Career in trading and relevant degrees, CS skills?
Hello all,
I'm currently pursuing a master in management in a top 3 European business school, with the aim to specialize in Finance and pursue a career in Trading or PM in HF. However, I'm a bit lost as I've made the mistake not to study engineering when offered the possibility, so I have several questions:
1) I barely have programming skills and read in many threads that Python is becoming essential. There are tons of resources out there but i'm not sure which ones are relevant for trading (e.g. which kind of programmes would one write in their day-to-day trading job?). Also, is it a problem not to have a CS degree and therefore put self-taught python on a CV? Might be a dumb question but I was told that not being an engineer could prevent me from landing a trading job.
2) During my specialization year, I have the opportunity to either major in finance at my school (best MSc in Finance in Europe) or apply for MFin at MIT or MFE at Berkeley. Do the MFin or MFE seem relevant for a trading career? I think I have more chances of being admitted at MIT since they require a less quantitative background but I'm afraid that it will only land me IB jobs (which I'm not sure I'm interested in).
3) What are the exit options of a trading career? Can you transition in a different asset class vs the one you've been covering, and is it easy to get PM jobs?
I feel like the markets also work very differently between Europe and the US so I'm open to all answers.
Thanks in advance!
1) Programming skills are certainly becoming important and essential. I don't know about hedge funds, but banks certainly advocate traders to have programming skills. After all, when there are thousands of candidates applying for the same job and they have programming skills while you don't, that can't be good for you.
Python is a good language to start with, and to answer the second part of your question: No. Not having a CS degree isn't a problem, and putting self-taught Python is ok. Just make sure u can back it up when asked about it.
2) I think this comes down to where you want to be in the long run. If it has the best MSc in Fin in Europe, then it'll most likely be a target school in Europe, so London can be a good choice for you.
I've heard good things about MIT's MFin though. Are you sure they need a less quantitative background? I've also heard that MIT's MFin are particularly more mathematical- not sure about this though.
3) Traders often go to hedge funds / prop trading shops. I've heard FX traders go to macro hedge funds.
Thanks for your answer!
I'm learning Python by using the Python for Finance book but do you know of any resources that relate to finance?
Not sure whether MIT is more mathematical than others but students in the Berkeley Financial Engineering masters come from engineering backgrounds (some even have PhDs), so I just want to maximize my admission chances.
datacamp.com might be a good course
If you are self taught make sure you have a github to back it up, it is essentially the modern day CV with respect to CS/programming.
I have completed basic courses in Python (which lets be honest, don't mean a huge amount), but a github with some projects on is useful (for example, a github where you scrape a website for data and then clean and format the data into a dataset - that is actionable, valuable experience).
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