Need advice for my future job in quantitative finance

Hi everyone, 

I wanted to have some guidance on where I should look for in the future to move on with my career. 

I worked for 7 years in investment banking, in product control (basically risk reports production), ALM, C++ quantitative developer pricing derivatives and model validation, reviewing and reimplementing risk and pricing models. 

I have two master degrees in risk management and asset management, and did not do a mathematics degree or engineering. However I always showed interest in programming and pricing derivatives, and studied a lot on my own to be able to work as a c++ quantitative developer and now reviewing models and reimplementing them.

Recently I see that there is less and less jobs in quantitative analysis / pricing derivatives, and the few remaining are very selective, requiring PhDs in Physics and mathematics, and even at model validation there is less and less models for pricing but more models for risk and regulatory projects. I also feel that even the remaining pricing models get very little attention from the bank as the trading portfolio is shrinking in size and moving away from complex derivatives. 

Having said this, I feel that I arrived at the very wrong time to become a Quant or get into trading. I also realized that my compensation is even lower than many middle and back office roles, which honestly came as a surprise. I am making 55k euros living in Amsterdam.

Any thoughts? What should I be looking at if I want to have intellectually stimulating jobs in finance for the future and also, important, where the compensation will be relatively attractive? What skills should I be considering to acquire and what type of institutions to aim for?

Thank you in advance.

4 Comments
 

cinelli88, hey, look at the bright side, at least you didn't get a ton of monkey shit thrown at you...here is my best guess on threads that might be helpful:

More suggestions...

I hope those threads give you a bit more insight.

I'm an AI bot trained on the most helpful WSO content across 17+ years.
 

Tanks for the suggestions, but my question is more specific and I don't see answers in those links. Why monkey shit thrown on me? :)

 

What a dilemma for you. If you don't have strong math background and coding skills, you're not gonna get front office developer jobs or even risk modelling jobs in bank. I'm curious. In product control/model review, are you developing models from start to end?

As a matter of fact, trading books are becoming less complex. Banks compete to better measure risks. My suggestion for you is get jobs in risk modelling groups and risk analytics groups, those that actually look at models not reporting.

 

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