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I don't buy the idea that Chinese people are too primitive to cope with western ideas like derivatives, or free speech for that matter. I guess the history of derivatives is not on the syllabus, but they are older than most countries, and were in use before the steam engine. However, they...

As a headhunter I will have to share with you that there is absolutely no shortage of Chinese language skills in Finance. None. Not even a little bit. Zero. It's value is somewhere between drinking coffee without spilling it, and advanced use of lift buttons. I'm not even sure why anyone thinks...

It was the case some years ago that most GUI development was in C++, but that is long gone, and except at the very high end of GUIs it is overkill. In the last year my firm has handled exactly 1 C++ GUI job, even then we asked them if they really meant it. GUI development is a noticeable part...

C++ Wins I'm a headhunter, and I'm here to tell you that C++ outclasses Java big time. Java is for those who are weak and patient, as content to live on a modest income.

Steve is right about the s/n ratio, and the question is itself not quite the right one... The question is not what they need, but what they will pay for., as a headhunter with a background in this line of work, I appreciate the difference keenly. They will pay for good maths, C++ and are...

With all due respect to the director, I look at profiles for a living :) I'd guess you'd get into a program, but there are other variables here. What sort of engineering did you do ? In particular what maths and to what depth ?

As someone who writes a longer guide to getting a quant job I of course read it, and the style is very different. Given that Baruch grads are the sort of people we wanbt to attract, would anyone who has read both care to share what they think about they way eFinancialNews do this ?

The "deepest ideas" is an worthy thing to aim for. But... We find that finance PhDs often have done "deep new" ideas rather less often that we would expect. As a headhunter, I will share with an interesting ratio. We sometimes get hiring managers who say "we want maths/physics/statistics/signal...

Indeed. I think the point is that a rating of "AAA" or any other grade is basically a snapshot, not a long term commitment. As a headhunter I will have to tell you that that the pay for people working at a ratings agency is massively lower than the quants at a big bank or hedge fund. It is...

Inheritance is for 2 sorts of a "is a" relationship. The first is when you are specialising or generalising. As in: A Bond is an Instrument, and a European is an option But an option on an equity is not an equity. So an equity object might be a member of an option class, but not a base. Then...

I have an aversion to running software in nearly supported environments. I want a machine that works, and fighting drivers et al was fun when I was a kid. Paying more for a slower badly supported box because it's prettier doesn't work for me. I appreciate that Baruch is one of the better places...

My laptops are Dells, and I'm happy with them. But I have the deluxe support plan, where I get intelligent beings answering my call and fixing them. When I had the cheap plan, I got stuck in the "Your screen is not broken, try installing windows" hell. But there is no option for a newbie quant...

Paul & Dominic’s Guide to Getting a Job in Quantitative Finance FAQ Paul & Dominic's Guide to Getting a Job in Quantitative Finance FAQ FAQ 0: When is FAQ 2.0 coming out ? We don't know either. Our best estimate is in time for newbies starting courses in Autumn 2007. FAQ 1.x is still pretty...

Also, C++ is better for big projects, and also can talk natively to more things. This is changing of course, but getting Java to call libraries written in anything other than Java is tedious. In the quant domain, it's painful to get Java to talk to Excel, and that slows it's adoption a lot. The...

I've done a bit of C++, you know where I am :)

The standard figure, is that 60% of quant man hours are spent doing programming. Some people put it higher. The right answer is the one that makes the computer do what you want. I have used the value -0 to make some programs obey my will, I have set an option to off then on to make it realise...

Matlab is indeed getting a good share of model development. Banks vary a lot in how they see it as adding value to a Cv. Zero if they don't use it, and some see it as rather like someone bragging that they are "really good at doing charts in Excel". But there is a market for people who know it...

I'm interested in the % of MFE students who use Matlab, any ideas ?

I don't think anyone believes that the NYSE chose AIX on technical merit. It's not a stupid decision, but I'd be shocked if the NYSE techies agreed with it.

It would seem to me that someone who is selling himself on being smart and applying for a job doing advanced computational work for a very high profile IB, will have worked out how to get the email address using the programming language of their choice...

As Andy says, I am in the unique position of being a headhunter who has done this work, enough that I do most of the C++ on the CQF. It does have recognition in the US, and if you want to chat to a CQf alumnus, then drop me a line.

There is a large pile of Brainteaser questions at Wilmott Forums - Brainteaser Forum They're set (and often answered) by finance types. One very large bank has told me they've given up trying to avoid asking the ones to be found there, since their views is that anyone smart enough to be able to...

All online recruitment systems are poor, some of them are so bad they are quite funny. Before becoming a headhunter, I had a proper job, and once applied to JP Morgan, but somehow they felt that they could survive without me :( I lived through this trauma, but for ages afterwards, even when I...

I'm afraid it's copyrighted... We have a guide we send out in exchange for CVs, it's not the same as Carck, different focus, but we think still useful.

As head hunter, I must say that the expectation is that MFE level people are weak at programming, except if their first degree was CompSci, in which case often the expectation is that they shouldn't be allowed on a computer without a grownup to hold their hand. Expectations are a big thing. If...

We have a guide to getting a quant job, which you can have if you send your CV to Dominic@PaulDominic.com From what I see there are jobs for people like you, but a bit of time hitting the books would bring you a lot of benefit. Over on Wilmott.com We observe the quants often come into the game...

I like some of the ideas, and certainly am in favour of multithreading being both a defualt and discipline in the early development of the language.

My first guess is that this might be down to the compiler. I know and ( mostly) trust VC++. Maybe your compiler flags were off ?

Are there any British Baruchers ?

In the limit having Pi as the result of an expression may be slightly less efficient. Recall that a "const" is not the same as "never changes". It is a hint that it won't change much unless you want it to. Thus the compiler cannot make optimisations that assume it never ever changes...

I don't know if you've done the Monte Carlo bit of your course yet, but I invite you to calculate the number of years your PC would have to run to get Pi to that many decimal places. Also, as a hint, one mildly common line of questioning at interviews goes something like this: Here's...

A lot of the work in hedge funds is marketing to high net worth individuals. Miss Clinton has obvious name recognition, and has met a lot of rich people. Thus she can get through on sales calls where the average marketeer would hit a wall. Unlike many rich kids of celebrities, she's not a...

A lot of this stuff is going into the guide, which we're talking to Wiley about publishing. I would be very interested to hear how Baruch students who aren't citizens make out with getting work permits etc.

There aren't many absolute factors, but relative terms instead. London is better for "clever" transaction, NY for bigger. Quant finance is thriving hugely in London. Wall St. is vastly more dependant upon the domestic economy than London, indeed by some people's view, financial services *are*...

I've done two pieces for The Registerwww.TheRegister.co.uk One is a review of the Herb Sutters Exceptional C++ books. They are in effect 90ish interview questions with answers. http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/10/26/exceptional_cplusplus_more/ The other is a skit on constness in C++...

Well thank you kinds sirs all... :) I have to ask, how did you know ?

Alhough a 64 bit O/S will handle multi terabyte arrays, it's not really likely that a student (or midsized bank) could afford to run it at an acceptable speed. There do exist techniques for matrices that are huge but not fully populated. One thing that C got wrong, but Basic, Fortran and...

Assuming you're running XP, you only have 2^32 possible memory locations which is about 4 billion. A double is 8 bytes so, you're asking for 8,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 2,000 times more memory than XP can handle.

I'm glad you're looking at this. More than one hiring manager has bitched to me that they see people who claim they can do numerical nalaysis who think doubles are reals. There are several schemes for calculations. The most mangy is fixed point, a method for using 32 bits on CPUs with no...

NNT is like that in like that in real life. He's not a consensus man, he thinks the quality of truth is basically a function of how hard you've tried to kick holes in it. When arguing with him, the third bottle of wine brought the insight that this was a like one of those exercise you do in...

NNT is like that in like that in real life. He's not a consensus man, he thinks the quality of truth is basically a function of how hard you've tried to kick holes in it. When arguing with him, the third bottle of wine brought the insight that this was a like one of those exercise you do in...

Agree with the above, but what you might have read is one of the following TYPE *p, q; Defines p to be a pointer, but q isn't However a typedef would get them both.

Good question...

We did have one candidate who came *that* close to getting put forward with a good recommendation. But, something about his last job but one, seemed just a little too good, and implied that he'd taken a stop down for his current one. That happens, but is worth investigating. Made a couple of...

Here's one that gets a few people: 1: Write a function to compute factorial using recursion. 2: Do the same for Fibonacci numbers. What's basically wrong with the Fibonacci code ? Almost everyone makes the same mistake.

I teach how to build VBA/Excel DLLs in the UK, I have lecture PPTs with some example code. If you want them drop me a line at my pimping address. (no, you're not allowed to question why a pimp teaches c++)

As a pimp in financial markets I have to say that precisely one student has turned up to us straight from any university finance able to program in C++ in any way that wasn't frankly embarrassing. I am of course excluding those that did C++ before they went in, and the situation is so bad...

DCFC The Pimp I'm Dominic Connor, a headhunter in global financial markets, specialising in quants. Or "pimp" as I am generally called. Some of you may know me as DCFC from www.wilmott.com One thing Paul Wilmott & I have put together is a guide to getting a job in quantitative finance...