How smart do you have to be to work in a HF?
Hi, I'm 15 years old and I'm interested in working in finance in the future. Unfortunately I dont think I'm smart enough to even get into Mensa. I'm curious about how smart HF professionals are. Do the majority of HF professionals have high IQs of ≥140?
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This is probably a troll post, but I´ll bite since I´m bored. Yeah, you need to be very fucking smart to work at a hedge fund. No, being smart is not directly correlated with pure intelligence. "Smart" means more like knowing what you know, what you don´t know and how to tell the difference. A good hedgie (and I speak from experience) is as much a professional with narrow vision as anyone, as an accountant, a physician, a craftsman, whatever. So, to answer your question, the abilities which determine if you have a chance of thriving at a hedge fund are not pure intelligence, but much more critical thinking, experience, mental discipline and last but not least, some creativity. Hope that answers your question.
Oh, and Mensa is for dry losers who wank to their score. Not my words, Isaac Asimovs´.
Personally I think in order to be successful, you need to know how to put puzzles together and figure out why it will play out with being able to explain your rationale with some sort of validation and knowing how to capture it. When I was at a hedge fund, the fund manager who used to be a hardcore nat gas pit trader for 20 plus years. When he was talking to the senior trader, I honestly couldn't follow what he was saying. He was throwing numbers out there coming up with strategies on the fly and explaining why it might work. The point I'm coming across is... you need to be creativity. I don't think it's so much having a large IQ but rather being curious and backing it up. Hell you might be wrong but no one is always right. You can be a geek who majored at Columbia with an MFE but if you don't know what to look for, you're useless.
You don't need to be smart, you just need to pretend to be very smart.
Aside from the intelligence required to break into high finance, hedge fund managers and analysts know fuck all about what they're doing. Hence why the industry has under-performed the market since before the housing crisis and has been facing capital flight since then as well. You need to know how to convince your PM and (once you command capital) your investors or CIO that your theses have any modicum of validity. With those traits, and high amounts of sheer luck, you can be successful in the HF space.
Those are some mighty big words for an intern
Pretty sure 10 interns locked in a room with a robinhood account would be able to outperform Dalio and Buffett with how they've been doing lately.
I'm not lying lol, turning 16 this april
I worked at Citadel/Millenium/Point72. You can be pretty dumb.
My last interview was with the global head of the group. PhD in mathematics from Cambridge. Asked me a dice probability question and I refused to even try to answer it, arguing it's not even remotely relevant to what I'm trading. Still got the offer and then chucked 7 months later after the head risk taker ended up in the NY Post for offering his gf $70k cash to abort their child. Multi-strategy HFs are something else...
I have said the same thing about brain teasers
ron ozer?
yes ron ozer lmao
Do they still ask that nonsense to experienced people lmao
I remember the dice question. After like 20 rounds….
unreal. it was mark stainton
140 ? Probably not lol that’s statistically very high
You don't have to be that smart, for fundamentals investing you need to be curious and have common sense and be able to figure stuff out on your own (I.e. be a good Googler) - you're better off being kinda smart and having the right personality and mindset vs. a human calculator who can't get through a management meeting or has poor subjective judgment
I think my IQ is on the lower end. I took it once; it was 110 or something in the medium range in 2006/07 (Which hurt as I thought I was smart enough for Mensa). I definitely think though my EQ trumps my IQ. Maybe those who know me disagree. But that said, nobody cares in this industry. I really doubt it. If I saw a CV with an IQ written on it, I might be tempted to judge the guy as somewhat socially awkward though it obviously indicates you're smart, but nothing really to boast about.
Honestly, you need to be smart enough to attend one of the schools they recruit from! A top 10 college or better for a direct opportunity by graduation.
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