Hi, I am a 3rd year Math student, I am aspiring to become a quant. I should be attending a prestigious mathematical finance masters programme after I finish this bachelors (as long as I don't completely mess up my exams), however I wanted to start dabbling with some quant trading now, preferably with a demo account because I have no money (life of a student haha). I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources or the best way in general to go about starting this up for myself. I want to get some experience in quant trading but I have no idea where to start. My mathematical background is strong-ish and I can code relatively well (python, R, C++, MATLAB). When I mean I have no idea where to start, I have no idea. I've been researching but I can't find anything coherent. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
trading with demo account vs real account might as well not even exist. you think you can make a program to do it automatically and dispassionately. you cannot... you will probably waste ages developing systems just to find out they don't work. it depends on so much more than just coding. its a mental game too. no one is looking for quants to hire, they will try to do pompous shit like an unpaid internship just to get yelled at by bald idiots. my suggestion is , just read a lot. im an autodidact so i cant relate much
If you've got the resources, then please post them here. That's the whole point of this forum. There's no need for private on-the-side discussions because your resources can help a lot of other people reading this thread aside from just the thread starter.
Quantopian used to provide a great set of resources for aspiring quants, before they went defunct. You can find an archive of their resources here: https://quantopian-archive.netlify.app/ For a professional-level program on quantitative topics, check out https://www.arpm.co/
ARPM is first-rate. I attended their week-long on-site program a few years ago. Risk probably employs more quants than the other areas. This is a good exposure to the requisite applied mathematics. Tho, IIRC, it's mostly geared toward people in industry, so you'll have a bit of a learning curve in that respect.
Set up an account with Interactive Brokers. Use their API. Write some basic quant algos to get your feet wet (like VWAP, Bollinger Bands, etc.). Use Python.. it's what many quants use. Get 25K together (FINRA minimum) and TRUST YOUR ALGOS WITH YOUR REAL MONEY. Paper trading is ok for test, but you need to feel the heat when the market moves against you. That experience is worth its weight in gold. I can't stress this enough... you won't learn if you don't have skin in the game. How can you expect a hedge fund to trust their money with your algo if you don't trust it yourself??? A quant needs an education... and he has to pay for it. Also, read the two referenced books. That's what I did to get into the hedge fund community. http://interactivebrokers.github.io/tws-api/
Your post prompted me to write a blog post on the subject. I hope it's useful https://qoppac.blogspot.com/2021/02/so-you-want-to-be-quantsystematic-trader.html GAT