Advice Needed - Quant to S&T - How to sell my experience?
I am a sophomore at a target going for a quant gig at a boutique HF this summer. The job mainly involves coding to help in generating alpha-factors (i.e. not execution) in US equities.
I am worried that this will not be seen favorably during S&T SA 2021 recruiting - because it has little to do with analyzing the markets - as opposed to, say, fundamental L/S equity fund, where you have to keep up with what's going on in the markets (e.g. news, etc). To make matters worse, I am a math major and have little to show that I am actually interested in the markets (i.e. no investment clubs, no stock-pitch competitions).
How should I position myself and sell my experience in S&T SA 2021 recruitment? I was thinking of mentioning interest in e-trading and perhaps make a personal trading account. Also if it matters, I have past internships in Asset Liability Management at MM and Data Science at a boutique commodity trading house, and a shitty GPA of 3.3
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks a lot!
From the profile looks like you are still relatively at an early stage of your career. From what I see work going straight to the bigger names S&T could be more challenging. I feel you can work on trading role at non tier-1 banks. Likely there might be a chance to break in.
In my experience BB S&T interviews are 90% behavioral and the 10% technical are something like, “If rates go up what happens to bond yield?” I had nothing on my resume approaching a trading/quant/hedge fund/markets role, and I think those are generally pretty rare among applicants anyway. So in short, just talk about how it helped inspire you to want to trade and you’ll be fine.
That said the GPA is going to be your biggest obstacle during recruiting. You’re going to need to network your ass off to get first rounds let alone super days.
But I'd imagine they'd look for some indications that you are interested in markets - because no way they'd interview every candidate with high GPA, though like you said - GPA is probably their first screening tool to weed out candidates.
You said you had no market-related activities on your resume. If you don't mind me asking, what was on your resume that helped you stand out to get the interviews then? Did you have IB sophomore internship? Or was it your networking that helped?
bump
you have an interesting background...but you will need to network to get an interview. if this scares you...the concept of talking to people...then perhaps this is not the career for you.
however, if you can do the networking (stalk on linkedin...ask for career advice coffee chats...etc) then you should be able to convince somebody at some firm to get you an interview. this will feellike work..because..it inda is. thats the job market these days
Thanks for the response!
I have been doing a bit of networking the past few months (calls, coffee chats), so the concept is not entirely foreign to me.
If you don't mind me asking, did you conclude I have to network mainly because of my low GPA, or because the quant HF role is not so related to flow trading, or both? Will definitely network hard, but I just wanna know where my profile stands among my competitions.
just GPA...all the rest is fine...in fact...Quant HF exposure is a positive for S&T.
Math major with coding experience is definitely plus in trading recruitment lately. Just need to ensure that you have interview chances. GPA sounds a little bit of drag in that perspective, but networking could help
Regarding math major with coding experience, is this specific to e-trading?
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