I tried doing searches on my own about DE Shaw but continued getting invalid search messages. Does anyone know anything about proprietary trading at DE Shaw. Such as do they pay a salary plus commission/bonus or is it 100% commission based, how long training is, what licenses are needed, and whether or not this is a decent starting position for someone with minimal work experience (6months to a year, with an advanced degree in economics). Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.deshaw.com/index.html You have great chances of 1:250 This is in case they invited you to the interview.
D.E. Shaw is a hedge fund. A trader in a hedge fund receives a base salary, plus bonus. Before the big losses in 1998, they offered sign-in bonuses, and guaranteed bonuses to new hires too. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=200371&highlight=shaw#post200371 http://www1.excite.com/home/careers/company_profile/0,15623,811,00.html I heard that they have been doing well in the past four years. They do interview a lot of people, before giving out a single offer. The whole interview process can take over five hours. If you are invited, make sure to sleep a lot before the D-day.
to get an administrative positon with that fund you need to have a great resume. they only hire creme of the crop, top phds and financial engineers. you must be exceptionally talented to even get an interview.
Failing the search task (typing "D E Shaw" into Google retrieves their site as the first result...what were you doing??) might raise a red flag about aiming for such lofty heights Seriously, why do you have D E Shaw in mind in particular? Economics theories aren't really useful there. (They did, though, hire a music major once upon a time!). Massive processing and modelling of multimarket noise has been the game most of the time.
Call David Shaw and ask him if he'll accept a $25k deposit from you against your losses. You never know, he might like your balls.
most of their trading is automated. they are very heavily involved in technology - investing in & using. doubt they employ prop traders as such - more likely a nerdy software engineer to come up with the code to trade. look at their results - they arent that great to warrant such an arrogant attitude
The fund's performance numbers are a closely guarded secret, but it is believed that the firm does make money, with above-average returns in an increasingly tight hedge-fund environment. "It's one of the most successfulquantitative investment-management companies in the history of the business," said Andrew Lo, a finance professor at M.I.T.'s business school who studies hedge funds. He's not referring to a period in 1998, when the company encountered what might be described as a "hiccup." That was the year Long-Term Capital Management, a giant Greenwich, Conn., hedge fund, imploded and had to be rescued by the Federal Reserve to avoid bringing down the entire American banking system. At the time, D.E. Shaw was using some investment methods that were similar to LTCM's, such as fixed-income arbitrage (the buying and shorting of bonds), with what one report estimated to be 19-to-1 leverage. Huge trading losses forced Bank of America, which had invested money with D.E. Shaw, to write off hundreds of millions of dollars; Bank of America faced shareholder lawsuits, and there was much acrimony. Mr. Shaw opened for business 10 years prior to those dark days with $28 million from several investors, including Donald Sussman of Paloma Partners, another Greenwich, Conn., hedge fund. The company has since grown to $6 billion in aggregate capital.................................................... http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ICQ/is_2004_Jan_19/ai_112251497
Most recent number May 2004: 23% net annual average since the equity fund inception in 1989. They lost money in 2003 so they're not amongst the wizards who have never had a negative year. Assets= about 6 billion. Most recent numbers for Futures currencies and distressed funds are in the 33-40% area, last year (not average annual) with 800mil-1billion assets. ...One of the most successful quantitative funds... Academics characterize themselves by an excessive use of hyperbole and rear-kissing. You won't hear about the funds who don't promote themselves in the media or through academia because they don't need to sell anything or need OPM i.e. commish to pay the bills. Someone else said they were arrogant. That's an understatement. Some years ago I considered applying for a job there, so I went to their campus presentation, I wanted to puke after that and it wasn't the food. But that routine works with some people, the sheepy kind.