Do people make mega money at places like Optiver / Virtu / IMC?
I remember reading about how an IBD salary isn't going to make you rich without lots and lots of hours. I also saw that Anton Kreil youtube presentation where he talks about salaries in S&T, and they aren't gigantic. I assume that, if lots of people want these jobs and the barrier to entry is only a college degree, the pay may not be huge.
Are people in quant trading making mega bucks? Is there some barrier to entry that requires employees to be maths / programming experts, which means that they get paid lots more? Or does the mythical "9 - 5 but huge money" job not exist?
Optiver and IMC are fairly 9 - 5 jobs where you can make really serious money (not sure if you can make gigantic money though). Virtu I dont know cause I dont know anyone who works there. It is however extremely difficult to get in these firms. Networking counts for literally 0 with these firms, you need to be supersmart, especially supersmart with mental math.
Trading hours are not 9-5 unless you work in east coast. Index products floor opens at 8:30 and fixed income products floor opens at 7:20. Some of the products actually trade almost 24 hours every dat(FX, treasuries, commodities, and ags) so you should come least at 7am. I'll say 7-5 would be a better guess.
Optiver and IMC are firms where you can make good bucks if you are really good(compared to other top firms like SIG or JSC) since you start trading early(~ 4 months) and you can get promoted really quickly (yeah and they fire a lot if you suck). You can make partners in 5 years and make low 7 figures.
Source: I work for one of the firms you mentioned.
Traders are usually paid either a discretionary bonus or a percentage of their PnL as their bonus, and if the latter, there's opportunity to make some serious money
Optiver for the bonus pulls the profits from all 3 locations. Every person is entitled to a small share of the profit. Basically everyone is on the same team working together.
But top performers in S&T have made tons of money, and there probably will be star performer getting paid a lot in the future even if it won't be anything like the 00s.
I would just add that S&T isn't the same skill-set as prop trading. @"vysethecoward" The barrier to entry for S&T isn't "only a college degree". JPM/GS/MS take 100 interns out of 10,000 applicants and of those maybe 60 get full-time offers each year. In general these kids don't have the same level of technical skills that prop traders do, but their soft skills are often much, much better. Prop trading doesn't require the same level of client interaction that sell-side trading does. So while sell-side traders probably aren't as smart as technical as buy-side folks, they're still generally very smart but also have soft skills that many people don't (some of them anyway.
Don't know what you mean by 'mega money', but top performers at places like Optiver, JUMP, and Jane Street can make serious dough. You need a good working knowledge of math/stat/programming. If you know languages like Java/Python/SQL and have experience using programs like Matlab/R I would say you're solid on the computer aspect of the job. The math is being able to calculate things quickly and knowing about topics such as expected value. I'm just shooting from the hip here, but my impression is that it's not hard to find someone with these credentials, but keeping them around is tough because it's such a cut-throat high pressure atmosphere at prop-trading shops...making money aint easy (for most it's also easy to get discouraged when you aren't)
The bigger firms are a lot more like corporations - expect a similar comp and bonus structure to BB's
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