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by marssaxman 352 days ago
What is a "strat"?

I would never want to work for a place like Goldman anyway, but knowing they had their own idiosyncratic tech environment would certainly be an additional negative.

3 comments

Quantitate Strategist. Most places call this role a Quant.
It's a tech/quant role.
A job title, then...? I took it for a description of the company; web search turns up only references to guitars and some hotel in Las Vegas.
Strats as a role has been downplayed and realigned a lot over the last several years. Traditionally, a strat was indeed a "quantitative strategist" that sat on the desk, often next to voice traders, developing tools, pricing models, trading systems, etc.

One of the people I regard as the Godfather/OG strat is Emanuel Derman (https://emanuelderman.com/). Another transformative (in my time) person in the Strat complex was Marty Chavez (https://www.rmartinchavez.com/). Both amazing people on and off the trading floor.

it means "strategy". I imagine each "strategy" looks at some data and decides what kinds of trades to make in response, or predicts the price of some securities and sends that to a downstream process which decides what trades to make based on those price predictions.