Ask HN: Any developer who transitioned from Tech to Quant Trading?
As a developer what did it take for you to transition from Technology to Quantitative trading, and how does it compare to your life working in Technology?
Quant crowd hangs on NuclearPhynance forum, but for what You are asking WallStreetOasis is the place.
But..
1. Not really PhD, but You have to learn math somewhere.
2. Start trading crypto Yourself.. there are so many exchanges giving You direct access for free.. fetch a market feed, reconstruct limit order book in real time, backtest some strategies, do deep learning models. They do the same.
3. You have to be lucky, just like anywhere. There are lots of unsatisfied people in tech though it pays more than ever.
4. No idea.
5. Two years or so, but previous roles were quantitative.
I am trying to make transition myself, let me know if You need more info..
www.vladovukovic.com
My background: I have a computer science graduate with about 5 years of experience building very high throughput consumer facing applications as a backend developer.
I'm a fundamentalist, so I hardly believe anybody can reliably make money doing this. Maybe with HFT or insider information, which both are fields I don't really wanna compete in, as they both feels like cheating to me(and the second, illegal).
If anybody could reliably make money doing trades of any kind, which doesn't either abuse insider information or latency of systems, they could as well predict the future, the lotto ticket etc.
The people I think work on this field are working for big companies and investing other people's money, which generally got a huge amount and by themselves can sort of try to manipulate the market, usually have a taste of inside information and generally get outperformed in the long term by somebody that just reads balance sheets.
But this is a comment from an outsider, which has been making constantly more gains than S&P(by a tight margin, dunno if this will last, maybe I'll just regress towards the mean) for a decade, just checking balances sometimes. I just invest in companies which are well managed, by my criteria, while I work fulltime as a software dev.
Just try to imagine how many companies with open capital exists, and how bad management can be, if you could find the good management in good markets, also try to understand more how the government will influence it, you could create much more powerful methods.
I've done a fair of trading though, mostly flipping IPO's, but I don't believe somebody can make money doing trades.
People from tech generally end up becoming quantitative developers(implement trading strategies other people make),and some go even further and make their own trading strategies(which it what traditional quants do. Correct me if I am wrong here).
I would like to know experiences of people who transitioned this field from pure technology. Some key points are:
1. What did you have to learn as a experienced developer to break into this field(do really NEED a Phd in Mathematics or Finance?!?!) 2. Whats the work like? 3. Does it pay as much as it hyped to be? 4. How does it compare to your life back in Tech? 5. How long after working in tech did you make a switch?