Differences Between Exotics Desks
Are there any differences in the type of person that works and the type of work on a credit exotics vs interest rate exotics vs equity exotics trading vs fx exotics desks??
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While I do have a PhD (a major mistake of my youth), it is definitely not required to come up with volatility arbitrage strategies. Most real life quantitative strategies are based on simple ideas (yet they are surprisingly nuanced) so what really differentiates a good PM or an analyst is the ability to quickly navigate the search space and juggle multiple competing tasks.
At the moment, I am a one-man show and do everything, from research to execution. Which, as a matter of fact, is why I am still up watching the market in Asia instead drinking bourbon at home.
I used to be in an equity derivatives structuring desk and we did both vanilla and exotics (which can also be split between light exotics and more complex stuff).
Not much of a difference at all across assets in terms of personality, abilities, etc - they are all geeky, quantitatively dexterous, and good at abstraction. These days they know code too. Function within an asset class probably matters more than the asset class: the closer a function is is to the Quant team, the more true all of this is. The scale is equally applicable to Trading (who are still mostly quantitative) and to Structuring (some of whom are quants, but don't have to be, as long as they get the concepts - and these days, code). When you get to Sales, you can tell. They're more like Sales guys in other products.
There are differences in the actual nature of the work due to different clients.
Intellectually the biggest difference between asset classes is that FICC exotics are a bit more complicated than Equity exotics due to the nature of the underlying: in Rates/Credit/Commodities, there is an additional dimension in the form of tenor/maturity, which is not present in Equities (a priori the underlying shares are there forever).