This stuff just isn't secret anymore ... Tricky .. Yeah a little but many many firms and individuals know how to do this so the knowledge is declining in value. If I can hire multiple people that know how to implement a particular strategy or algorithm then they are already on their way out of a job. I'll stick to my commodity valuation for your skills and I would be glad to answer your questions if you would like to hire our firm for our standard fee - much more than you make by the way. I think we might have a slot for your firm in about three years, if then. The stuff you are doing is boring since its known and I dont know anyone in my firm working on the type of projects we have that would want to do iyour projects at the dollars you state - which is already a premium over the typical dollars for these skills. Actaully its a bad sign when a firm is paying extra as it says you need a premium to attract people to your company given the working conditions......
These are questions that are very basic, any serious fixed income market practicioner would know the answer. As for "your firm" and "three years" - give me the name of your firm, I will ask around if anyone ever heard of it, or for now I maintain you have no clue what you are talking about. Also, if you have worked at the CME for about ten years during the start of their options markets , you should be happily retired by now, since they started trading live cattle options in 1984, if my memory serves me right.
trying to post articles that are on topic of this thread... let's not turn this into a pissing contest sle and caltrader! hehe. ======================================== Scrambling To Stem India's Onslaught Friday January 16, 4:10 pm ET Two years ago, when DaimlerChrysler (NYSECX - News) decided to overhaul its computing systems, it invited the usual crowd -- IBM (NYSE:IBM - News), Electronic Data Systems (NYSE:EDS - News), and other giants -- to bid on pieces of the job. But the carmaker also opened the door to a handful of Indian newcomers for the first time. One of them, Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies Ltd. (NasdaqNM:INFY - News), won the first $25 million chunk of the project. A 25% cost savings over the giants helped, but what has impressed DaimlerChrysler since then is the quality of the work Infosys has done, says Klaus Felser, a DaimlerChrysler vice-president for technology. The giant auto maker now plans to ship a large percentage of its tech-service work to India over the next five years. Until recently, Indian service outfits barely registered in the West. Now, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, and others are emerging as real competition for the industry's behemoths. Their ability to offer prices that undercut Western adversaries by as much as 70% is just the start. They're also amassing the skills to handle complex consulting projects and rapidly opening sales offices in the West to get face time with potential clients. Their efforts are paying off: Three years ago, just 125 of the top 500 U.S. companies placed work with Indian companies, according to Nasscom, India's software-services trade association. Last year, that number hit 285, including Boeing (NYSE:BA - News), Cisco Systems (NasdaqNM:CSCO - News), and Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH - News). JIGSAW PUZZLE. This cross-border competition is roiling the $578 billion tech-services industry like never before. Confronted with pesky new rivals, giants such as IBM and EDS are overhauling their operations. To protect their flanks and remain competitive on the low end, they're slashing costs by moving jobs to India, China, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe. In recent weeks, Accenture Ltd. (NYSE:ACN - News) said it may hire 5,000 people in India this year, and IBM will hire more than 4,000 people in India and China. At the same time, the bigs are moving up the food chain, boosting their technology innovation and consulting expertise in ways they believe the Indians can't easily match. "This is the biggest reshaping of services in decades," says John Parkinson, chief technologist for the Americas at Paris-based services outfit Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. The challenge for all the players -- Indian companies included -- is to fuse Western and Asian operations into smooth-running global machines. The industry's giants are expert at hand-holding customers yet are mere novices when it comes to providing low-cost services and dealing with the cultural differences in India. For Indian companies, the opposite is true. Now the race is on for the Western companies to fill in the Asian pieces of the global jigsaw puzzle while their Indian rivals hustle to fit together the Western chunks. Not all the players will survive. "There is bound to be a shakeout," says Jayant Sinha, a McKinsey & Co. partner who advises service companies. Some weak or smaller players will be takeover bait in a business where the top five players still control only about 20% of the market. Already, computer makers Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ - News) and Dell Inc. (NasdaqNMELL - News) have snapped up service companies in recent months. BearingPoint (NYSE:BE - News) and Cap Gemini, respected firms but poor performers recently, are among the potential takeover targets, analysts say. Who will win? Among the U.S.-based players, IBM and Accenture are most likely to come out on top. Big Blue, already the key technology supplier for many of the world's largest corporations, has the advantage of being able to offer customers a vast array of services, hardware, and software. Accenture not only has a solid start on reducing costs, with 4,800 employees in facilities in India and the Philippines, it can also match the breadth of IBM's service offerings. Look for one or two of the Indian companies -- perhaps Infosys, Tata, or Wipro -- to emerge as large players. The handful of companies that achieve both efficiency and innovation will dominate the next era. Before they can dominate, though, they need to heal the wounds of the past three years. With demand slack, prices were hammered down relentlessly. June E. Drewry, chief information officer at Chicago-based insurer Aon Corp. (NYSE:AOC - News), has replaced most of her late-1990s service contracts, and she was able to reduce her bills by 30% to 40%. Prices aren't likely to recover soon. "It's like virginity. Once you lose it, you lose it," says John Kirincich, director in charge of information technology for North America at Germany-based chemical company Celanese. As a result, the industry is expected to grow just 4.7% this year, says Gartner Dataquest, vs. about 10% per year in the late 1990s. A HIGHER HIGH END. In response, western players are trying to create services for which customers will pay a premium. Both IBM and Accenture harness their research labs to help consulting clients. Accenture, for instance, had its researchers analyze more than 100,000 phone conversations to help them develop an automated phone system for AT&T (NYSE:T - News) to handle calls from its customers. The goal? To cut costs by half. "So far, we're getting the savings," says Lou Delery, AT&T's vice-president for operations. At the same time, the bigs are coming up with strategies that take advantage of their global reach, something the Indians can't yet match. They parcel out work among existing offices in their primary markets, moderately priced countries nearby, and a smattering of Asian companies, including India and such lower-cost countries as China. They divvy up the work to take advantage of not only labor costs but also language skills, time-zone convenience, and the immediate availability of specific skills -- say, obscure programming expertise for the pharmaceutical industry. Cap Gemini, for instance, last year got a $500 million, 10-year contract to manage software applications for auto-parts giant Visteon Corp. It put 350 people on the project -- portioned out among Visteon's Dearborn (Mich.) headquarters and its own facilities in Germany, France, Spain, Bombay, and Kansas City, Mo. The trickiest challenge facing the industry's giants is to quickly establish productive operations in India. But their mad rush can cause its own problems. For instance, to attract talent, foreign companies typically pay 20% more than the local market rate. At the same time, though, some don't offer their Asian employees upward mobility or other benefits they want. The result is that Western players have annual attrition rates of up to 25% in their India operations -- about twice those of their Indian rivals. When Sapient Corp. (NasdaqNM:SAPE - News) in Cambridge, Mass. started up in India in 2000, it didn't understand its new employees' commuting needs, and it took two tries before it got a busing program working. "People can go to India and spend more money and get less done because they don't know how things are done there," says Jerry Greenberg, Sapient's co-CEO. Local companies are already masters at organizing efficient armies of software programmers. And they have techniques that allow them to perform routine tasks with consistency and quality levels that are hard to beat. Infosys, for instance, processes 1 million job applications a year, administers 1,000 entry skills tests a day, and quickly winnows its applicants to the most qualified and suitable for the jobs. But the Indian players are still far behind their Western rivals when it comes to anticipating what corporations want. In an effort to change that, they're trying to develop business expertise in industries ranging from banking and retailing to manufacturing and energy. They're also pushing to stay abreast of the most advanced technologies. Infosys, for example, has an alliance with researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who are working on such things as radio-controlled inventory systems. While the Indian companies have an advantage now because of their low costs, analysts expect the Western competition to come on strong over the next two years. The Indians have a healthy respect for the Westerners. "The beast has awoken -- just as Netscape woke up Microsoft" (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News) to the Internet, says Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys. Don't expect the giants to crush the Indian upstarts, though. This battle will have winners from both worlds.
IBM Raises Number of New Hires for 2004 By Caroline Humer NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM will hire 15,000 new employees -- 50 percent more than originally planned -- in areas like software and services because of a rebound in the economy, a top executive said on Saturday. Armonk, New York-based International Business Machines Corp (IBM)., which has faced criticism for its plans to shift some U.S. workers to cheaper locations such as India and China, will add about 4,500 net jobs in the United States this year, according to Randy MacDonald, IBM's senior vice president for human resources. "We are going to hire more in the U.S. than we shift" overseas, MacDonald said in an interview. About 30 percent of the 15,000 new positions, or 4,500 jobs, will be net new hires in the United States, he said. In total, the move will increase IBM's workforce by nearly 5 percent to about 330,000 or more depending on attrition. That number is the highest since 1991 when IBM began a decade-long overhaul under former Chief Executive Louis Gerstner. More than half of IBM's employees are outside the United States. The company plans to move up to 3,000 jobs from the United States to developing nations in 2004, an IBM spokesman said. A Wall Street Journal report in December that said the company would shift 4,730 software jobs to India was incorrect, MacDonald said. NEW GROWTH CYCLE The raised hiring target follows news from the world's largest computer company that customers started buying more technology during the fourth quarter. IBM Chief Financial Officer John Joyce described 2004 on Thursday as "the year when the IT industry will begin its next growth cycle." The technology industry is emerging from a three-year slide caused by a weak economy, computer overcapacity and cuts in corporate spending. While consumer spending recovered in 2003, corporate buying lagged. Last fall, with signs of growth starting to emerge, Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano said IBM would hire 10,000 new employees in 2004 in "hot" segments, such as software for doing business over the Internet and services to support wireless technology and the growing Linux operating system. The decision to add 5,000 jobs was made in the past few weeks, MacDonald said. Discussing where the hiring will occur, MacDonald said that was a matter of the availability of the technical skills and customer needs, as well as cost. IBM's plans do not favor one geographic region over another. He said that Asia Pacific is the company's fastest growing region. Moving jobs overseas has become a hot political issue as U.S. corporations build foreign workforces to try to cut costs. IBM services competitor Accenture Ltd. (ACN), for instance, plans to double its staff in India to 10,000 this year. MacDonald said IBM also would raise to 50 percent from 40 percent the number of its new staff directly from college. The rest will have previous professional experience. In 2005, IBM plans to increase the percent of new hires from a university to 60 percent, he said.
..Pretty much dead one and reflects what is going on ....... These are industries that are best avoided - horrible working conditions and very little committment to employees. I know dozens of IBM consultants and I none of them actually enjoy their work; Theyt get paid just enough that they dont bail - but in my opinion most of them could make more in areas related to their present jobs if they just had the guts to make a change. Bottom line in the software business is that you will languish unless you have a truly unique niche with a strong barrier to competition. Fortunately my companies do: if they did not i would look to sell to one the other larger firms since the near term outlook for the consulting side of the business is average returns which make the business uninteresting .....
Well, all I can say is that we will agree to disagree. As for your firm ...you may already be a client and we might be evaluating your work right now as we are typically brought in to evaluate the quality of work in pre-reorganizations and for problem employees - one of my firms. We work only with corporate boards and you sound like you arfe too far down the ranks that we would ever be talking directly to you on a deal. As for the CME .... Why would I retire at a young age if I can keep starting profitable companies and reaping rewards ? I guess I just have more ambition than you ......
Even the Europeans want American jobs. Heading west: Braindrain to America worries Europe http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_538425,00040010.htm
" And fan the speculation. The sleeping giant may really be awakening, Justin, but the question is whether any Western capitalists will be allowed to make a nickel on it. Well, they are very shrewd and their merchants are all over Asia, so they know what they need. And they have infinite patience, which none of the rest of us have. This is 100-year kind of thing. When I talk about Chinese stocks in conference rooms, I say, âThese are things you buy for your grandchildren,â and then they listen. That matters to them. If you say, âHere is a stock you should buy right now,â they say, âOh well, it has already tripled; I donât want to buy it now.â Anyway, when I play with this China thing in my head a little bit, I start to see that what is missing now in this market, its drained-off substance, has gone to a different, younger, more vibrant place. No wonder we complain that weâre only doing dribs and drabs of the things we did in our youths. Our markets really arenât like they used to be." http://www.weedenco.com/welling/archive/li/v06i01lilogo.asp m
Mecro, Actually, sle's company is NOT unique. Quants/research/implementation people are now getting as much as traders used to get or even MORE. The table has turned. Some financial products are so complex, that they need quants to run it and implement it and they are getting a bundle for it. here are a few more job postings. And I would imagine sle's pay is only in the midrange for now. No offense to you. But just from seeing how the market is pricing things... ============================================= Equity Derivatives Quantitative Analyst â New York - $400,000 Company: Huxley Associates Location: US-NY-New York City Pay: USD 400,000.00 /year Status: Full Time, Employee Job Category: Banking Education Level: Doctorate Job Description The structured Equity Derivatives trading desk at top-tier US investment bank seeks a quantitative analyst with a minimum of 4 years front office experience. You will provide leadership to 3 less experienced quants and take responsibility for the quantitative environment. Working in close collaboration with exotic equity derivatives traders you will resolve day-to-day pricing and modelling issues and drive the increased sophistication of the model library. In addition to pricing and hedging strategies you will contribute to the development of arbitrage strategies. You should have a profound understanding of exotic equity derivatives on mono- and multi- underlyings. You will have expertise in correlation and volatility modelling problems, including experience of implementing stochastic and local volatility models. It would be advantageous if you had experience of working with hybrid products (Interest Rates, Inflation, Credit). You should have a PhD from a top school and excellent numerical programming skills (C++). Knowledge of Malliavin calculus would be very interesting to our client.
$2M/yr pay for research. not even putting on a single trade... So, sle's pay is actually prety normal or at the lower end even... How life on Wall St has changed since the 80s when research people were paid poorly... =========================================== Job: Global Head of Quantitative Research, PhD, Investm Reference #: GOCLHEADQUANTNY Location: New York or London, United States One of the worlds largest and most profitable Hedge Funds is looking to hire an extremely high-profile Global Head of Quantitative Research. Your remit will encompass managing the Quantitative Strategy and Research department in its entirety. This involves managing a highly skilled team of Quantitative Researchers, Analysts, Strategists and Modellers who will be applying cutting-edge techniques throughout global financial markets. This is a key hire and you will become an integral part of not only the profitability of the firm, but also to the future strategy/direction of the company as a whole. You will report to the Senior Partners of the Fund and will be responsible for research for all financial products areas. It is also paramount that you will either have held or hold a similar position for a Top-Tier Investment Bank/Hedge Fund. You will have an excellent academic record and will have demonstrated a broad knowledge and understanding of a variety of statistical methods including linear, non-linear and multivariate statistical methods, and time series analysis. It is expected that you will have substantial knowledge of Quantitative Investment Theory and Methods. It is also expected that you may (either now or in the past) have been a university lecturer within Financial Mathematics. Salary is negotiable, but we expect to see candidates who are currently earning $2m ++ per year. To talk about this role in complete confidence