Trading from non-quantitative degree

Hey,

I am in a target school in UK (Oxford,Warwick etc) in a Economics/Finance bachelors program…

I am very interested in trading from the start and also have some programming knowledge in Python etc. 

but most of the people i see in Prop trading, hedge funds and even BB trading are from technical degrees like Maths,Physics and engineering… 

Do i have a chance of getting in with an Economics/Finance degree with sone technical knowledge?

also recommend some things i should like in programming etc. to be better..

thanks

8 Comments
 

To be fair, in the UK, it doesn't make that much difference for Bulge Brackets whether you go to Oxford or Warwick. 

You're still put into the same pool. 

For PE, Hedgefunds and Management Consulting, yeah, it definitely makes a huge difference going to Oxford (and no sane person would choose Warwick over Oxford anyway).

 

BB trading? Sure, there's a few PPEists and the like at GS, even on my desk. although bb trading isn't "real trading" in the sense of prop risk*

Prop trading? Probably not unless you demonstrated you were v quantitative, i.e were basically good enough to get into COWI maths if you wanted to (olympiads, maths competitions etc)

BB's don't really prefer Oxbridge over Warwick, especially in markets. Diversity/whatever means there's aggressively diminishing returns on your school's ability to get you in past a certain point of "targetness". However for quant/prop, there is a preference for Oxbridge, in fact the few non-quant degrees i've seen at shops like Jane street were oxbridge grads.

EDIT: I should add that Markets at BBs don't really test technical knowledge anymore, at least here anyway. Same goes for prop shops, they're more interested in seeing your maths/coding ability. Prop and BBs are very different in terms of what they're looking for.

 

Hedge funds vary, what strategy are you talking about? Quant? Long/short? Macro? etc. The need and type of language will vary. Prop varies, a baseline understanding of python would be good but places like JS tend to teach you their languages like OCaml.

Tbh don't explicitly need a language to recruit into BBs. I got away with knowing a limited amount of python on the job.

 

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