Quants Don't Exist

I made a video in 2017 on the 6 types of quants. This video was based on a document by Mark Joshi. As the industry has advanced over the years I think the videos title should have been, "The 6 Types of Jobs in the Quantitative Finance Industry." That title also gets messy though with determining what is the difference between traditional finance and quantitative finance.
Quant Research vs Model Development:
kzbin.info/www/bejne/j6ncooqAgbaiaq8si=IZZjbWs6d0Isgh-L
6 Types of Quants:
kzbin.info/www/bejne/i5PKYZmOZ9J_i7Msi=oXbUiNIC5bIgjozl
Website:
www.FancyQuantNation.com
Support:
ko-fi.com/fancyquant
Quant t-shirts, mugs, and hoodies:
www.teespring.com/stores/fancy-quant
Connect with me:
www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-bianco
DimitriBianco

[@babyeric]

Thanks for the great video. I'm an undergraduate student studying mathematics and I love the coursework I'm taking but haven't known the places in industry where I can apply these concepts. The people I know who studied math are all teachers or academics. Your channel has been a great resource in learning the different career paths and especially differences in roles between job titles. I have found it difficult to parse through what the actual difference in work is and finding the jobs that are more research or analysis or development focused. This video laid things out very clearly, you are a talented communicator.

[@GeneticSteve]

Mathematics enjoyer 🍷🗿

[@SylComplexDimensional]

Congratulations on studying math. I have recommendations on Applied & Computational Mathematics courses for a solid understanding & pro- fession in Quants if you’d like

[@KaraboMoremi]

3 years later, still coming back to this video.

[@Montythedog123]

I work in the “front office” as it were in the auto loans space and I would agree with you Dmitri I am definitely not a quant. I think your video here definitely is more accurate in comparison to the video you discussed years prior. I think a lot of people in college don’t realize how many financial products quants are involved in that aren’t options.

[@christopherkraken7625]

Definitely true - I'd say that there are even more sub-varieties than 6, including quants looking at banking book risk, quants looking at sustainablity/climate issues, quants in the big 4 consultancies quants doing ALM management for insurers (someone told actuaries about the risk-neutral measure at one point), quants doing asset allocation for asset managers, quants doing data-modelling at Bloomberg or MSCI. The thing is that there's very few areas in finance where some quantitative approach isn't helpful to some degree.

[@waitup-5198]

Great stuff, man.

[@Alkrf8bo]

Hey Dimitri! Hope you're doing well. Been following your channel for a while now. Very insightful video as always. I was hoping to ask if you could share your opinion on what kind of skill set/concepts are typically needed to succeed as a quant researcher in a buy-side firm? Is it mostly statistical concepts that are in-demand right now? Are concepts like optimization/integer programming also prevalent? I am extremely interested in learning about optimization algorithms and was wondering if it is applied in quant finance roles. Thank you.

[@Heretolearn12345]

One section missing, and could possibly be included in "front office", is the modern use case of financial engineering. Like you said, most financial engineers are not really working on pricing of exotic instruments anymore. However, financial engineering tasks these days would include things like: asset-liability management, interest rate, fx, and commodities hedging, engineering and analysis of structured products, asset allocation to meet balance sheet demands, etc. Treasury and CIO departments of large banks and insurers are much more advanced than they were even 10 years ago. These types of jobs require deep knowledge of financial products, programming, and mathematics.

[@jasdeepsinghgrover2470]

I see a very similar trend of bifurcation but fundamentals remaining the same in CS. Jobs like software developer, data engineer, data scientist, ML engineer, DevOps etc. need many similar skills but they each have some niche tools and skills as well.

[@gabrieldejo8856]

Dimitri, thank you again for this informative videos!! Since the video you made about the CMU report I'm heavily interested in pursuing the role of Quant Portfolio Manager. In which part of the scheme would this type of “Quant” fit and what are the responsibilities and abilities needed?

[@zhangcoleman4004]

You can’t be a Quant Portfolio Manager without at least a 5+ track record. You need to first be a Quant Researcher working for a Quant Portfolio Manager to become a Quant Portfolio Manager.

[@Joseph-ms3iq]

i remember watching that video!

[@JamieHarris-bz4ct]

Hi Dimitri, I share your passion for stats and am going onto masters in it next year. My only concern is a lot of job descriptions tend to say something along the lines of mathematics, computer science, engineering, quantitative finance. Do you consider statistics a part of maths in the eyes of employers so no need to mention it? Coming from a heavy stats and econometrics background I wouldn’t say I have the PDE style applied maths background, is this needed for something like model development at a bank? What do they mean when they say mathematics?

[@therealjezzyc6209]

Statistics is a branch of mathematics.

[@davidcmpeterson]

Presumably you've at least done *some* heavy duty maths during your degrees?

[@nicoherrig5002]

Stats is an applied branch of maths. In terms of quant finance, its basically mostly time series analysis, so statistics is more than suited for working in quant finance.

[@zhangcoleman4004]

Why Statistical Arbitrage Quant is its own category? If you make Statistical Arbitrage Quant it’s own category, you would also have to add Event-Driven Quant, Trend Following CTA Quant, etc. In reality, stat arb is just a type of quant strategy and should be under the category of Research Quant on the buy-side

[@DimitriBianco]

That is why towards the end of the video I cross out stats arb and capital quant. They are just job types as you have pointed out.

[@user-cl3tu5qm9m]

Would u believe is possible for a mechanical engineer (28m) transition to quant or fintech jobs ?

[@isaacstamper7798]

As a PhD student in applied math and statistics, this is very interesting

[@Danny-kv1pl]

unc

[@isaacstamper7798]

@@Danny-kv1pl I'm 22 lol

[@mikelCold]

When you said "a lot of views" and "40,000" I thought you were joking, but I think I've just been in the bandwagon part of YT too much lately.

[@EmeraldStone-ie5fr]

From independent quants to quants dont exist why sir?

[@garyadamos]

Damn are we all 22 here lol

[@maxd1744]

No

[@crik10jr45]

Hey i am frm india i want to join quant field i am 22 want to establish myself by 25 help me ,guide me

[@priyam2213]

Do let me know if you get a reply anytime soon