Search results

The article seems to assume that Ireland is part of Britain, something that has not been true since the early 20th century. I was particularly taken with the idea that any part of the Irish political system is "Thatcherite". Thatcher is uniformly despised by people in the septic Isle, even...

NewHaven is right, very much so. As I recall the industrial revolution reduced the height of Englishmen by over three inches, such was the degree of hardship. Life expectancy in 1909 has dropped to 43, that's the average. The level of pollution was so intense for so long that there are a number...

Easily the best environment to learn C++ is MS Visual Studio, and if you are a student, you get the full version free. Over time you'll pick up some other IDEs and editors, but very rarely do employers ask "do you know VI ?", the goal is to master C++, and so I use VS when teaching. One tip...

The UK issued undated bonds during WWII, they may be redeemed at any time. They pay a pretty low coupon, so it's not likely the British government will do so any time soon, unless it wants to make a political point. Bob has a good point about the politics of it, the UK started issuing...

In my previous job I was a consultant to the UK government, and helped out a bit with their project for ultra longs, and perpetual bonds. It's an interesting question about what price difference there should be between a 100 year bond and a perpetual. In the midst of the current situation, it's...

The sugar thing could get worse since the large sugar producing area of Australia was hit very badly yesterday by a tropical storm, they reckon around $500MM of the crop was lost. I think the dictatorships are behaving rationally, the Egyptian situation was partly sparked by food price rises...

BBW is right, that is indeed what we see in most cases. As far back as the late 1700s skilled workers from England were migrating to the USA, for instance at one point wallpaper makers were forbidden by law from leaving the country. Eastern Europe lost many skilled workers, particularly in...

I agree Tsotne that zero skill workers still exist in vast untapped numbers. But employing someone, even for free is not so cheap as it was. Recently I had to explain to one of my interns about why algotraders often worry more about jitter than latency. He got paid nothing to hear that, but my...

Yike and Wushi have it pretty much right. One reason that last year I wrote to JP Morgan formally saying (politely) that my firm would not recruit for them is such a myopia. This included being told that someone with my own personal education background would not even be considered for a job...

Yes, Tsotne, the sale of Hummers was an interesting case. The market for these vehicles is in a nosedive which is why the business was sold. Anyone think there is a big market for vehicles whose core design is now really quite old, and guzzles gas faster than a flamethrower ? Also it is not...

Don't underprice communications and presentation skills, mumbling shy quants who lack the ability to communicate even in their own naticve language don't have the best pick of jobs. There's nothing wrong with Java as a learning language, loops, patterns and much else is pretty much the same as...

I might have liked to attend, but registration appears to be closed...

That's rather odd "evidence", isn't it ? I appreciate the FBI is mostly run by arts graduates who haven't really grasped any technology invented since 1980, but this guy is calling for hacking and denial of service attacks. Not good, but a very different thing from violence.

Fox would see a meeting of Jordanian childcare advocates as a Moslem conspiracy. As far as I know one thing that Ofx has not reported is that China is censoring news on Egypt. I see a shutdown in Suzes as extremely unlikely. From that perspective it doesn't matter whose side the army is on...

I suspect that not being the top exporter of beer or lettuce is a wound that a country as big as the USA can live with. I was actually quite surprised that the USA was #2, and how recently it lost #1. US cars are astonishingly bad. Odd since non-US made Fords etc are actually quite decent, my...

More than once it has occurred to me to do a finance film... Some of my godchildren are in that biz, and a spin out from my last firm does serious special effects such as bits of Harry Potter, etc. I have a huge stock of anecdotes from my own career and those who drink with me, all are...

Retirement finance is a curiously attractive option to take. Funding longevity will be a major part of mathematical finance in years to come. They should be congratulated for adding it, and of course both lecturers come with a good rep.

Egypt is not an oil producer, so any persistent change wouldbe by some sort of "domino effect". Although it would be nice to see the back of every regime from Morocco to Pakistan, they are good at oppression, typically it is all they are good at. So my call is a few riots, nothing more in the...

The CFA is not really a quant qualification, it's aimed at different career paths. Eric says he has seen no demand for CFA qualified quants, and certainly I have never had a client mention it in the desired skill set. However, I observe that some people whose job title is quant, have the CFA...

It's very easy to say "we must teach X" where X is something we don't currently teach. It's so easy to say that a bit of googling on my name will prove how easy it really is. But an MFE is a year... Maybe you could add a week, maybe even a month to the taught part of the course, is this enough...

The web course is of almost no value to you, and you're smart enough to work out "Computer Applications" yourself, or if you're not, this is not the career for you. The Art, Science of programs look promising. I'm glad you are doing a stiff load of maths, the more the better. Given that, and...

Actually, I did do a translation for a good % of the book's VBA, don't know what happened to it, will hunt it down....

Fenzo, I also favour Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel aand have no problem with the other suggestions here. There is a matter of taste, some people prefer to learn this stuff in different ways, so if you find one book doesn't work for you, I strongly advise you try another. But... Programming is...

I do not believe that the NYT sucks especially hard when compared to most newspapers. As some of you already know, I do a bit of 'pro-bono' headhunting which is basically to identify slots for interns where none existed before, and try and put an intern into them. So, I was talking to the...

If it's a good and relevant MS, then yes.

Fenzo, I was articulating the PRC Chinese view of Africans, one I do not share. I agree that the Taiwan situation may be resolved peacefully, but political reform in the PRC is a big ask, and history is not on the side of peace. I can see why Fenzo suspects I have an "animosity" towards...

There is probably more over-capacity in the market for news than any other human activity. Today I saw that more 50 different news organizations were present at what in the UK is called an "arraignment" for the murder of one person. That's companies, not people, there were probably nearer 200...

I find that with respect I am forced to disagree, with ThinkDifferent about RBS being a mess. A mess implies a disordered state, which implies a static stable situation brought about by forces of entropy. RBS ain't that. But I'm not sure exactly what it is, since nothing that I understand...

Of course the definition of "other countries" is not that clear cut. Taiwan for a start. Then there's the border disputes which the PRC has on pretty much every side. Also, some of the border regions are far from stable and shit may spill into the PRC from outside. Imagine millions of N.Korean...

I was recently interviewed by the BBC about bonuses, and used my connections to help them talk to bankers about their bonuses. I agreed to do this since for once, there were some journalists who actually doing the research wanting to talk to people who know what's going on. This was made...

Personally I think the problem is not that the USA is very likely to crumble into some 3rd world state, but that it fails to adjust to realities as they change, causing pain to itself and everyone else. For quite a while, America can expect to be vastly more powerful in military terms than...

1) Anthony, the Brits did huge building in India, Oz, NZ, HK, Sg, et al didn't stop it being an Empire.All were friendly countries, hundreds of thousands of people from these countries volunteered to fight for Britain in both world wars. That's what empires do. Same with the Roman empire. The...

Anthony, you may be right, in fact you are very probably right, that the US will not commit a technical default. I'm rejecting your assertion that the probability is zero. Ditto Afghanistan, like most people I expect the US will shore up the current fradulent government, give them some guns...

As a recruiter I look for C++ for several reasons: 0: Employers ask for C++ more than C#, and a lot more than Java. 1: It is evidence that you're smart. C++ is harder than C# 2: It is evidence that you've had a better education, people who do weaker courses do weaker languages, on average...

I think they are taught to question more whether it is the right binary.

I have not read the book, but I see a mix of intuitive and slightly dodgy reasoning here. As someone who talks with an extremely wide spread of students, I see the 'drift' term big time. There's listless drift, as in low motivation and "powered drift" where students work hard, but their...

As Andy says, only the timing of the move is really news. Makes applying for entry level MS jobs an interesting game.

Anthony is wholly incorrect that there is zero chance of America defaulting, that's not a forecast, that's an observation. Recall how very very close the US came to defaulting under Clinton, when they could not get a budget passed. That's not so long ago, and given that the US has an even more...

One reason the $ is the defauilt currency is the lack of plausible competition. Although it is not run well (however you define that), the $ is too global to be easily manipulated for the benefit of an organisaiton favoured by any one country. You can image how China and the EU feel about that...

Jobs has been ill before, indeed this may be the same thing moving to a new stage, so to some extent it is priced in. To me the question boils down to momentum, both real and perceived. Apple enjoys good margins on products that are either of lower specification than competing brands, or very...

35 is not too old, but the clock is ticking quite loudly. One thing that you need to be clear about, both in your presentation to potential employers and yourself is that you are going to take a serious step down in 'rank', one you may not ever go back up from. At 35 with a PhD, I assume that...

Ken is being harsh, but fair. One result of the education system is that too many people are taught that there are good clear solutions to problems, often these solutions are elegant. Teachers praise elegance both in your work and in the things they teach. This ain't such a situation. To be...

It is an interesting fact that regardless of culture or race (whatever you mean by race), by far the best predictor of the educational outcome of a child, whether that child is male or female. The exact correlation of course varies by group, but the correlation is always there. That gives us a...

Culture is a thing, but I do see evidence of Real programming in Japan, but not India. Yike is right that "breaking things" either by accident or design is an important part of being a Real programmer. An experimental view of the world is critical to this.

As Andy says, people who sell stuff travel, or if they are managing groups in multiple locations. By far the norm is not even to move all that much around your building, much less go to other countries. Networking is an issue for quants, and it is good that you've spotted that the lack of it...

I apologise if my thoughts didn't come through here... If you learn the things I suggest you seriously increase your chances of getting a job in algotrading, without much risk of not being employable in other sectors. Probability is good for most investment banking work, and the DSP /comms etc...

Yeah, I always hear them as being code-monkeys, why is that? euroazn, I don't know, it's harder to explain an absence than a finding. If forced to guess, I'd say it was because of the nature of the Indian computer industry. It services rather than leads. Lots of money there of course, but the...

So, for the sake of argument, let's prepare someone who is not a UK CS grad for a career as a HFT Quant developer, trader, or doing something relevant in that space. Actually UK CS grads are way above average, just not good enough, which should tell you a lot about the shape of the global...

euroazn, I recently wrote in the Register about the failings of UK CS degrees. However I was incorrect that only one UK college does C++ at undergrad level. It's two... A useful % have done threads, but only in Java. Java threads are easier to drive than in C++, which is both good and bad. Java...

When GS describe what they look for in an algotrader they specify more education, more applicable maths and C++ than you have. You're a British CompSci grad, you don't know C++ Please don't tell me how good Java is, I may vomit. MS seem to be splitting off their prop trading bit, so if you're...

Depends where you are, but generally it's pretty hard. A lot depends on what sort of engineering you are studying, but based upon what you say, I'd say that there was a 10-15% chance of you getting a decent role in algorithmic trading after the QD job.

Interesting, do we have any idea about the numbers of sales ?

I wonder what happened to the TV producer ?

I teach some ethics on the CQF, and Paul Wilmott integrates much of those ideas into his teaching, but... One big issue is advocacy. It's all very well someone thinking "we ought not to be doing this", but for it to be useful, you have to be able to get others to share your position. Otherwise...

BBW is right I think a good example of how to do it "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" It introduced many people to a jargon that made them feel "insiders", if you can make your customers feel smart, you will sell to them. As for romance... I met my wife at IBM's labs, arguably the least...

At one level it doesn't actually matter does it ? You apply when you apply, the chances may be lower but there is no siginicant change in your choices since it is out of your hands. roni has a good point that if you are marginal for this line of work, is it your best choice of career ? Also...

Yike is right about how different courses prepare you for different work. We can all learn things that can make us more valuable. But the optimum is to be found where you are playing to your personal strengths. Any way of making money or achieving success by other measures is competitive. You...

GS is not the first to do this, another bank did so, and it was hilariously badly done, Bloomberg tried shit like this, didn't work either. Their HR took control of this process, and next to IBM, they have the worst HR function of any major firm. Apparently they commissioned a consultancy to...

It is interesting to see a film about something that one knows something about, and the way that media people just don't get anything which is not the media. Wall St could really be any industry, good film, but 5 minutes search and replce could make the script do the advertising business, or...

It's not quite exactly true that Wall Street only want people from the Ivy Leagues, they want smart people, and that's a convenient place to look, they pay me to find the ones they miss, and having done AI, I apply rather smarter search algorithms, and your goal is to show up on the radar of...

I'm not sure that Raptor class aircraft are the way forward... Their cost means that their number will always be relatively low, and their running cost is colossal. Their complexity means that if a war between large countries erupted (their primary use), it would be extremely difficult to train...

LI is relatively unusual in social networking because from the start it had revenues from users, not just advertisers. It's mildly interesting to me why they picked 2011 to IPO. They are not so very far off hitting the 100 million level at their current rate of growth, and the announcement of...

A few points about how the CQF has evolved since the reviewers did it... There is now a much larger math refresher course, which used to be a separate chargeable option. We don't have a formal careers office, but there is a headhunter on the faculty :) The latest manifestation of that is CV...

I really don't see what value any traditional credit scoring has for judging people who've spent pretty much their whole lives in education. As current events show, credit scoring ain't that good for people with work histories either.

I'm not at all convinced that a stealth fighter is all the relevant to whatever war China expects to fight next. I see the future as UAVs, missiles, etc. I believe stealth that stealth on manned aricraft will be as relevant in 10 years as more efficient propellers. Also, as someone who was a...

Signal processing at Imperial is generally worth more than 35K as a faux QD, It sounds like you have at least the basics for an entry level algorithmic trading role, which in my experience never pay £35 K at entry level, it's either rather more or zero. My public advice is to say no. You say...

Although everyone hear knows I am a headhunter who teaches a bit of Quant C++, I still amd registered as a journalist, doing occasional pieces for the technical press. Thus I get press releases like this article, which was merely slightly edited by a cheap hack or maybe an intern to go in a...

I've had a reasonable variety of feedback about working in Japan, and opinion seems to vary more than for most places. Pretty much all agree that Tokyo 'works' functionally better than many other large cities. However they report a degreen of naked racism and sexism that is unique in developed...

Part of my model of the "new normal" is that there are going to be vastly fewer 'permanent' jobs. That's independent of the level of employment, but is an effect of globalisation and technology. In the 'olden days' which ended around 1990, many people could realistically expect to work for 10...

I have to say those questions sound a bit easy for quant roles... Not saying they don't get asked, but you will die horribly if these represent any sort of boundary on your ability to do interview questions.

By all means put non-relevant work experience on your CV, it's value is pretty much strictly positive, and occasionally it helps catch a hiring manager's eye. But... Don't let it dominate your resume. I regularly get CVs where more space is given to part time & vacation jobs than to the meat...

Quant maths are mostly quite different from maths used in CompSci, though you're right that someone good at discrete maths, can quickly come up to speed in the continuous maths prevalent in this area. I suggest that first you need to prove it to yourself, so as to make sure you are not making an...

I have to say the quality control is a candidate for the least valuable skill an aspiring banker might acquire. That's not the way it should be, but my job is to tell you the way it is. There are basically two possibilities: 1) The QA course gets read as part of the background noise that...

First, where did you go, and what was your topic ? Based upon what you say, I'm 90% confident that it is at best a QD position, for which you are superbly over qualified, so of coursethey are interested in you. "They told me that the position would be in IT but very close to the Quants...

BBW, I would ask you to read my post, I agree with you that it's not a very useful scientific concept, and that it is often badly defined. We must distinguish between the way that many people use terms sloppily, and the term itself not being capable of definition. The term "scientific" itself is...

@BBW, one difference between American negroes and other groups is that many didn't come voluntarily, they were sold as slaves by their own people to white slavers, so the filter doesn't apply so strongly. Race is a scientific concept, it's merely one that's not very useful, and is especially...

Like newhavenct, I'm not a professional neuroscientist, though I did study it long ago. My understanding is that although the genetic difference in intelligence is very much the single biggest factor in variance (note I say variance not mean), the differences that one can assign to 'origin' are...

I think there is absolutely no logical reason why intellect and race should ever be mentioned in the same sentence. Actually I teach logic, and I although I don't use 'race' as a useful term for describing people, genetics are critical in intelligence. Any reasonable person would know that...

It doesn't shock me as much as other people that there are 'glaring' errors... I read many resumes, and find all sorts of shit in people who I generally believe have graduated from decent places. Resumes aren't read like novels, they are skimmed, and since a lot of people apply to Harvard do...

I share some of BBW's scepticism about the idea that it is "the system", but I don't care. The system is the way we deal with the problem. For all I know, there may be genes that enable ethnic Chinese to learn maths better, but that doesn't matter either. What matters is how you deal with it...

I have to assume the Shanghai results are somehow the results of corruption because the PRC exam system is more corrupt than.... At this point I realised that you can't honestly say that PRC exams are are as corrupt as... One is forced to disrespect an exam system by saying "it is almost as...

Andy, I wish you luck in your attempt to get information out of Maryland. A small number of my clients are habitually escorted by men with guns, and they are easier to get information from than most MFE programs.

Plenty of Maths/Physics grads work for banks in programming.

"named school" is indeed highly subjective, which expresses itself as risk. A big problem with the Economist article is that it doesn't really cover risk in this investment, which frankly is so naive as to render it worthless. As it says in my Quant careers guide, I advise more people on...

I find in this debate that I must again take thought leadership from George W. Bush. He understood that these people are useful, and that it is inhumane to treat them this way, which is more than his party did. When GW Bush out thinks you and is more compassionate, you are screwed. I...

Alain says it will burst people's bubbles, and I see this as a good thing... As I say so very often, a PhD is a foolish move in terms of pure career progression. A PhD is like sex. Some people make very good money from sex, but spending 5 years learning how to do one specific sex act very...

@Anthony you say:"1) It would make sense that people who strongly believe in liberty would be nationalistic. " Do you mean patriotic, ie loving your country, which is quite a different thing from hating foreigners ? 2) The continued bashing of the tea party is rather pathetic. It is certainly...

I kind of admire it... The same way I admire the Jamaican bob sleigh team, it's an insanely difficult thing to do with no possible useful outcome. To me it seems that this "school of engineering" is actually a work of art, it serves no functional pupose other than to communicate the futility...

I agree that cliches waste space on your CV, but think of those terms as a syllabus, not the material itself. Every single one of those terms has appeared in many job specifications that I have read. At some firms they are aprt of the standard template put on all job specs.

Sound quality ?

BBW has a point, and pretty much the first thing I say on the CQF soft skills lectures is that they are skills not talents. By that I mean you can learn how to do it better, it's not a deterministic function of your genes. Part of the reason for the apparent skills deficit here is that firstly...

Exams are a Victorian invention (as I recall Trinity College, Cambridge). Before that you had to convince the masters by a mix of presentation and conversation that you had grasped the subject. We still see echoes of this in the PhD process. Something was lost when we moved to the industrial...

The first goal is to be a good version of yourself, not a crap imitation of someone else. In practical terms it means identifying what sort of person you want to be at a detailed level. I get to talk with very successful people in mutliple domains, though of course centred around finance and...

Marina is right, and it's a recurring pattern... Ever since the early industrial revolution it has been necessary to educate an increasing % of your population to graduate level. In Europe, education was close to being a monopoly of Christian churches, and even as the nascent changes started...

When I read news like this I am happy. Some here might see me as a helpful source of advice on careers, which is only partly true. Just because I'm a nice guy shouldn't blind you to the fact that I feed off the misery and greed and others, and if a bank shafts it's useful staff then my role is...

Yes, British unis do award degrees to people who barely speak English, so do US ones. Not the top tier, but it gets very bad very quickly as you go down. I recently was interviewing my first wave of interns, and it became clear that some simply didn't understand what I was saying, even after...

Huge barriers, especially if you aren't white.

Although Andy is right that few places depend upon Matlab, it is very common, so common that it doesn't have huge value to your CV, unless you are very very good at it indeed. If you wish to invest a bit of time increasing your value through software, pick any programming language other than...

Paul Wilmott last night advanced an argument on maths that is similar to my view on Java. For some years there has been a contraction in the breadth of maths used in the mainstream, and it's possible this has career implications... Firstly, if some type of maths becomes more useful, the...

Bank vetting will not prevent a Madoff, we know this to be true because nearly all of the people who've done bad things have passed such vetting. I believe Mr Assange would get through... One only has to look at the history of the various government security services to see that background...

@BBW, I think you are right that attracting smart foreigners has been part of the mix, but that would only get you as far as neglect, I observe active hostility. The US has long had fewer people with science degrees in the higher political echelons than any other major country I can think of...

It's not an ethical dilemma, any system of ethics that I know of has lying as a bad thing. I like tests for things, and to me the test is to put yourself on the other side, and ask whether you would feel that you had been misled. We all leave things out of our records, partly because it...

There's going to be several factors here... Beating America at science education is like beating it at cricket, it's just not what America does. It's a nation where 40% of the population don't even believe in evolution. As Andy says, migration is acting as a Heinlein filter. Ironically that...

AlgoCan raises a most important point. I'm a student of why people quit their jobs, and lack of Respect is one of the most common core motivations for saying enough is enough. Respect can of course be expressed through money, and I'm no so naive to say this doesn't matter. But actually low...

@Marina policies are not handed down by God. They are made. Also, Ken should ask to see a copy of the policy, on paper. Because 9/10 when some fatuous bureaucrat says "it's policy", the policy is rather different. When they say "it's policy" what they actually mean is "I don't want to, and...

I enjoyed Avatar, but after any sustained period watching 3D through glasses I get a mild headache, and I believe this to be quite common. TV, as opposed to PC is a 'lean back' experience, and anything that is hassle loses utility fast. Also it is not child friendly... My home has slightly...

What would happen if you just parked in the 'reserved' spots ? I don't believe you're being 'difficult' since what you're asking for doesn't cost them anything. The most arrogantly useless people that I encounter work in academic administration. Some are excellent working hard for little pay...

Good on her. Some people will just see this as the actions of someone who's slightly unhinged, others will see passion, and a few will say "what the hell, get get her in, it might be interesting". Having been both a hiring manager and a headhunter I know how important it is to stick out. S...

London contractors commute long distances suprisingly often. One guy I know lives on the Isle of Wight, which means he has to catch a ferry to the mainland before he can catch the train. Typically contractors do earn more than permanent staff, but on the quant/dev side it is often the other way...

coolharvard is right, "average" is not a useful way of making education decisions. In particular, a given individual is a mix of talent levels, and education after 18 is largely specialising on the areas that students seems to be good at. The correlation between 'raw' intelligence between...

Peter is obviously a worthy recipient of this award. He is in the small group of Quants that actually move this profession forward rather than implementing and replicating the work of others.

@atreides, Amazon has the same problem any provider of an open service faces. It lists >30 million books, and it's hard to see how they could check each book, and even then it raises a tricky question of whether you want Amazon to have an official role as censor. As far as I am aware this book...

Seeing the curriculum, I think business analysis might be the way forward for you. That of course means building up an understanding of some area of the biz. BAs can start off with a level that is comparable to having read and grasped Paul Wilmott's Introduction book. An alternative to this is...

As someone who habitually tries to deflate the common obsession of 'branded schools' I find that this article just goes the other way far too much.

There was just a post on a SocGen trader being arrested for violating trade secrets. Suppose some trader or hacker broke into the system and sent the code to Julian instead. Who is going to be legally or financially responsible for this criminal act? That's a good question... The law here...

This is the first feedback I've seen for that course. One bit of shared responsibility is that they have a Masters course for people who have no experience of programming. If I had my way there would be no such thing, anywhere, most of the output is simply dreadful. Partly because if someone...

He's been dumb on several levels, not least of which is failing to read QuantNet... I have on more than one occasion connected people with lawyers, and so far not one of them has been convicted of anything. One that ignored the offer is in jail. That's not in any way a guarantee of course. I...

It would not be very hard to leak a vast number of documents from a bank, the email systems are particularly vulnerable. Not very hard if you work in the right area and have the motivation. I find myself in two minds over the whole wikileaks affair, and not as black and white as Anthony. Indeed...

TraderJoe is giving an opinion that you should not only ignore, but take care to believe the exact opposite. Indian background checking is indeed behind the standards in the West, but that is changing, and even today it's a risk not worth taking. One can go off the grid As Andy says, this is...

TD makes a valid point, that being able to block out background noise in a bank can have real value when you are trying to concentrate. Tiffany, just so I understand... You can hear people with your aid but not so well that you also need to lip read ?

Some firms have a policy of making sure that everyone with an officially recognised disability gets an interview. I won't go as far as to say it will never be an issue, and there will be some jobs won't be ideal for you. But I'd also say that it doesn't really matter since most employers are...

Campus recruiting does bring in some people, but it is often really rather random. Fact is that even in these dark days, about half the students at any given university are thinking about working for a bank. That means campus recruiting has a horrible job in trying to filter from a wave of...

If as the article implies it is something to do with placement rates, this change is a bit of mystery to me. From where I sit, I see no particular change in the reputation of the program either up or down. I'm not saying it hasn't changed but the signal is below my ability to detect. Also there...

It's like many things headhunters say, sort of true :) Firstly, as anyone who has read the P&D guide to quant careers will know, we recommend all newbies to try the direct approach. That's partly because our philosophy has always been to tell it straight, and also because we don't really see...

OK, a worked example, good I wouldn't set it up there unless proximity to clients was imperative. Firstly of course proximity is an issue for many kinds of business, and the banking / media cluster is critical to that. But my model predicts an levelling out of the playing field. Wage rates for...

Ken is just sooo right. Passion beats algebra.

I agree that quality is too poorly correlated with cost in education. The British economy is high tech, the problem is that it is not high tech enough Not being a socialist I reject the anti-globalisation position that because I am a white man I have some sort of right to a higher standard of...

@Anthony: Although I see your point on how fees for top grade UK universities are cheap compared to US ones, that's not really the point. Like me, you despise socialism, but in fact my position on this is at least mildly nationalist, in that Britain needs a highly educated workforce if it is to...

I have worked as a professional writer, and even then it is hard to avoid expressing the same thing in the same way. Because I've also written code for lexical analysis I am sceptical that they can reliably avoid self matches. I'd even bet that since one is asking kids to bullshit, the set of...

what's your degree in ?

@BBW: Immigrants are destined to remain outsiders. Although this does happen, the diffusion in most European countries is actually more rapid than right wing racists would have you believe, and faster than left wing pseudo-liberals would like. My own parents were immigrants, and on a number of...

@Bigbadwolf I agree quants need to build a view of the world outside their screens. That's why in the Quant Careers Guide, we recommend not only a some non-math finance books, but a subscription to The Economist newspaper.

First up, although Paul is my business partner, and I teach part of his course, I am in no way his spokesman. He is entirely capable of doing that for himself. I suspect he was using "stupid" in the sense of "idiot savant", ie people who over-specialise, and because they are excellent in one...

atreides is right that the migrants will end up somewhere. The question is who does this benefit. The vast majority of migration is economic, people want to work. On average these people are significantly more economically useful than both the population they leave and the one they join. So...

Rather than sympathise or criticise with an individual, I'd like to think in economic terms of the outcomes that the current environment produces. If you model a degree as a simple investment for an increase in lifetime earnings, then defenders of the current system might say that it provides...

@euroazn, we are both assuming that Anthony's picture is really him ... ;) Also the face on that picture is so small that I wouldn't recognise him from it if I met him in real life.

@euroazn, the Libertarian label suffers from a similar, but opposite problem to liberal. Many people I see who identify themselves as a libertarian are also American nationalists which I see as a bit of a contradiction. One way of pigeonholing people is by what they read. I've had a...

@bigbadwolf: Churchill did not go to university at all, and compared to most PMs was almost uneducated, which given that he was eligible for a US passport should not shock you. He did however have a Cambridge college named after him, a rare honour shared by one Jesus of Nazareth. Technically...

Andy is of course correct which is why you are better off chatting on sites like this and Wilmott.com where you can choose to use a handle that is nowhere near your name. It is of course trivial to create an online persona that makes you look smart, responsible, kind to animals, and...

BBW, I am not sure that we are disagreeing, I agree that there are things living under my fridge that are better equipped to be president, but a process that elects GW Bush twice may well screw up again. If she enters, and avoids any spectacular blow ups, I would give her easily better than...

BigBadwolf says "The Europeans are no different in this regard but no-one calls them crazies." It depends of course who you call "Europeans". Britain is part of the European Union, which art the time of writing had not yet fallen apart. The Europeans are spitting blood over the UK's...

I was a C programmer before C++ so will try to answer any specific question. Be aware that K&R C is not standard C, though it is worth reading K&R because of the insights it gives, and because some interview questions are based upon it, especially Bloomberg.

Stefan suggests that you send people back to the country of origin, which has certain technical difficulties... For a start they may refuse to tell you. Or they may lie. Just because someone "looks hispanic" does not mean they didn't come from Canada. Or they may claim to have come from...

I reject a basic premise of the question. It assumes that more people will illegally move to the USA if existing illegals are made citizens. Most illegals tend towards lower income / lower education jobs for whom there are few if any decent jobs in their home country. Such people have high...

Where does one draw the line ? The Catholic Church also recruits from universities, and it has organised the rape of tens of thousands of children. Makes anything Goldman does look pretty tame. The various weapons makers also recruit. There are two ways to look at them, the obvious one that...

I've been talking to Xenomorph, who produce the DB rmentioned by WallStYouth. The idea we've been kicking around is to provide a "student edition" that's cheap / free, possibly populated with some time series. Although I think that would be great for some students, I haven't yet been able to...

Some marketing people are quants. Yes, really. I do social networking seriously and I keep seeing people with "quant" in their profile, who work in marketing. They will have produced graphs to show the success of the Citi project, and they won't have been going up, That's not of itself a...

I suspect the trick will be to find things that seem normal to people like us, and are thus authentic, but are not what people in the so called real world experience very often. I have some constraints on my best stories a) because of confidentially b) I would no longer be the centre of...

This is a cool shot. What you didn't see were the shots taken from across the road... The big window got trashed, and the door was broken, some people sprayed graffitti, but the attack was so small that the shop you can just see in this picture was virtually undamaged. As for it being...

I'm a headhunter who has also worked in this space, my comments on this line of work are easily found here and elsewhere. (google on DominicConnor as well as Dominic Connor) I have a good stock of anecdotes, and I admire your ambition in trying to convey this stuff to a wider audience. It will...

Also of course people with PhDs come to the USA.

Firstly, although TJ's numbers are realistic, there is no guarantee of an academic position, and some people really don't want to teach. Sadly not being able to teach does not seem to bar that many people from academia... However we seem to be focusing solely on money, which fair enough. So...

Various bits of sexism have been well documented, so I won't repeat them. What is interesting to me is that the number of women studying quant seems to have reached a maximum and then gone down. But at the same time, the % of maths, physics, engineering and CS students who are female has gone...

I really don't care what your introductory lanaguage was. My own sons started witch Scratch & Alice and their first 'code' language was VBA. If some school choses Python, Java, or Lsip, it matters not. I have a big issue with those that only use one language, and sadly often that is Java. I...

One path the LSE could take is to skip having an endowment, and simply charge what the market will bear. Due to wise property purchases in a previous recession it manages to be both in an expenive area in London, but at the same time largely unaffectedf by spiralling rent or to buy new premises...

Although my views are a bit more nuanced than this article, it's all true and a bit sad. No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed • The Register

LinkedIn data does have survivorship bias. If your education does not lead to your desired line of work then that very important data will be missing. Also it is only backward looking, you can say that a lot of poeple who did suvject X at Y are traders now, but that's not quite the same as...

This article does not have the sources that I have access to... What they don't know is that the limit is going to be set around £12,000 (circa $20K) On top of that English universities will be allowed to charge certain 'fees' if they choose. So the LSE could charge a lot more. The article...

Your friend is right, that often happens. I would generalize that still further and say that is the fate of the majority of all science PhDs. The amount of research outsourced to academia is suprisingly small, though some people do make a reasonably good living that way. To an extent however...

My dislike of BFE degrees is that it is too specialist too early, and too narrow. Anielson asks the perfectly reasonable question about why quantum mechanics is somehow 'better' than pricing options. The problem is that a sustainable career in finance requires that you have a broad skill set...

No, you don't need a PhD, as in it's not an AND gate when filtering CVs, But it will be tough, especially since you are in the set of EEs who don't do that much C++ There exist a few jobs in algorithmic trading, but those are mostly for people who've done signal processing. What finance books...

I saw the criteria for attendance, and they look unreasonably stiff. Last time P&D ran a careers fair, we optimised with respect to people from whom it would be useful, and if one of my guys had come up with rules like that I'd have just stared at him until he quit.

Dijkstra was talking about programming, I'm a headhunter, so I talk about making money from it, which are often very different things.

Cobol is also used for air traffic control, yes really. R is widely used in banks, but no-one "cares" about it because if you can do this sort of work, it is assumed that you can pick it up on the way. Kartik may have missed the point. The list of languages was those for which the supply and...

I note that Java is not one of them... CUDA is an obvious one for quants, and I perecieve that Python is going to be increasingly useful, but remember Infoworld is looking at the general IT industry so don't believe for a second that C & C++ skills are not going to be important.

That's harassment, if some fuckwit tried that on me, the sky above them would swiftly darken with lawyers, and if I had even one phone call as a result the police would be involved. Anthony mentions libel, and although the truth is a defence, it assumes that you have accurate data. These...

Can you program ?

I wonder if Rahul is trying to be sarcastic ? Some people don't yet realise that when you type unformatted text, a lot of the "emotional bandwidth" is lost. I think there is a bit of education that is missing here. Although we are all using English, we come from different cultures, and in...

I'm not sure this is true. I believe that their tests show this, but my information is that the system hasn't gone live yet, and there is a big difference between simulated loads and real ones. The largely .NET system is obviously going to be slower than the C/C++ one built by Sri lankans...

Yike Lu is right, my view is that at least as far as your first degree you should be in education. At some point you may get training which is more specific to how you earn your living. Some people do education to PhD, some stop at a first degree. Individual topics may in fact be identical, but...

Threatening people on an internet forum is rarely wise, and typically quite counter productive. I feel included by the accusation that we have engaged in a vendetta against Rahul, yet when I review comments made by 3rd parties such as myself and Andy, we have tried really quite hard to be...

I can see that as true of algo traders, and that the environment for many will move from being like a fighter pilot, to that of a commander who issues orders based upon radar and satellites integrated with comms. But I don't see TV leaving the trading floor any time soon, indeed modern military...

I am not great fan of doing financial maths at undergrad level, and not accounting either. If you like maths, do maths.

That's a valid position, but the point to grasp about qualifications is that managers are extremely diverse in what they look for. All you can do is play the averages. I agree about programming, even in VBA. On the programming bit of the CQF that I teach on, there is more than 8 hours on how to...

The USB thing is part of a trade off. To make a computer tough to extract files from, you end up limiting it's capabilities quite severely. One way of stealing data is to attach a video recorder to the graphics output. That may strike you as just silly. Actually, a significant reason Windows...

French universities are often seriously good value, but you have to speak French well.

I fear your statements about honesty as applied to the PRC and other Asian nations undermine your position a little. I also see no reason to snipe at Andy's work on this site. He did not say that QN reached all people in this line of work, but that between my social networking groups (which are...

Andy makes a very good point about refunds, one that embarasses me slightly since I never have anything to do with the financial side of the course I teach on, must find out what the policy is, no one has ever raised it anywhere near me.

Thanks for that, I'd be glad to hear from your investor, one of the few privileges I have found for my position is something that I truly didn't expect. People actually go out of their way to avoid giving me the impression of something that is untrue. As a headhunter, I had expected it to be...

I read sycurve's last post as a threat against Rajan, maybe a justified threat, but it's clear that something bad is going on here.

GS has brand value, and at the risk of dodging the question, which bit of GS ? It matters now, because of the split into one part which using a proprietary language and one that I understand is going to be a C#/C++ shop.

I've just checked his profile and it doesn't say he has done the CFE, but it does say he's done the CFA... When making such assertions Rahul, be aware that I have a large social network. That being said, I think it would be tough for someone with an Accounting & finance degree to take on SABR...

It all sounds rather sad. In my mind, alarm bells would have rung when he said " pay immediately or otherwise i would be forever rejected from his program". Classes do of course fill up, but anything that says 'buy now or never' is on the wrong side of my trust.

Maybe, it rather depends upon the technology you use. (say) 10 years ago, there was no big difference between the tech used by quants and housekeeping IT. Then like now quants used C/C++ one of the VBA family, and some sort of graphic/calc tool like Matlab. Often they used the same SQL database...

IlyaKEightSix is both right and wrong about people who "blow their chances". I've blown any number myself, indeed one reason I feel qualified to address large audiences and make hardline statements about careers is that I have learned from some errors so dumb they sound like the output of a...

I have no direct knowledge of the CFE beyond reading the link Joy shared with us, and of course as a part of the CQF faculty, I declare an interest. It doesnn't explain how you can do the optional C++, which is not something you could do without help, and there is no mention of tutorial...

The British conservative party membership average age is as I recall 69. Yes, really. That is why they didn't address pensions properly. When state pensions were first introduced in Britain, roughly half the population did not reach 65, the age where they could claim it. Being then a mostly...

>I doubt that even a PhD student can properly learn all those subjects in 5 - 6 years. I also doubt that majority of algo traders posses a deep knowledge of those subjects. I agree. But this is a competitve game, if you want in to it, then these are things you will probably be asked about at...

>Would you say that an individual with a PhD or extensive experience would be better suited or have a better chance at algo trading? Yes, if the PhD was in the right area. >Or would a MFE be enough assuming said individual was creative? In no case is an MFE adequate preparation. An MFE on top...

Currently there is no MFE that really aims to produce algotraders, though I have noticed a distinct pattern in the way Baruch is developing. Latency has some of the truth, in that algotraders are very secretive, but we part company in whether it can be taught. Certainly it is hard, and you have...

Andy is right, and the QuantNet team deserve our respect for the job they have done. Of course a web presence is not a business, else the world would have hundreds of millions of billionaires. My older son recently asked me how you make a successful business, and I've been trying to explain it...

I see what you mean Joy, it's far from an optimal strategy to randomly email people, and certainly you should make it a small part of your time allocation. I am seeing this as a sales process, and talking to alumni is what I learned to refer to as "an excuse to call". Randomly phoning and...

@Joy, at least some of it will end up in the Quant careers guide. Including the bit about girls. I tell it like I see it, and to do my job properly I tailor advice to people, both strengths and weaknesses. Anthony:I am all for playing to win, but also realize that the kids you screw over now...

Please feel free to forward this to anyone you know at Columbia, with whatever description you feel appropriate of why one might listen to my critique of this note. Dominic Connor's take on the 'Columbia Note: >It has come to our attention that some of you have already managed to become...

The 'good' news is that it will actually benefit foreign students, since there has long been been a serious cross subsidy from them to 'home' students (EU+Brits) The fuckwit arts grads who run UK universities don't like the current system, typically referring to it as 'Soviet' since the central...

Societies can survive with close to infinite ratios of wealth, we know this because that has been the norm for most of history, and has existed in every type of society we have yet to devise. 'Fairness' is a service supplied by a government, in competition with others. People don't want to buy...

IlyaKEightSix is right, the right place for government is maximising opportunity, and patching people up when the process goes bad for the bottom 10% or so. Social tensions which affect both rich & poor arise when people come to believe that there is no way within "the system" to move their...

Yes, although the CQF has a final exam, you never actually finish it, unless you want to. Personally I think all finance courses ought to be like that, since new stuff comes along, you forget the old, and you never know which things you learn will turn out to be useful 5 years later, long...

I have to first declare an interest since I teach C++ on the CQF, and Paul Wilmott, is a founder of the firm I work for... A challenge you will face is that it has been a while since you did maths, and unfortunately they were mostly the wrong kind for quant finance. So much so that I do a...

Joy has a point, I guess some bank might be honestly able to make that claim, but I don't know either way, mostly because I don't care. Automated trading is not a game where your heitage counts at all, even slightly. Citi are a respectable enough firm, and automated trading is sexy at the...