I want to intern at BW or P72
As the title says, I want to intern at Bridgewater or Point72 in the summer of 2021
I am interning at a BB in S&T and have buy-side experience at a niche investment fund.
My school is a non-target and has a very limited alumni network, although it does exist. I am studying finance.
I plan on teaching myself coding/VBA before my S&T internship this summer as my school year ends early.
Besides networking/teaching myself basic coding what can I do to help my application?
Either you code or you don't. The level of proficiency you need to add value from a software angle at a HF is beyond "the basics". If you didn't take advanced coding classes in college, you'll seem stupid marketing yourself as someone who can add value as a coder. That's just a taste of reality. So, do it if it interests you, but I'd candidly advise telling you to save the embarrassment when someone who really knows coding calls your bluff.
As far as what can you do to help your application, do well at the internship man... Having the "what's next" mentality as an undergrad at a non-target with limited street presence is myopic and probably setting yourself up for disappointment. The best you can do is play the cards you've been dealt - so kill it at the internship. Getting into one of these post grad buyside roles is already extremely challenging from a target, nevermind a non-target. Trust someone who went to a non-target. The well trodden path is well trodden for a reason, so trod it well and be patient.
I wholeheartedly disagree. A selective novice knowledge of VBA and Python will help any fundamental analyst do their job more efficiently and HR/PMs will absolutely eat up that someone taught themselves a rough working knowledge of selective coding, because at P72 type places the PM probably doesn’t even know how to code and it’s good to have someone around who has some awareness of how it works, even if that awareness just helps to ease interfacing with internal data teams or a little excel model trick here and there.
depends what youre trying to do. but if you think you can gain coding proficiency in 2 years without focusing on it in school youre crazy
I think you're shooting from the hip here, man. If you have experience working at one of these places, you'd know that there are strategy teams dedicated to coding / automating functions on behalf of the investment analysts / working alongside them on inquiries where code is helpful. I don't know exactly what excel tricks here and there you might be referring to (lol), but the plug-ins that the strat's offer are pretty comprehensive, and anything you think you'd need beyond that you can inquire with the engineering teams for. 1 year spent dabbling with python isn't getting you anywhere at a place like point72, in short lol.
I do have experience at these types of places. Anything you work on with the centralized coding teams will be shared with other pods, so if you have unique data used in a unique way, I found it more efficient to do it myself and retain the edge over other pods in my sector. And dabbling in Python is very useful for a fundamental analyst in a pod shop.
And as for what excel tricks I’m taking about: things like having large Bloomberg files refresh and save down overnight, things like automatically cataloguing and recording changes to EPS estimates, making dynamic lists of upcoming earnings calls and catalysts that export to my calendar on demand, making scraping tools for pulling down recurring website info or pdf info and putting it into files or generating recurring reports without manual work, doing things like weighted averages subject to criteria filters on multimillion row tables and then the result print automatically into excel models and lots of other things that are quite useful and fairly easy to accomplish with a year of self taught Python, SQL and VBA. So that not sure why you put your “lol”, but assuming that your experience is reflective of anyone else’s experience in the industry is a great way to have bad judgment
I work at one of those out of undergrad. I'm from a complete non target. it is possible, grind your ass off.
What's your role there? What did you study?
judging by his username, it’s p72. p72 has many opportunities for nontargets to get in the academy recruiting pipeline but you NEED high SAT/ACT scores.
do u know how to code?
"Cash is Trash" - Ray Dalio - Founder- Bridgewater Associates, Circa late 2019/early 2020
Choose wisely.
Who doesn't haha
The sort of work you'll be doing at BW vs. Point72 will be very different - I get that P72 and BW are two of the most prestigious hedge funds you can work at right out of ug, but I would recommend thinking more about what exactly you want before you set your sights on two very specific - and very different - firms.
Re: learning how to code, it'll be useful to help your day-to-day tasks but you will not be able to add value as a "coder". Python / VBA will help streamline / somewhat augment analysis you would otherwise be doing by hand, but without a more significant math / CS / stats / etc. background, marketing yourself as a quant / quant developer / software engineer / etc. will not end well.
Well said and all around accurate
Just wondering, would you be able to shed some like on some specific skills on Python that may be useful to "streamline" the day to day task? As I am currently learning python on Udemy on financial analysis stuff, which i think is not that type of automation / streamline that you were referring to.
Just as an example, Python is way easier to use to compute anything more complicated than a linear regression ("linest" in excel). So, it can be useful if you are trying to fit a higher order polynomial to a trend or if you wanted to use ML to model a time-series (unlikely you would be able to learn ML via self-study).
Though on the day-to-day, Python is very well integrated with Excel. As an example, you can use the "yfinance" library to read in all of the real-time tickers you are following, grab their financial statements, last 30-days of stock ticks, and their basic financial ratios. You can then write these to a local excel document with a new tab for each stock ticker/company. It can also be useful for web scraping emails, validating emails, and sending mass lists. In these situations, you are simplifying a repeatable task that could take an hour or two into a Python script (run in a few seconds). In order to learn these, I would recommend you familiarize yourself with matrix/array structures (numpy, pandas) and the excel library (read_to_excel, write_to_excel): it is a matter of aggregating and quickly displaying data.
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