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.