Hi,
I have been working for a single manager Quant fund for about 4 years. I would like to move into Quant PM role at a multi manager. I have been in touch with a recruiter and will soon have some first meetings with business development guys.
My key problem is that I do not have a track record, which can be attributed to me since the structure of our firm doesnt allow that (everything is team based and there are no PnL silos). Also, from what I see most people moving into Quant PM roles have more experience than I do at this stage of my career. So my challenge will be to make sure they see me as a serious PM candidate despite being fairly junior compared to the other candidates they might interview.
Do you have any suggestions on the preparation and strategy for these interviews? Also, how does the interview process for Quant PM roles usually look like? Right now I am preparing a basic business plan with some stats on performance, capacity, necessary resources and timeline for getting started.
Another thing that I am not sure about is how much information I need to give about my strategies. I suppose they will want to know as much as possible, but of course if I tell them everything they might just build it themselves instead of hiring me... Obviously I want to avoid pure idea fishing interviews...
Thanks for your help!
CambridgeGuy1986, sorry about the lack of response. Maybe one of these topics will help:
If those topics were completely useless, don't blame me, blame my programmers...
Hi CambridgeGuy,
I have no advice here but as someone who also would like to make this jump at some point, I would definitely appreciate an update on what the process was like if you end up interviewing!
can you replicate the entire trading strategy on your own? do you understand the research process required to do so?
Do you materially participate in the idea creation of new strategies...or do you simply do what you are told (which means that without your boss...you wouldn't know how to grow creatively).
1) yes, I implemented key parts of the strategy and am confident I can replicate it 2) I was involved in all stages of the research process and have a good understanding of what has been done. I did some further research and background reading on my own and have ideas for various improvements 3) I developed quite a few ideas myself and am continuously trying to come up with new things. Call me arrogant, but I would say that I am better at idea creation and put more effort on staying on top of market developments and research than most of my more senior colleagues.
ok, and if you backtest the strategy over the last 12 years, what are the annual returns % AUM, max drawdown each month, time to recover from each drawdown, annual sharp, sortino.
Run your backtest thru 2008 to include the financial crisis.
"Brain rape" is common at large quant fund. Back when I worked at one, they would interview mid-senior level people at least a few times a year even if they had zero intention of hiring anyone just so they could have a gauge on what the rest of the street was working on. Ask yourself whether you, a highly intelligent and motivated quant, could recreate key aspects of your own strategy with 6 months of runway based on your interview answer. If the answer isn't no, don't answer the question. Don't lie though, your interviewers are probably smart enough to tell the difference. On the bright side, however brilliant and proprietary you think your signals are, everyone is most likely looking at similar stuff already so if you slip up you're not giving away too much (just look at the correlation between monthly pnl of all MMHF). The real edge in this industry is scaling optimally, minimizing t-costs, signal refinement, and in general squeezing out every last penny.
Finally, I from my personal experience on a start-up trading team , my unsolicited advice is as follows. Don't jump the gun and start trading until you are 100% comfortable with the entire process and risk you're running. If you lose 8% you're fired. On the other hand, if you just hang around for a year, but have very little to show for it, the management committee will at worst just get annoyed at you. As bad as it feels spending money on analysts and bpipe for a year with no PnL, it's much worse to have to dig yourself out of a hole because you decided to bring a signal to full scale before the book was ready. For example, if you have three strategies, don't bring them online at full size one at a time, but trade each one as it enters production at test size, and bring them all online at full scale simultaneously when they are all ready.
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