Is being a investment banker the top finance career if you arent IMO level genius in math
Whenever there's a debate around careers like investment banking or private equity and buy-side quantitative work, there's always something in the thread about how the relevant people for those roles are completely different, and one wouldn't work in the other. Usually along the lines of "Investment banking is for stupid people who love money, and quant is for Math Olympiad geniuses who also love money." Is this really as true, or is it vastly exaggerated? Is it that unlikely your average smart dude (who studied math and CS in a top 25 school) would have a much worse chance of becoming a quant than a guy in a top 25 finance school trying to become a banker?
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It’s not that complicated, it’s just more so a personality thing. It’s more about the type of person who’s like to be senior partner anything is going to be that, no matter which domain of finance they pick. But the nerdier guys tend to like HF/Quant like environments than a social butterfly chad who thrives off maintaining tons of relationships. Both have to be dawgs in their own right but I wouldn’t say any one path is necessarily “better” than the other.
So basically to be a banker you have to be a very good salesman but to be a quant you have to be very good technical wise
yes
About 1% of banking MDs could be considered chads, they spend their entire life suckign off pe partners and groveling to their wife not to divorce them
I think the most recent tech boom means society has taken a narrow view of intelligence as being defined by mathematical and technical aptitude.
I have a much broader interest in how business work, how organizations work, how people work, how geopolitics work (which affected my choice of industry group) and how influence works. I value that broad lens that investment banking allows; private equity does the same in certain roles. You have to be able to do algebra fast and accurately but once you know them cold, I find the mathematical aspects of investment far less important than the qualitative aspects and being able to manage these different aspects requires a difference broader but less deep form of intelligence.
I worked in a quantitative trading role early in my career at the market leader at the time and it was interesting in pieces but way to narrowly market defend
I thought you were a banker from analyst on up?
Spent a year in S&T before starting as an a1
going to group all typical fundamental investing roles (PE/HF) as the same career as IB because think that's what OP means
Might be easier to "break in" to IB/fundamental investing from a knowledge perspective but IMO if u want to have a career in finance thats as lucrative as those in quant you have to put in a similar amount of effort, as the post above outlines investing/finance has a lot of different dimensions and moving parts that make it complex.
You also definitely don't have to be an IMO level math genius to get a quant job. It's for sure not easy but also has been "gamified" in the same way that leetcode has changed SWE ie. just spend a LONG time cranking away at the guides / green book and it partially becomes pattern recognition. Still harder than SWE and IB though
I’m not op but are you saying that the job of quant is harder but the effort it takes to become a banker is the same as those technical
Most takes that I've seen about "how hard it is to be a quant" either well overestimate it (they're all IMO geniuses) or underestimate it (read some books do math / cs at a decent school and you're in).
If I had to give a generalization I'd say the bar is around "math and CS at a good school and towards the top but not necessarily the very top". The variance is high as some extremely strong math types aren't in quant either because 1) they just don't want to be 2) work ethic or 3) personality and there are some much weaker folks who for the opposite reasons ended up in it and still do well.
People tend to focus on Jane Street and flashy new grad offers but forget that there's a lot of firms out there. Conditioned on your aptitude for this stuff there is some sufficient amount of work / luck that would get you in.
That being said, you need to actually like this stuff to make it. If you don't and you get a quant job it might be fun to tell people but you won't make it / be happy unless you actually like this stuff and might do it on your own to some degree. And there's barely any quant jobs where you show up and chill and gets tons of money, you need to really like it to take a $0 bonus year or a below tech salary and just keep on going.
Doing all of that work to get 0 bonuses or a below big tech salary is crazy. That would be very demotivating if you took the effort to get into a hedge fund just to make 100k because your PnL dictates so much.
I've done it multiple times! not fun but you gotta have enough interest in what you're doing to in those times just be happy you're there put your head down keep going and hope it goes better
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