[Rainymood]

Interesting!

Thanks a lot for writing/posting this. I enjoyed the read.

One thing I had to chuckle at was this:

>Mark Joshi obtained a B.A. in mathematics (top of year) from the University of Oxford in 1990, and a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. He was an assistant lecturer in the department of pure mathematics and mathematical statistics at Cambridge University from 1994 to 1999. Following which he worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland from 1999 to 2005 as a quantitative analyst at a variety of levels, finishing as the Head of Quantitative Research for Group Risk Management. He joined the Centre for Actuarial Studies at the University of Melbourne in November 2005 as an associate professor and is now a full professor.

Pure math to quant to actuary. It's kind of funny how I see/have met so many people that have gone this route. It's like they got sucked into pure mathematics, then thought: shoot I really need to get some practical work done with this math! And afterwards, at a later stage in life they wanted to back out and wanted a stable, high paying, but still math heavy job (actuary!).

Does anybody here have any experiences with being on the 'front office'? I'd love to hear them.

[lotsofmangos]

"Following which he worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland from 1999 to 2005 as a quantitative analyst at a variety of levels, finishing as the Head of Quantitative Research for Group Risk Management."

No wonder he moved to Australia.

[bradleyjg]

My great-uncle went pure math (he had an Erdős number of 1), a brief sojourn in industry, pure math.

From the stories I've heard the industry stint was purely about money. He had grown up very poor and had four children, a few years working on oil field and bond models was enough to supplement his professor salary for the rest of his career.

On the other extreme is someone like Simons who left pure math to found a hedge fund and is still at it billions of dollars later.

[azmenthe]

I worked at a hedge fund at the start of my career, though it was somewhat atypical as it was a very new fund and had more of a startup environment than a well established hedge fund. The work was a fantastic split between analysis and building new software to run the fund.

But to your point, the CTO of the fund was a pure math phd who got into finance/coding when his advisors asked "Ok so now how are you going to make money". which is common for most of the heavy duty quants I know.

[zerr]

And also theoretical physicists. Permanent jobs are hard to find in these domains...

[mdda]

What's the upside to admitting on HN to having front office experience?

[skrebbel]

Seriously? Why are you on HN at all?

[mdda]

I'm going to assume your comment wasn't as mean as it appears in writing.

Why am I here? Because I started my first business in college, then went into finance to get some 'real world' experience, and then went on to start several other businesses (both tech and finance). I've employed quite a few people over the years, had some good times, some bad. You know : The basic entrepreneurial story. I started programming with 6502 machine code, C, C++, Perl, and more recently Python, Scala and GPUs. Will likely start something to do with deep-learning/NLP in the New Year. HN feels like home. That's why I'm here.

As to the content of my comment : It was intentionally low. I wanted to see how many negatives a valid comment about actually being in the finance industry would generate (-2 after a couple of hours, constant since). And, besides, any person in the finance business would immediately smile at the clear-cut upside/downside evaluation that is so common in the business. I just said it out loud.

Best wishes to you.

[branchless]

Pure math to head of QR risk management over the period when RBS took on insane leverage and relied on wholesale lending markets staying at low rates forever. An assumption that was incorrect and led to RBS being bailed out by UK tax-payers.

Good work fella.

[shamney]

head of quantitative research = spending all your time on pricing models for complex derivatives. it's unlikely he had anything to do with RBS's overall financial strategy

[branchless]

Head of modelling risk for RBS. Maybe some of it was derivatives. Some of it should have been modelling the cost of borrowing money on wholesale markets. The RBS strategy was leverage to the hilt, borrow short, lend long. Lunacy.

[cma]

Maybe he thought it was a bad srategy until he calculated in the likelihood of tax-payer bailout if things went wrong.

[dreamweapon]

But hey, it must have been a fun, taxpayer-subsidized ride. Or as a certain person in the industry once famously said: "As long as the music's playing, you've got to get up and dance", right?

[walshemj]

should have paid more attention to the machines in the dinosaur pen :-)

For non uk peeps a while back RBS had major screw up on the mainframe side that meant that some people where not able to access their bank account for days weeks for one of the NI subsidiary's