Quant Finance with No Masters #Finance

hey youtube it’s dimitri and today christopher asks i was wondering if you know of any ways to gather experience in quantitative Finance before committing to a

job are there opportunities like freelance work contests internships or projects that people need help with any advice would help i’m asking because i’d like to get a feel for the work before i commit wholeheartedly to it and i’d like to have some work experience in my belt going

into it thanks again okay so to answer this again i’m going to answer this from a u.s perspective because that’s the market i’m in that’s the vast majority of quant jobs are all in the us so that’s what i’m going to talk about here no there’s really not any

specific quant thing i would say from an undergraduate level sure there are trading firms out there who will take quants there are some here and there um but the majority of jobs that are quant model development quant validation aren’t really going to take undergrads and i wish there was a

way to say hey we’re gonna do internships as well for undergrads but we don’t we typically take under our internships that are masters and phd students because again you need enough stats and math and computer science to actually do the internship you need to be in a mastery phd level

course now that being said things to do things to prepare to really get a feel and understand if you would like it or not one is do some research talk to some industry practitioners through like um informational interviews for example and make a list right make a list and say okay i want to end up

in i don’t know high frequency trading or i want to end up in stats arbitrage or i want to end up in model development for Credit risk or i want to end up in model development or model validation for example for market risk at a bank and talk to these people just to get an

idea of what they are and aren’t doing try to figure out okay so like what types of models do you build what types of problems do you solve and then you can jump on over to things like kaggle and you can see there’s competitions on there and you can kind of get an idea you can kind of

get a feeling for what you’d be doing in a full-time job i think this is probably the best way to do it now kaggle i have a whole gripe and complaint with them the way that it’s done on kaggle is not how the real world works off obviously because you’re not just maximizing fit and

whoever has the greatest fit wins the competition um yes i know there’s out of time samples and oh if you do great in that the real world is you have business people to work with you the problems are far more complex there’s a lot of different constraints that you’re given before

you even develop the model kaggle is usually trimmed way back to a very very simplified data set which is very very tiny and small compared to what used in the real world uh i’m talking Credit riskier because Credit risk um yeah i’ve used like 100 plus

gigs i think my colleague of mine is using like a four terabyte data set once so it’s not the same it’s different on cable but kaggle will give you a good understanding of okay these are the sorts of models that i would be using and building this is kind of what the data looks like this

is kind what i’d be doing now the other piece here i mentioned before is doing the informational interviews is really really helpful because you’ll actually get to interact with professionals and please don’t get all like bummed out because i know this happens but when you email a

lot of professionals out there a lot of them aren’t going to respond because they’re busy they’re slam they have families jobs hobbies like a million things going on like my chaotic world here and they usually just don’t have a ton of extra time to sit and chat but if you

reach out to enough people i promise you you will find people to say sure i’ll jump on a call for an informational interview so be specific and tell them hey i’m a student i want to learn a little bit more about the job the industry skills that are needed that sort of thing and

you’ll get usually an interview with someone to kind of get those nitty-gritty details here now that being said you can look for other jobs other Industries and other opportunities

that are kind of related here so if you have an opportunity for like an internship and an undergrad i would look for data science i would look for fintech i would look for statistics these are going to be the big ones i would also consider like looking at like trading firms there are some trading

firms that take undergrads um i’m not going to weigh too much in on the rigorness of their quantities uh on how close it would be to actually working at some of these like i don’t know big quant firms that are doing quant research for example our model development model validation but i

would look at these sorts of jobs because even if you get a job doing let’s say i got a job an internship doing data science for marketing it seems nowhere near related right having the experience of being able to program being able to learn like this is the problem we’re trying to

solve being able to pull in data understanding all the issues and the headaches you have with the data and the modeling process coming up with some sort of model and getting someone to use it that whole annoyance of a process and figuring out the struggles with it is going to give you the insight

of whether you want to do this full-time so this isn’t like i sit down and i’m like i’m so excited i’m going to code today and i put my headphones on and i’m just nerding out doing math and stats it’s usually like oh i have to get on a call and have to figure out

why the person i don’t know that wants the model built doesn’t like the model we built and they have to understand you know okay they want all these extra things built into the model based on the way they’re gonna use it and then you find out management isn’t happy because

of x y and z and now you have to redo this that and the other and then somebody on the team didn’t do their part of the job right now you’re redoing things there’s a lot of it that’s not modeling quant focused so i would say 60 of your time is usually coding for these jobs

that are quant model development model validation these sorts of things if you’re quant dev you’re going to be programming a lot more but for this research side right doing actual model development model validation research these sorts of topics here you’re going to be spending

about 60 of your time programming these ideas and testing things and working with data and because of that i think it’s good just to get some hands-on experience modeling and stats econometrics or data science if you can get an opportunity in doing that and that will kind of give you the

nitty-gritty details of this is what a day is like you’re gonna have to write documentation for example on these models and it’s tedious and boring but those are kind of my tips here so no there’s not really a really apples to apples easy way to get experience on this do

informational interviews learn a lot about the industry learn about what people’s jobs are like use that opportunity to figure out like what types of models the industry uses for example what type of risks they’re modeling and then you can take that and you can look at kaggle and you

can practice on data sets there and get some more experience and expertise on that and then finally if you do have an internship opportunity take full advantage of that try to get one doing modeling somewhere right you might not be able to do it in quant

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance because there’s typically that masters or phd barrier but if you’re an undergrad get an internship at least try to get one here doing something with stats

econometrics that sort of thing because you’ll really understand the full process of what it’s like to actually be a model developer or a researcher so anyways those are my tips and tricks thanks for watching thanks for listening and as always until next time you