Worth leaving 6 figure job right now to jump into finance?

How's the cost of living where you are? If low, I'd just stick with your current job and retire young

If you enjoy it, and have an upside.... why leave. If you are capped at $200k and your goal is to make millions as a portfolio manager, then you have to make a strategic decision.

Does your firm help pay for further education? Have you expressed your interest to your Director? Explore options before cutting off your income.

one of the guys i interviewed with for a stat arb shop (ex-BB prop head) thinks that MFEs are worthless. his view is not uncommon. better off lateraling. save you time and cash.

Thanks for the input, my cost of living is great and I'm living very great right now, I guess my thinking is that I'm young and in a good situation to decide where I want to move to. What are entry level quant jobs paying like, would I have to take an initial loss?

Why don't you talk to the quants at your hedge fund? Also, ask to see if they would welcome you back on the finance side after getting an MFE..

shit id stay put. cant you just learn finance on the job?

IMO you should really learn what a typical quant job actually entails before quitting your job for an MFE. I think that quant jobs tend to be romanticized. Unless you get a hard-on for math and programming, I don't see the point. The grass is not always greener on the other side.

What's your upside in your current role?

Why not start writing your CFA?

it's always a mix between salary and bonus. salary will rarely go above 200 for a junior quant.

Grass isn't always greener man, whatever you do just keep that in mind.

the guy was an old school quant who started his career in the '80s. he has a physics ph.d. and started at a BB. his perception is that the MFE was invented for people who are technical and want to do quant work but don't want to get a phd or be STEM ABD (MA/MS) to get into finance. back then it was that or nothing. but the MFE is really watered down technically. the ph.d. usually comes in with a much more rigorous mathematics and even coding background (you code hardcore physical models for 7 years of your life in a unix/c++ rig in a ph.d. where you really have to think about optimizing for memory and efficiency; MFE, you are usually doing mathematicall shallow problems in MATLAB or mathematica).

the problem with getting an MFE is that you may end up paying a ton to get a job you don't really want. the job you really want is a front office quant/strategist position in which you eventually get to trade the strategies you develop. anything else is essentially a middle office (risk management, etc.) or back office (quant "developer") position which is a dead-end. but a lot of MFEs are getting shuffled off into those by unscrupulous HHs, etc.

going back to the old school quant: he just thinks that the crap they teach in MFEs is useless. i agree to some extent. for instance, girsanov, markov, radon-nikodym and all that shit is basically mathematical masturbation for academic finance guys and BB sell side marketing guys to give legitimacy to their structured products. if you are doing HFT MM or some kind of directional/stat arb/whatever, you don't even have to know stochastic calculus, because many fewer shops use that bullshit than you can imagine. i write from work sometimes so i am not going to talk about HFT MM, but i do know that plenty of equity stat arb guys, for instance, don't even know the ticker symbol for microsoft and dell because they are not even treating trading as a market problem but a data problem -- exactly the opposite approach as that taken by MFE academics.

bottom line is get your self some crack coding skills and technology skills. in the next 10 years this will matter a lot more than learning about finance theory bullshit which is ONLY good if you want to be a structurer, sales, or something of that type (and i would advise against THAT too).

The U.S. (assuming that's where you're from) needs more engineers, and not more financiers. If you're somewhat bored at your present job, I'd suggest perhaps starting your own company. That's as exciting as it gets in my view.

That being said, loving your job is paramount and if you really want to take a stab at transitioning into some quant role, go ahead, but keep in mind that you already have great experience; maybe you don't need to take time off to go to school, and can somehow transition with your current qualifications. The value added of a financial engineering degree (never even knew that existed lol) isn't that great when you already have another engineering degree under your belt. You might just want to take a few programming courses instead...

I'm in a similar boat as you wazuh. I'm a petroleum engineer looking at getting into the computational finance and risk management side. Maybe not go as far as a quant, but start something as a energy trader or consulting for energy companies to help them derisk their portfolios. I recon in the future governments are going to get stricker on oil and gas companies on being more transparent in their risk portfolios, so MFE knowledge can't hurt...

Enegineers turning financeers... we really haven't learnt anything in the last decade.

If you're technical and enjoy techie work, there are different quant roles which could be more or less financial. By default, quants sit with the business, and earn business side incomes (different from IT).

What sort of qualifications do you have if I may ask? The best paying quant roles tend to be rather snooty in their selection, so you MUST be on top of your game to get in. What sort of HF do you work for, and what sort of work do you do?

It's a tricky one. If the quant role doesn't suit you, it's always easy to fall into a cosy IT-ish position when you have quant "cred". But if you're doing over say 150k at the moment, you're unlikely to beat that soon in this economy as an entry level quant.