Your career 5 years after MFE

[Andy Nguyen]

I'd like to open a discussion for many of our members who have received their MFE years ago. Surely, they must have at one point or another looked at their current job and thought about the road ahead.

Where do you want to be and importantly, how do you achieve that goal?
How are you currently keeping your skills updated and marketable?
How can you move from one product to another?

Thoughts?

 

[IlyaKEightSix]

1) Rich. How? By working my ass off and learning from the quant above me at work, because as he'll learn, he'll pass that down to me, and hopefully, I'll have a few strats raking in some nice moolah.
2) Learning at work :P
3) Errrr...this might sound naive, but I thought the entire point of algo trading was to not really give a damn what the product was, but what some of its quantitative characteristics were. It reminds me of the time some programmer won a simulated naval battle contest by just having the AI find the best strategy, which was a bunch (and I mean a bunch) of really small, poorly-maneuvering boats with massive guns on them that were more or less just floating cannons, but with so many of them, any "normal" fleet would just get overpowered by the zerg rush of cannon boats.

I always thought quant finance was the same way. Does it matter whether you're trading GS or FCK1 or whatever else, so long as it passes the filters for trading? If you're losing money, it means your filters/rules/indicators/signals suck, not the products you're trading.

 

[joel_b]

@#3 Quant Finance is not just algo trading. He's referring to the suite of products offerred at banks that require quantitative analysis, which may be pricing, risk management, trading in many product areas.

 

[Jian Wang]

My question is what is career goal after 5 years graduation of the MFE and start a quant job

be the portfolio manager? I am now in the phd program and want to learn about the typical career path in quant job

 

[Shaker]

I opened this post curiously but didn't see enough replies or content.

 

[financeguy]

I'd like to open a discussion for many of our members who have received their MFE years ago. Surely, they must have at one point or another looked at their current job and thought about the road ahead.

Where do you want to be and importantly, how do you achieve that goal?
How are you currently keeping your skills updated and marketable?
How can you move from one product to another?

Thoughts?

I'll preface this with saying that (1) I'm 2 years out of my masters degree, not 5, and (2) I got a MS in OR, not FE. Hopefully you don't mind. I've been a trader since grad school.

1) Honestly not entirely sure. I've toyed with the ideas of either joining the buy side or moving to trading another asset class. I also like what I'm doing now, so I could continue in my current path and just be a senior trader on the desk.
2) Like IlyaKEightSix said, always make sure I'm learning at work. The more stuff I know how to do that other people don't makes me less expendable and more attractive to competitors. As soon as you feel your learning curve flattening out, you know you need to change something in your current routine. For example, after 18 months of looking after one exotic options book, I felt I needed something to change to make sure I continued to develop at the same pace as when I started, so I requested more responsibility from my boss in the form of looking after a broader set of underlyings as well as getting more involved in the vanillas business and prop books. So far that's been working out for me pretty well. It can be easy getting comfortable with a routine - the trick is to resist the comfort and push yourself to always learn more. That's my take, at least.
3) I don't know! I wish I did. I've been getting interested in looking at trading jobs in other asset classes on the sell side, but have literally no idea how to go about even being considered for one. Logically it seems to me as if the window of opportunity to move into trading other products gets smaller by the day as I get more and more experienced in my current area. Then again, I don't know anything about what the window of opportunity is. I'm hoping to hear from someone who has been able to do this.