Tips on Finding a Quant Finance Research Topic

How do you find a quantitative finance research topic?
First off, don't think you will solve any grounding breaking problems or be published in a top journal! A masters program is too short to do meaningful research.
Find a simple problem that can be solved within a few months and has data readily available. Even just applying a model to data and writing about the results is enough to get employers excited as you will have some basic experience. Applying machine learning models to quant finance problems is an easy place to start.
Do research on the area you want to work in. For example, do not do credit scorecard model development research thinking this will land you a job in HFT. They are not related and employers will not be able to easily see what skills you have that are relevant.
Don't know what topics are in a specific job? Do informational interviews with professionals who already work in the job you want. You can ask them many questions about the work and then do some research on these topics after the interview.
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[@lj234LIFE]

I think it's crazy that I watch your videos so much that when I typed "research topics in quantitative finance" your video was number 4 in my google searches 😂. As per usual, thank you for giving insight on this and being the link between the quant finance world and us !

[@nyamekosalakuphathwa861]

Lol on my side it was number 1 😂😂

[@babushkaboybabushkaboy9540]

Thank you for answering my question!! You are a living legend man! Thanks again.

[@thomasvaudescal9316]

Thanks for the tips Dimitri! Very enlightening for my future research work 🙂

[@Kedoink18]

Thanks for your brilliant answer. One thing which I have been uncertain on and you don't touch on is overfitting. Saying in an interview I solved this problem, isn't there a high probability that has been overfitted and thus wouldn't work in a real-world sample? And if somebody said they could return a high amount would that make you skeptical?

[@brandonbrown4493]

Thanks a lot for this video

[@daanialahmad1759]

Dear Dimitri, Markov Chains model are used in Credit Ratings. I am reading a book on Big data in Finance where I learned this

[@DimitriBianco]

They are used to model defaults as you have multi states however they are fairly rare in the industry for retail or commercial credit. Over 6 years of credit modeling I've only seen one used successfully. I have seen another firm attempt it and fail.

[@daanialahmad1759]

@@DimitriBianco Thank you so much Dimitri

[@chymoney1]

Hi Dimitri this is kind of a random question but have you used advanced outlier detection like minimum covariants detection for CCAR??

[@emmanuelameyaw9735]

didn't find financial engineering stuff on kaggle though... I am interested though how you extend closed-form models? If you don't read journals, where does your ideas to extend models come from? Text books?

[@vaibhavmalviya6160]

Acquiring Data really is challenging 😓

[@kingshukdutta2064]

I am doing my summer project work on sustainable finance and I feel you really well.

[@mimi-kv6qu]

Hi Dimitri, May I ask is there any chance I can conduct an algorithmic trading research without using math just programming? Thank you!

[@DimitriBianco]

You can as long as you want to work at a firm that doesn't focus in using math.

[@mimi-kv6qu]

@@DimitriBianco Thanks for your reply. May I have your clarification on the name of the trading method just focus on computer science and is it actually work? Thank you.

[@DeependraSingh-bq7my]

@Dimitri Bianco Can you share some sources to learn trading without any degrees to make sustainable amount of returns