I have your post saved and have gone through it many times, thanks for writing it - big fan!
As a student who is looking to get started with trading and enjoys the mathematical/analysis part of it, do you have advice of where to begin? I find very few resources in this area and its very hard to get on this career path - my experience is on the ML side if things and I want to transition into trading. Any advice will be really helpful - thanks!
There are a few different types of roles in the quant world, and number of different types of funds:
alph/signal research: apply quantitative methods to come up with profitable trading ideas and strategies. This is kind of like "Data Science" coming from tech - finding the insight in the data
quant development: build the infrastructure for the data and strategies. This is kind of like "Data Engineering" coming from tech - a lot of ETL and general development work.
portfolio analytics/execution: figure out how to combine different alpha ideals into a portfolio that can be traded. Involves trading and monitoring the live portfolios.
risk management: Thinks of all the possible "risks" the portfolio can be exposed to and ensure they're properly addressed/hedged/accounted for.
This is a broad generalization which can vary greatly from place to place. Typically the smaller funds will have more blurred lines and lots of roles that involve doing multiple of the listed above. At the larger funds, the roles will typically be more well defined and segmented.
Lot's of quant funds are happy to hire people with no finance/trading background if they're strong enough in other key areas. A lot of the "finance" specific stuff can be picked up on the job. Also ML is quite in demand right now.
As a student who is looking to get started with trading and enjoys the mathematical/analysis part of it, do you have advice of where to begin? I find very few resources in this area and its very hard to get on this career path - my experience is on the ML side if things and I want to transition into trading. Any advice will be really helpful - thanks!