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1,138 posts
- “Finance is a huge misallocation of our brightest STEM talent” The non-finance STEM talent:
- >having good day >see Jane St made $20B >having bad day Tfw
- As rumors swirl about the 9-10 figure losses at Jump, Jane, HRT etc. I can't help but wonder how firms known for their savagery/shrewdness in tradfi markets got caught playing marco polo in the middle of a busy highway
- Citadel: “oh noooo please stop this I hate insane flow crossing truck-wide spreads a billion times”
- Replying to @macrocephalopod and @quantymacroNatgas spreads are insane because theyre one of the most legitimately volatile instruments with the potential to gigafry a jr quants backtest but they’re traded by autistic phd math tourists who unironically see mean reversion in HJ and get oneshotted by it
- Replying to @bennpeifertThis is only accessible by the select few firms that have access to tankers and pipelines to store/transport physical VIX
- It’s kinda cute that we send stocks to a 10min timeout when they’ve been bad
- You're a 21yo quant trader. You work on a trading team with a team lead who is 25. You have no exposure to the core alpha and trade clerking grunt work takes up your whole day. Your boss eventually leaves for Citadel and you've spent the past 3 years writing file parsers and VBAYou're 25. You work on legacy code at a startup with founders who are 28. You haven't seen a single unit test since 2014 and daily standup takes an hour. You stick around for a few years and learn nothing. Company eventually dies and you're almost 30 still coding angular.js
- You basically named your trading firm “Target School Supremacy LLC”Here's a hard truth that quant firms can't say out loud: According to multiple sources from Tier 1 quant/HFT/prop shops, the number one indicator of success as a quant trader is the university they attended... for undergrad. 🧵
- Replying to @ryxcommarDS team I used to work on spent most of their time making minute parameter adjustments…but the highest value add decisions came from the dept head running Excel pivot tables and making basic but impactful decisions off of simple summary statistics
- There’s also a very thin pretense/subtlety to quant prop trading recruiting in that places ideally want bored geniuses to “stumble upon” trading instead of actively pursuing it. Professional masters degrees throw this out the window and it gives some people the ick
- >shotgun job apps for everything STEM >resume rejected by HR for all “normal” jobs >get 4 prop trading R1s >forced to lock inWhat’s the lore behind choosing your career path ?
