that actuaries in general are less happy than...

Given that QN has a high % o students, I thought I'd share some results on how happy various types of quants are in their work, this is based upon 715 responses from our pay survey. Very Happy 11.3% Quite Happy 45.2% Neither 28.5% Quite unhappy 12.0% Very unhappy 2.9% For the job...

Compensation data is really hard to get, so we're doing a survey which in the couple of days we've been running it has about a thousand responses. If you have a specific query get in touch in a couple of weeks and I'll be happy to help. bit.ly/letqkA

@Andy, I didn't know that the UCB online course is that expensive and that short. The CQF one I do is much longer and included in the fees.

I've started to seem some output that looks like results, some results look like they might surprise some people, but to make such claims I want to have a good sample first.

P&D are running a pay survey for people who use maths to make money, or at least stop money being lost in vast quantities. If you're working in that sort of job then you can go to http://bit.ly/koFj1Q to add your contribution.

Students not knowing what they want to do by the time they hit 18 is, in my opinion, an inevitable consequence of state education. I was educated by the state and had very clear views on my direction. My children go to a private school with a fine record of getting people to the very best...

There is a considerable amount of brinkmanship here. German voters are not very impressed with Greece which has chosen not to sort its economy out for the last 30 years. So Merkel has to somehow placate them. When the Greek Communist party seem to be the one with one of the most rational...

My problem is that I want a good Windows tablet, but such a thing does not exist. I simply do not know why MS is making such a mess of this market, it is really not that hard to put a good gesture based interface on top of Windows. My call is 20 programmers for 6 months, having read that part...

The languages used in quant work are (in order ) C++, VB, C#, Python, SQL, Perl, then Java, though I begin to suspect that F# has overtaken Java. You need to be good at C++ That means reading the Sutter books and the Duffy books and mastering them. As well as being a headhunter, I teach quant...

First thing is that if you are talking about a PhD, we are looking at the world starting 7-8 years from now. It will be different, not only that its not realistic to predict in what ways it will be different. Algotrading may be saturated, or it may be the only game in town. Remember that your...

Andy is right to highlight the issue of family support. A fact that seems invariant across cultures, countries or most segments of humanity that you care to pick is that the educational level of the mother is the best predictor of educational outcome for the child. Note that I say "predictor"...

There are several processes going on here. China is the first, and probably the most important factor with India being significant as well. In the 15 years up until the crisis we had a sweet combination of growth and low inflation. Good growth normally helps fuel inflation because people have...

I have to declare an interest since Paul Wilmott is my business partner, and I teach C++ on the CQF As Darth mentions there is work being done on careers, and there is a rumour that a mildly well known headhunter is on the faculty. I actually don't know how various programs weight the CQF...

As you will read elsewhere I've heard very bad things about Fordham, and they never responded to any of my questions in order to explain themselves.

This is what Americans want. Look at the issues they vote on.

hariadya the BB tests are a useful and cheap filter, some firms send you a link to the BB test and if you score high enough, they interview you.

As you might imagine, I have a professional interest in this...

tobias makes his point well, and it's not just finance that feels that effect, but all universities in the non-English speaking world, hence the tables. The effect is so great that the European Union is commission a new methology that will make European universities look better. They are upset...

It's not easy for me to see why anyone would take this offer (this is British understatement, not sarcasm, I believe the American equivalent would involve monkeys flying out of my anus) Most people doing the course will be quite far along the process so deferring would be tricky. Also $8K is a...

@Amanda, thanks for taking the time to read my post. I suspect a reason it might have come across as sexist is that so much is written that is 'supportive' of women rather than identifying things that they can and should do better. I have an issue with 'male dominated' as a view... Yes, most...

It's not the job of universities to produce people in the ratio that markets currently want. I see education as like a book. Would the world be a better place if a given textbook was only allowed to be read by a certian number of people ? Do you think universities are capable of judging the...

Job:Headhunter Debugged Operating system code for IBM and Microsoft as well as part of Excel. Worked on porting first Intel Unix at Nortel C developer since 1982, C++ since about 1990 Basic programmer since 1973 SQL Since 1987 Written VBA from the British Treasury, and Python under perversely...

To me, the most interesting issue is the drop out rate between MFE and actually working in banks. I have yet to identify the factors that lead women to spend serious money and a year/18months studying then go and do something else. My problem is of course that the lost girls never come near me...

Before I start, I have to disclose that my sampling has a serious bias to it because I talk to people who have chosen to leave. I talk to lots of PhDs, it's possible that no one in this industry talks to as many as I do, and their view on academia is remarkably similar to people I know who come...

You have first to be subjected to my standard disclaimer which is that I don't tell you what to want, but simply try to help you get it. Fact is that "introduction to..." isn't enough to get you into HFT all by itself. Thus there is a risk/return issue here, you need to do SP well to get into...

"I'm not wasting time and effort on courses that I won't use later on." I'm really worried by that statement, I often offer advise on optimising educational choices, but a problem that applies to any optimisation scheme is that you can end up with a maximum that is close to a cliff face of...

Also, the most common criticism of BS is that it fails to handle tail events all that well, ie is not well suited to risk management, typically underpricing risk. So Buffet is saying he wants to take more risk than that ?

I don't have any official role as a gatekeeper to this line of work, but I do have to ask Maks why you think this line of work is for you ? We all have holes in our skills, but at some point you move from being a boat with a hole that's fixable to being a fishing net that sinks. I'm not saying...

Even though you are thousands of miles away, that dull thudding you can hear is my head hitting the desk repeatedly. Do not do a PhD as a pure career move. It leads to misery, pain, suffering, anguish and quite probably (and clearly important to you) poverty. That applies to all PhDs from all...

Ruthlessly question yourself on what you are better at than most other people. Maybe Quant work will pop out of that, maybe not. An algorithm that iterates through all lines of work asking "is this good" is grotesquely inefficient". Obviously high end math skills, sharp around PDEs, stats...

I'm being harsh here, but it's my job to tell the truth about careers, not sell you on the idea of a quant career. I don't care about your verbal GRE, to me that's just a symptom of the dysfunctional US education system, and if you find a way of gaming the system good for you. I do care that...

Actually, I part company a bit with Andy, the LSE is one of the few British universities that most educated Americans have heard of. There's a whole pile of work visa shit of course which makes this more complex. What sort of maths did you do on your PhD ?

I don't care what program you get into, but as a headhunter you have failed any plausible test for me getting you a job, so why are you wasting so much money and a year of your life. You don't speak English, I can cope with that, I'm lucky enough to live in England so I get it for free, but you...

One has to be careful about what you call "automatic trading", which I shall compare to weapons of varying destruction Some imagine the Terminator, I know my son does. He's 9 A fully autonomous entity, which is unknown in either the art of war or the craft of trading. Arts grads in the media...

Noko's right about this stuff, however the drive for ultra low latency has caused people to try and reduce the round trip through the stack of O/S and N/W layers to an absolute minimum, and that means they haven been putting more of what you might as well call "application code" into lower...

I'm rather intrigued by this thread, it seems to me that between us we have every skill we need to have a good shot at this. As headhunter, I'd like to confirm that several high end trading outfits do like people who have done well at poker, as long as they have a useful set of other skills of...

It's mildly embarrassing that I have to explain basic economics to D.Serg Firstly, you have to stop thinking about the Chinese as people. Think of them like steel or cardboard or computer chips. US manufacturers (like for instance Dell), take in stuff from other countries, screw with it a bit...

I do sales and engineering, in fact I've spent most of the last couple of weeks writing and analysing some code, and agree that sales is a skilled job, and it's wrong to see sales and marketing as part of a zero-sum game. Many good things have failed to be bought, and thus died because they...

The question is also why do engineering firms pay so much less than finance ? I get to talk to leaders of both banks and engineering firms, and overwhelmingly the bankers say they value engineering talent more than engineering firms. Someone with an engineering/science PhD is now far more...

I model job hunting as a competitive game, and your allocation of time & money should optimise the chances of getting a good job. Should you give up time and money that you could spend on learning maths, finance or programming to learn to express yourself ? For most people I think the answer is...

Even the facts in the article are basically wrong, it's not a £40 billion inudstry, it's the whole fucking economy. Although some of these kids go home, many stay, and since they are on average smarter than both the place they leave and the place they join, and better educated, they are...

The monotonous dull thudding noise you can hear is not allied bombing of Tripoli, but the repeated intersection of my head and my desk.

BBW is right that there is considerable rose-tinting, driven by the filtering processes that happened in the bad old days. My parents were immigrants, and could offer no guidance to me in spelling, and the Christians who 'taught' me at an early age didn't bother with teaching a working class...

mikeb, you're right, but it is the case that often programmers are working in secret, either becasue they don't tell, or because their management doesn't ask. I should clarify that I'm specifically talking about financial software development where the "if I don't see something, it does not...

I don't have a strong opinion on whether OO should be in the 'introductory' curriculum, and see some value in this choice, since it gets kids early before they code everything as for() loops. That may surprise those who read my thoughts in various media, where I deride the majority of CS...

In >25 years of dealing with banks, that's one of the most cynical bits of bullshit I've ever come across. Britain has amongst the worst retail banks in the world, with levels of services so dreadful that it is not possible to tell the difference between malice and incompetence. They don't...

Excellent insight, thankyou. I think it illustrates an important business principle. He says that the HF business is not as easy & profitable as it was. That decline is a constant in finance and any business. If you find a way of making money that is easy and profitable, then by all means...

I like Alexandre's answer. It's worth adding the fact that people don't choose numbers randomly. A particular issue is the way they choose birthdays in these, so that 0 is rare, but then 1..28 is more common, 29-31 a but less likely then 32 to 100 less likely still. This helps one in games...

Newhavenct raises a good point, and I'd turn it around... This guy got caught because his method was all the way dumb. The volume of traffic was so large that it stood out and it seems he made no real effort to hide it. I've not heard of a case where sophisticated methods were used to take...

I was intentionally being offensive about the Japs in WWII, so didn't care if it offended people who tortured. What we have here is a noun with a past tense. But yes there is much the same phobia about 'offending' people in the Britain as the USA, actually it is not PC to call it Britain, one is...

When you say physics, I assume you mean undergrad ?

Yes it's true that there are more LSE alumbs on Wall Street than from LSE. Whether it still deserves that position is a different thing.

Yes, there's a big issue around job security and risk here... When I was a kid in the 1970s TV repairmen were better paid than plumbers, and there were more of them. The mean time between failure of a TV was months, not the decades we expect now, and because they were expensive, it was worth...

Euroazn, bots are 'like' insider trading in that some people see them as an unfair advantage. I'm doing some stuff for the BBC where I get more views about how many people see algorithmic trading as 'insider'. Also there is a structural difference between British gambling laws and US ones. US...

Glad to be of help, and you raise another interesting issue that gets me involved as a careers advisor... Do you take a good job at an OK bank, or a less good job at at a better bank ? That's one of the single most common questions that people come to me with, and part of the way I break it...

The level of pollution in HK is rather higher than NY, if that is a major concern to you personally, it is an easy choice. HK tends to be a better place for front office work than SG, though that is an average not a guarantee. It is the case with most large firms that the 'thinking' is mostly...

So an interesting problem is how do you write code to spot bots ?

My problem with BS is that it is so hugely dependent on unobservable values, often that makes any assumption about lognormality look pretty trivial.

That reminds me of when I was first learning AI, my tutor defined 'intelligent' as anything a computer could not do :) A good bot would be hard to detect, and a brilliant bot even harder, (apart from winning a lot of course), so it may be that if the statistic is true, it actually means "90% of...

I didn't know that statistic, euroazn and I confess it surprises me, do you have a link ? Why would someone go to the effort of building a bot that loses money ? It gives me the mental image of a lone genius building a robot in his basement that has the delicacy of touch that can pick up an...

It seems to me that if you're smart enough to build a seriously good Poker bot, you really ought to be doing algorithmic trading, which is both more legal and more profitable.

Anthony is cynical and probably right that the stats will be chosen as part of a marketing strategy and not in any way to help people make more informed decisions.

This begs the question of what model Buffet's firm is using to hedge and price these options ? An analogy: My company is building a bridge. The building regulators says I have to meet a safety standard that make certain assumptions about steel, vibration, wind, load etc. I say that because...

A big question is what is 'prop' trading ? Some see market making as prop, some don't. Obviously as an American article it could not mention 'evolution' since that would alienate most of it's readers, but there is a clear analogy here... Imagine that dinosaurs did not die out because there was...

Be aware that Imperial has two careers departments, one in the business school which is pretty on the ball, and the other which is run by clueless arts graduates. To give you some idea how shit the main Imperial careers office is at placing people, it has forbidden me to advertise to their...

What's depressing is why none of this will happen... Goldman Sachs can afford to bribe US politicians on a colossal scale, and in aggregate the US banks can contribute "campaign funds" of a few tens of millions to avoid any serious proscution. It seems to me that if you give serious money to...

If I were going after bankers, then I'd pursue the notion of 'reckless'... The criminal law treats behaviour where you don't care about the consequences of your actions as close to those where you have intent. The problem is how far can a reasonable person be expected to judge the consequences...

It's probably not a coincidence that a Christian politician advocates homosexual rape as a solution to America's financial problems, fair enough, it works fine for their priests. He's also ignorant of history, not just the medieval/Tudor stuff that Bob cites, but shit that happened yesterday...

MFEs are for most people either a conversion or as you say, a sort of finishing school. There are three key factor in choosing education that helps your career: 1) Are you playing the game where you are clearly better than most other people ? 2) Are you patching over some holes in your skills...

I agree about 'top universities' one of my interns doesn't come from one, and would beat to death most entrants in this competition, and of course I could help him. I'm so glad Max is smart enough to respond to feedback, and BSD is as good a licence as any, and I withdraw any objections that I...

I see on another thread a Quant Programming competition, and although we could debate how "quant" a matching engine problem might be, it's a good idea, and since I've personally written that sort of code, see it as a perfectly valid test. I have something of a following these days, so for the...

As well as the real dangers in singing such a contract, as someone who has more than once had to deal with intellectual property issues I will share that there is a major defect in it, possibly another which renders the agreement not to be a contract at all. Personally I don't think it...

zimingski has a good point. Most of what you need to be a good trader is not taught on an MFE, and most of what you learn on an MFE is not geared towards trading. Most successful traders don't have an MFE That sounds like a clear case for not doing an MFE if your only goal is to be a trader...

IE6 is still very common in banks, they have standard, locked down builds. The way to understand this is that if you take the top 10 guys in IT in pretty much every bank, 8 will have never worked in an IT department in his life actually doing an IT job. That means 8 out of 10 have never...

C# is rather easier to use with Excel, C++ is more powerful.

Algorithmic trading may offer you the sort of work you'd be good at. The bad news is that you'd have to learn to program.

My opinions on Fordham are on record, and since they've never responded to my (surprisingly polite) requests for information, I have to assume that they've not fully addressed the issues they've had with the MSQF. That being said, relatively few MFE entry level people reach basic competence in...

Anthony is entirely correct that two years, working in only one bank is pathetically myopic. Bob, I agree about the nature of many writers, you may have seen that I worked for a while as a mildly senior journalist, and I will share that publishing shares the sort of behaviours you cite, and...

My problem with is that this is the sort of shit anyone has to put up with, whether they piss sitting down or standing up. I despise soccer, one of my earliest memories is from 1967, hating it, a lot. I deal with the moronic droning about this low quality homoerotic porn by forming harsh and...

The nature of hacking is that it is really quite hard to identify the source, so although it may be true that this was Chinese in origin, I would need more evidence to completely accept that assertion. Even a mildly competent hacker ought to think about giving the impression that someone else...

My observations on history are that unemployment is a distinct factor, and at least as important as food. Americans are in the richest top 0.1% of all the humans who have lived since we started living in cities. Most aren't feeling very rich right now because human perception is based upon...

Andy, there are specific reasons for not being public, it is important to understand the difference between carpet bombing advice which is generally applicable and a knife fight, and the advice I shared requires sensitivity. euroazn, the correct grammar given that by the grace of God I am a...

It's also worth reading The Economist/Bloomberg/Reuters at bit so that you can at least show you have some genuine interest in how markets are acting.

Tsotne rasies an interesting point. Most of the suffering in the middle east is caused by regimes that we support, be it a theocracy like Saudi, a brutal military regime in Egpyt or racial supremacists in Israel. Ordinary people not only get little benefit, but they realise that if there was no...

The "price" of oil is not a single thing... It now seems improbable that Suez might close, but even if it did then all it does is cause a short spike in price caused by the delay in having to go around, + a couple of dollars per barrel for the extra shipping cost. US based oil like Texas is...

The average in this business is higher than $150K, though of course if you don't get in you don't get paid... There exist jobs in the Bay area. As Tbeas says. Wilmott.com has a decent sampling of job ads. There are too many parameters to get a good degree of precision on what you might earn...

I've seen the same sort of signal about Sg, though it's always hard to pick a trend from the noise. There is a structural shortage of good Quant Developers, one that is not going to be filled any time soon, but that's different from it being a good career path... There is no masters course...

If I may, I'd like to refine that to be "ideas as mostly worthless on their own", and we don't really disagree. I constantly feed ideas into my kids and leave the boring grind of supervising spelling and multiplication tables to others. Thus 2.0 could explain why Reals were countable and how...

Andy is 100% right about execution. This idea is part of a large scale trend of open source, which doesn't just apply to software. Much of education is based around knowledge, since it dates from a time when you had to know stuff else you'd have to waste days or weeks finding it in a book...

I wonder if maybe you ought to assemble this experience into a book, I know a senior commissioning editor at John Wiley if that is of interest.

Two things: 1: Delete your input to this thread 2: Mail me Dominic in PaulDominic.com and I will explain how to deal with this.

I'm glad to see that Tunisia is moving out of the darkness. I believe Tunisians or Egyptians or Bahranians actually want the same stuff as Europeans. They want an opportunity to make their lives better and that of their children They don't want to be screwed with by scum with guns They want...

I see that China has blocked LinkedIn because people have used the word "Jasmine" there.

I think the net result of this is good. These statement are just bullshit that at best blur the signal of which applicants or worse give smokescreen for the prejudices of those running the process. They favour well prepped kids (like mine), over those with poorer backgrounds (like I was). I...

I agree with BBW about Manchester vs Lanchester, though Manchester has been in adeath spiral for some years, since the internationally excellent Manchester UMIST merged with the fuckwit arts grads at Manchester Uni. You may not be entirely wise and I agree that also it would be unwise to...

I stand corrected, but he's still a smart guy.

The idea that interest is a social evil is far from unique to Islam, until the Catholic church realised it could make serious money from usury, it was forbidden to Christians, since the Jesus myths include him physically attacking people who made money purely from money, the only violent act he...

The problem is not the government of the PRC but it's people. A poisonous cocktail of nationalism, a 3rd rate education system and a culture that values conformity far too much means that many Chinese people genuinely think that democracy, the rule of law and human rights are decadent western...

euroazn is wholly wrong about C & C++ GC and object creation are different things, and he needs to revise struct creation. C is sometimes preferred in embedded applications like robotics because they are space constrained, and it's relatively easy to knock up a C compiler for a new process/HW...

Before I comment on this I would like to make it clear that I never, ever contribute to the US edition of eFinancialCareers, any writing you see under my name is for the UK version. There are reasons for that. I never really thought of myself as a poacher, more a sort of assassin, armed only...

A reading list has been prepared by Paul Wilmott and myself at http://quantjob.blogspot.com/2011/02/reading-list-for-quants.html However... You are going to find this hard, any decent program would have questioned very strongly your ability to survive the course much less get a job afterwards...

A good contractor in London can indeed get >= £ 900, if he has the right skills, and that set is not quite constant. C++ and KDB are doing well, as is Murex. It is unlikely that a new MFE grad would get anywhere near that, unless he was a skilled developer before, with little chance that he...

You cannot imagine how angry I am about this.

The article glances at the important point which is that women don't do the same jobs, so what useful data we can extract is hard to tell. It actually surprises me that women earn as much as 73% of men, so given the shallowness of the survey I'd bet money they only looked at base salary ignoring...

Actually I helped write that article, but for some reason wasn't credited, words will be said on that. The one about why there is an N-1 term in standard devitation seems to have got lost. Mark Joshi has written a far more comprehensive list of questions together with their answers.

I think I'm giving nothing away to say that I wouldn't have Manchester at #3., and ekta has a point about Imperial

I don't know the placement rate at Imperial, but don't believe for a second that it's only 10%. Maybe only 10% got front office ?

I wish I disagreed more with you Andy. I rarely believe that anything, no matter how good works 100% of the time, and assume the 100% is "except for those who we don't count for reasons we will not share". Fact is that some people do finance courses, and learn a very important thing... that...

The only way this will ever get better is the emergence of global standard examinations... Employers want to filter, to be more precise they want someone else to have filtered for them, but since there is no consistency in marking graduates, they use percieved quality of a university as a...

BBW certainly has a good point about transparency in the outcomes from the Baruch program. I don't have concrete evidence of any program lying in the way that Joy says they do. I'm not saying he is wrong, I'm just saying I couldn't prove it in a court of law for any given program. Yet... Even...

As a professional "connector" I will agree with the Wolf that connections matter, but in investment banking they matter less than in any other activity of which I am aware, except maybe football. We work in a meritocracy, though I will not claim for a second that it's anything like a perfect...

It's this sort of shit that makes people hate banks and the Tory party, and it's a scam anyway. CMC markets is an OK firm, but not stellar, and a two week internship for someone not smart enough to get one on merit is wholly worthless, possibly even negative. An internship has three source of...

I get a lot of error messages before the forums appear.

Be aware also... Some banks taken on E.European and Indian staff in their native country promising that if they work hard they can be transferred to London/NY/Chicago. This is often a lie, I have with my own eyes seen mails from HR departments forbidding such transfers without exceptional need...

Serbia will no doubt be assimilated by the EU relatively soon, but not soon enough to be immediately useful to you. You are right that there is a good "brand image" for maths education in E.Europe / Russia, but that does not translate to it being a good place to start a career. We tend to call...

If you can't get into London or NY, then there are places like Hong Kong & Singapore. Again I'm not an expert on visa rules for India or China, but my understanding is that it's not that much easier there. The law in the UK has changed faster than I have kept up, so it's time to talk to my...

I sort of agree with BBW, reluctantly. Greeks haven't suffered enough to make them realise how badly they have run their country, and to a lesser extent the Irish are in the same boat. To extent his metaphor of a straightjacket, the point of this is not to stop you hurting others, a properly...

Yep, it's tough, don't think it gets all the way to good anywhere. I don't have much knowledge of the French system, but I'd look to see if there was a provision for recent grads to work in Paris for a year or so.

I have to confess to an ill-informed cynicism on how finance schools pick potential students, but looking at employment issues: Firstly, you need to evaluate objectively your core talent at maths, sure you can improve your score, but talent is the factor that stays constant no matter how much...

BBW, I apologise, I meant to say they can't work here, without permission, they are quite welcome to come as tourists. >No German worker can survive on such wages. I think we know that to be false, a construction worker living in Germany must be able to survive on what they pay Poles. He might...

I didn't know about Latvia but the European racists don't count them as white, so their ability to move West is still legally constrained. Yes, I know Latvians are white, but they are part of a wave that included Romanians and Hungarians and so there are barriers to them leaving which don't...

I fear I'm not being very insightful, their politicians are already talking openly of this.

Leicester is a respectable school, but not what my firm call a named uni. By that I mean no one has ever asked for its grads by name.

I will repeat one of my standard warnings that your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles should be up to the same standard as your resume. You wouldn't put drug or alcohol abuse on your CV would you ? I forecast that the result of this case is that my reassuringly expensive lawyers will be briefing...