C++ going down....processors continue to improve in speed. Best to move to C#/.NET and Java. Both are very similar.
I have not thought of that as of yet. I guess, I have couple of options. Take unnecessary CIS for the major/minor, but the ones that will help me with programming in the future. Or take half during undergrad and the rest with MS which I will be doing in math, eco, fin. Haven't decided as of yet. But, I am not touching MFE until I get MS in any of those disciplines. Got any advice, I am in pickle here. PS...I though you first pick up C and build up to other programs. C++ , C#, .Net, etc. Although, most books on quantative programming require C++.
Concentrate on the business and math classes during the school year. You'll need the good grades. Start to pick up programming during the winter and summer breaks. Also, beg borrow or steal for an internship during these periods as well. Try to take some continuing education classes in it if possible. You'll learn more and faster if you can interact with a teacher. I would recommend C++ because there is a good chance you'll have to use it in your career, and the aptitude you develop can be transferred easily to pure object oriented languages like C# or Java. It's several butt kicking years of constant learning, but then again the market for quants is hyper-competative, and you need to give yourself a fighting chance.
you are useless if you cannot program. you dont have to program well but you need to be productive. i think this goes for all professions. you would be surprised how many jobs can be automated out of existence.
Actually, I thought I had succeeded in getting you out of the macro world. I also felt cool for a moment that you could avoid the conventional orthodoxy traps as well by only doing enough to see the foibles and failures of the maths many of these guys are preaching to you. For me, I usually can take on their orientation and bury them in a moment or two. Since you are still not getting the dead end nature of the quant regime, go for it and learn how and where it soaks into the ground and stiffles any living thing. Law and Lit is always a place to knock down grades; the girly thing is just humor from the dark ages. Here is the way it is in 2007. Try to imagine how the financial industry is going to go through the giant sucking sound of a siphoning off of capital. Here are where the sounds are coming from. Aggregations of private money are buying into the 237 business sectors that make up the global economy. Private money is doing more and more deals simply because that money, formerly devoted to supporting the traditional apps of cap, is not getting supported any more. The huge pools are not being feed by everyone anymore. The big money is spending a lot of energy to get new money. You may also notice that computer power is sort of increasing at rates many times the Sullivan expected rates of past years. Read the poor article in Futures this month about how 1990 compares to today. then read eric schmidt in the world in 2007 (TE page 110) So faster machines find the imbalances sooner so they can arbitrage them away in a shorter time. This is looking for leaks in the pipelines and fixing them sooner and when they are much smaller. The quant world. You had better notice that the highest grades are going to go to the guys who can presently recognize that there is going to be a paradigm shift. An undergrad has the ability to do post doctoral stuff simply because the accumulation of wealth is a different paradigm than is presently taught and it is not rocket science by any means. What makes the most money in the world is institutionalizing solutions to pervasive global problems. Look at the weekly issues of all things, The Economist. You have three shots at the Hannes Androsch Prize while you are studiying and writing papers as an undergraduate. This year its how to sustain and improve national labour conditions and social security systems in times of economic globalization. If you don't like a 100,000 EU for a paper go for some smaller cash and answer with some fresh ideas on how a vibrant private sector can tangibly help to catalize sustainable growth and reduce poverty. Its only 20,000 or 10,000 or 5,000 US offered by IFC. See page 108 of the 16-22 JUN issue of TE. As far as I am concerned moving money from giant pools run by quants is the answer. Pool extraction is what will be moving money out of quant operated big money operations. It will enevitably be moved by people who know how to extract rather than fix leaks with arbitrage. Read the review of the Asset minded professors (Capital Ideas Evloving) on page 96 Ibid. Glance at the top Info Tech 100 in BW on pages 68 0nward in 2JUL 2007 issue. NB that there are NO Info Tech people doing automated trading stuff for pool extraction. By 2010 it will be time to revise the pool extraction analogue. As far as I am concerned. I use a binary approach that has NO probabilistic aspects. Go to Willmott forums and read the binomial stuff that is probabilistically oriented and see what being stuck in 5 to 20% a year means. 20% is a days work when you get off the probabilistic kick you and others are on. On Mark Joshi's home page he lists about 25 researchers by referring to the Willmont list. his home page also has all the books and topics you have asked others to fill in with regard to what and why Baruch isn't teaching to quant standards in any depatment. Baruch is not a feeder for the financial industry and the finacial industry is only providing pools of capital for others to extract. For a person to get educated is a small task; it can be done by just keeping current. What a person who is your age is required to do is get with it and get on with making a giant mark in fixing what is busted. It takes learning how to corral huge sums of money and giving it to others who can get the job done. Bill and Melinda are hiring and the course load you are anticipating ain't going to cut it. Luckily we are coming to the end of the war, diplomacy and national boundaries era. Global is what is going to do the job of moving money from pools to the right places to get the global economy on track. 1500 bucks per car is what GM is saddled with for pensions. Why not use pool extraction to siphon off more than is needed and then cut car costs to create jobs for GM and give Toyota a run for its money. US social security earns 1% a year on its capital. this is bullshit. Fix it and get very rich as you do. try to consider learning to be able to think critically as your educational challenge. To do this you are going to have to forget about the "party line" being proferred by the conventional orthodoxy that got Baruch where it isn't today. It is fun to think about the people going through university today. I did it long ago. When I look at what allowed me to move forward, it is a really neat puzzle. I sat in classes run by one of top 5 physicists in world. He taught me to team up with two others to expedite learning. the physics is very orderly and switch from relatavisitic to non relatavisitc is no trick at all. before that I had learned how money is made by "ownership" in just an hour of listening. Fourier transforms in EE were not as important. Being able to handle odd and even harmonics in trading just came from calculus and designing amplifiers and antennas. The IBM puched card Hollarith coding taught me to be able to transmit all signals without a cahnce of error ever. The 700 series computers (vacuum tube) taught me that a person could be faster than a computer to make money. It's still that way today. Speed doesn't count for anything in making money. The tape is still the tape. There simply is no way doing 20 to 40 trades a day to extract the capital offered takes any lightening like action at any one of those 20 to 40 points where reversals occur. What kind of computer power does it take to know that you know you are on the right side of the market in between turns. There is no probabilty involved. The market tells one side or the other all of the time.
Hey Jack, Actually it is a mandatory requirement for me as well as others (even english major) to take macro. It is curriculum corses that is a drag, killing me here. LIT, ENG, PHIlosophy, SOCiology, etc etc. Have to take it unfortunately. So what you are trying to say quant is a dead end job which will be obsolete due to computers in few year? Also, I do not comprehend to which literary illustrations you are exposing me to. Sorry, I must of missed something can you elaborate on the books/papers/articles. Although I will find that Future magazine one. So my idea of what you are trying to say is this. Forget about quant and get into helping a world. Become a philanthropist? I would love to. I just don't have the money, and the fact that if I will be in red cross does not offer a lot of research which I want to do and money which alternately puts the seal on the job after love of course. Love can be interpreted as love for education. As I understand others, get my programming skills up to date. C++ proficiency? I will look into that, b/c I do agree with you. Although this skill will probably will be acquired by me in the end of my undergrad. Hey, nothing to worry about 3+ years of school. If markets change I'll go into something else. There is always MBA/CFA. And who can forget about LMAT and a law school. All you need is 3.75 and 170 LMAT and you are in top 20. Although some how I am still attached to the quant side. Any other comments? Keep them coming. Thank you all so far.
some very good advice from sjfan. One important thing to consider is that top school only makes people to glance at your Resume - nothing more. It all boils down how you can perform under pressure at 10-15 interviews. Simply said if you are not very smart the school matters shit - so as suggested by sjfan take a lot of math so that it will filter out your potential disappointment... At the interview be modest but not too much - make sure people understand what you want. Don't confused them (maybe even leave out unimportant schools from you Resume). Quality matters more than ever - not quantity. In the past few years with the increased sophistication of derivatives it is also more and more important to communicate clearly in non-quant language. The times of Russian chess freaks who were not able to say a word are way behind us (nothing against Russians - I befriended few great Russian quants). Just think how you would solve SDE and explain it to a senior manager in terms of a golf round - if you can do that you are all set . Also without a solid C type language you stand no chance. Even if some houses have their own development language (e.g. GS) they want you to be OO programming profficient. It also matters if you live in US or Europe - the requirements are slightly different, e.g. Europe is more technical, US much more practical oriented.
Have a look at the following reference article. http://finance-old.bi.no/~bernt/gcc_prog/recipes/recipes.pdf It's alright if you can't read this now, but this is basic C++ programming that you should be able to understand it a year from now. Then you can move on to OO programming and design patterns (such as model-view-controller). You might as well start to form good habits as a programmer. Learn to use an industry standrd IDE (integrated development environment) like Microsoft Visual Studio. Pros don't write much code from scratch on Notepad (or Vi) anymore. It wouldn't be a bad idea to also learn to use a CVS (concurrent versioning system.) Most programmers have to interact with other programmers, and there needs to be a way of keeping up with all the source code files generated during a project. In other words, learn to work and think like a pro, and not just some hobbyist sitting around at midnight in their underware hacking code.
Personally, I am all about the actual languages -- but the impression I get from my time at Wilmott is that Matlab/Matematica/Maple/R/Excel are the most commonly used tools. Once a quant develops a strategy, it is up to the quant developers (who get bonuses from the IT pool, not the trading pool like regular quants) to implement it in C/C++/Erlang/O'Caml/etc. Programming is a useful tool, but without the math and econometrics, it won't get you much further than the real quants handing you a function to implement.