I have to admit that I wish I had been present towards the end of the interview, to perhaps push this Venn diagram across the table. In particular, I see -- increasingly -- that "Magic" happens with the marriage of strong comp. skills and strong quant. skills -- but that only gets you to Machine Learning. I also see Subject-area experts try to add in some computational skills, and wonder agog why they end up with crap. "Hello-ooo!!" Danger Zone! I would proffer that comps and quants and subject-matter experts need to remain in the room, at the table, together, or you're going to miss value -- miss profit -- miss opportunity. http://drewconway.com/zia/2013/3/26/the-data-science-venn-diagram
I am 90% of the way towards a masters in CS (DS concentration) with a 3.8 GPA with a CS undergrad, traded options on the floor for 8 years w/ a positive track record (not screamers mind you, but pretty good alpha) backed by 1040's , knows a bunch of languages,yet at 52 don't look like the pictures on the websites of the Citadels and wolverines at their summer BBQ.... so it's not a simple Venn Diagram. :-(... just keeping it real
Great article. "The first marketing question for a hedge fund is always, “Why are you not the average hedge fund?” The right question to ask for every asset class.
For me, a small retail trader this article is depressing. How can I survive trading against those PhD mathematicians, financial analysts, physicists and their supercomputers? Is there hope for us? This is what he said: I am taking a Coursera class in introductory VBA Excel. It is a long long way from algorithmic financial system! It will be a very depressing weekend for me.
Don't try to compete with them maybe? You have lots of options as a retailer with not the least important of them having the option not to play at all. It's kind of like Mom&Pop store letting Amazon do it's thing day to day but opening their shop around the holidays.
You are not doomed at all. I read this article about a hedge fund manager whose main source of depression is that he has to put $5M to work daily and if he only manages to put $4m he has to use up $6M th next day. They can't do most of the stuff you can think of because it is not scalable. Find those niches OR better yet.. find their scalable strategies and be in on the top third of they accumulate and lost third when they distribute. Not saying it is easy.. if you are going to invest in learning.. start with python. learning curve is slightly higher but immensely more applicable-AI ,machine learning,API...