I love these topics where you discuss the personal side at work. I've had both kind of exposures and I've always felt its a lot easier and you'd enjoy your work more if you end up making friends at work.
I made it to a Fancy Quant video!!🎉🎉 Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that topic Dimitri, that’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot lately. Personally, I lean towards the “colleagues can be your friends” side.
Dimitri, you see to focus a great deal on the math and stats side. Why don’t you focus on the programming C++ side? That’s what’s holding me back a little bit right now. Is it not that bad? To be honest, I haven’t even delved into it yet, my undergrad background was applied math and economics with a ton of stats classes (enough for a stats major, but I could only choose either math or stats).
That is a great question. My channel focuses on "quants" which I define as those building models. Some firms call them "quant research" and others call them "model development." Many other firms have other obscure names as well like quantitative analyst, though that can mean almost anything. The responsibility of a quant is to build models. Model development is based on math and stats. Programming is just a means to express and test ideas. Quants are functional programs meaning the code works but isn't very efficient. My goal is to build a theoretically sound model. "Quant devs" (I absolutely hate this term as they should be called "implementation") implement models. Their job is to take the model build by a quant and implement it into production. They add a lot of value in re-writing the model in a programming language so that it will run very fast. Optimizing model runs is a combination of CS (understanding languages and hardware) and math. The math is needed to find a faster way of defining a model. For example, you wouldn't want to re-run a Monte Carlo simulation to price something in practice. It can be very slow and consume a lot of computation power (which costs both money and time). Numerical methods (math) can be used to approximate complex problems and make them fast to run. Now all of that being said, I am currently doing both quant and quant dev however the original focus of this channel was quant so I have left it at that. I have actually only come across C# once in my career. My current role requires implementation of models into Python. The role of quant and quant dev gets muddy especially in HFT as they are often more focused on speed and simple algorithms than they are with deep theoretical models. In many HFT firms there are only quant devs who try and cover both quant dev and quant research.
I haven't but you may find this interview I had with a friend who was a trader. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-z0E2ug1rfgg.htmlsi=QUGmiwppDpOg61Sp
When you say quant in all of these videos are you talking about what is called a "Quant Researcher" at companies like Quadrature and Jane Street?@@DimitriBianco
