Sellside quant trying to understand more about how the quant buyside works

i'm guessing you are perhaps located in the India or Budapest office (lots of quants in Budapest and India for some reason....i think they are cheaper than US quants).

Sellside banks use quants for pricing and portfolio modeling. They do this because customers force the banks to take positions as market makers, where the banks often cannot exit the position...and so they have to hedge with things that behave similarly.

Buyside firms don't have that problem....they can buy or sell just about whatever they want, within reason...and perhaps paying a wider bid/ask spread for the more exotic stuff.

The more exotic stuff (that requires quants to model) is more of an issue for the bank, because the bank generally doesn't want that risk...which is why they hedge. But often a perfect hedge does not exist....so the quants look for the best hedge available.

If you look at it from the buyside perspective....quants are more looking for ways to express an idea...and then the trader or PM calls a sellside bank and asks for a price on that structure. the bank then needs to be able to model the structure...and figure out how they would hedge this thing that has no direct hedge.

So, if you want to join the buyside, the major task is not knowing how to value some exotic structure....the hard thing is knowing "what exotic structure should i want to buy" and that is a different (but related) skillset vs what you are doing now. Coming up with the idea of what structure to buy, when the universe has unlimited options is a harder thing to do...requires creativity, and also the ability to picture where markets will be in the future..taking both time and the path of future prices into consideration. You are probably not learning how to predict the most likely path of future prices at time right now...because thats not necessary to figure out how to hedge....you are generally given a structure where somebody else made a prediction...and now you are asked "hedge this".

The original idea creation (with a track record of being right) is where the value lies on the buyside. The sellside wuant experience gives you a taste of structures that are available to buyside Portfolios...but you have not yet learned how to decide "what should i do now" because the world is always changing....history does not repeat.,..but it often rhymes, as they say.

All is not lost tho...you now need to find a way to explore the undiscovered country...which is a land filled with economics, market history, crowd theory, and all that fun market prediction stuff. Will take years to learn how to be that kind of PM (and be good at it). The best teachers are probably PMs on the buyside...so yes, ideally you go work for one and they teach you. Good luck finding that..