Is being a math nerd the only way to break into HF industry?

It seems like most open roles in big established HF’s target quants, engineers, people with programming experience and STEM education (at least that’s what I saw on Millennium, AQR, Bridgewater, Citadel, etc.)

I am starting to think I have spent my time learning the wrong things (soon an Economics graduate)…

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Has anyone else noticed that? And did you do anything to adjust to this situation? (I.e. started learning programming, ML, data science etc.)

Thanks

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I assume you’re talking about joining HF out of school. The way to think about this is: how is a random fella who just finished school with zero experience can generate value in a HF? Sure as hell the PMs have no interest in hearing about your opinions on where 10y yield is going or which point of the vol curve is underpriced.
 

The only way you can generate value is if you have good i) programming skills, so you don’t take 15 business days to code up dashboards/analytics tools/models etc, ii) maths understanding so you won’t make a mistake as taking the sum of the variables when you should’ve taken the mean (yes it happens more than you think). If that’s what a maths nerd is then I guess the answer to your question is yes.

 

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