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by lordnacho 3576 days ago
Seems pretty comprehensive to me. As a career quant trader I'd say it's a matter of doing the advanced stuff so that you understand the simple stuff. Especially in statistics, there are a number of simple principles, but they need to be learned by incorporating them into some complicated lessons.

There's also programming. That's a whole can of worms in itself. There's both theory and practice, where I'd say the practice is far more important than it seems. You really have to have bashed your head against a wall (of your own making) to appreciate how to code in a sensible, maintainable way.
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Chris2048 3576 days ago
I'm aiming to become a quant dev.

I'm already a dev, but trying to catch up wrt the math at the moment :-O

I'm finding there are a whole bunch of skills unrealted to most dev concerns. looking at this: http://quantjob.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-to-avoid-quantdevel... I think a lot of dev skills are "housekeeping" - VC, commenting, testing, agile, automation, standards etc.

The quant dev stuff seems to be a lot more concerned with performance, correctness and accuracy, and the last two in particular are somewhat specialist dev skills I think - I've found code derived from mathematical equations be be a little different to other code.

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lordnacho 3576 days ago
But housekeeping is important! I've seen supposed quants who didn't know how version control worked. It caused productivity to plummet when people just did what they thought quants do.

If anything it's knowing the plumbing that makes you productive as a dev, of any kind. You just can't get around understanding how branching works, or having some unit tests.

Very little of the work ends up being the bit you think you're there for. I suspect it's the same in many industries. My parents ran a restaurant, and there's a lot of cooking, but there's also a lot of driving to the wholesaler, picking out vegetables, cleaning surfaces before and after a day, doing the plates, accounts, and so forth.

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Chris2048 3576 days ago
> it's knowing the plumbing that makes you productive as a dev, of any kind

Is this true of quant devs? Seems the focus is different - regular devs aren't as rare, so maybe the most important thing is producing a viable POC?

As for quants not knowing VC - did they come from a dev background?

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lordnacho 3576 days ago
> As for quants not knowing VC - did they come from a dev background?

No, and that was the problem. The more you venture into this field, the more you realise how much of it is coding. New idea about how price series X relates to Y? No use unless you can pull the data, do the transformations yourself.

Another critical problem is that when you're unproductive, you make contortions to make your results "real". You make rationalizations that don't hold up, because OMG it's a lot of work to test some more ideas.

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Chris2048 3576 days ago
I think the last point is very important. Can a failing Quant easily bluff. Yikes.
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