I do not know much about HFT business but can make a guess that due to computer intensive nature of business with high power servers needed to have a microseconds edge over the competition, even quants making $400K before taxes, living in NYC, kids in private schools etc. etc. would not have much saved up to start a HFT boutique. They might have a fair shot if they team up with some non-investment industry "suit" as a partner who funds the start up while sits back and lets the quants run the show. Btw, reading this and other threads, I do conclude that quants with skills in TA, Data Analysis, Stat and Math modelling and further combining it all into coding and probably in several computer languages.............with so many tough field skills, the quant are pretty much like a "sweat shop" labor on the wall street i.e. heavily exploited.
Most quants don't make millions a year. Only the top quants do. There are some medium size banks and hedge funds recruiting top quants and programmers. They offer a salary base of $500,000 USD and up. I think the top quants at Jump Trading might get millions of dollars a year with bonus because the company is very profitable. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ...Senior model developers are less likely than front-office quants and traders to exceed $1m...The head of model development may make over a million at bigger intuitions like Goldman, J.P. Morgan and Citi,” Sternberg says. https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/311663/quant-compensation
Lol. I don't know. I was browsing some random websites couple weeks ago. I saw some ads. Some small hedge funds in NYC are recruiting quants and software developers. They offered a salary of $500,000 plus bonus I guess. At that salary, it must be top talents. I don't know software developers can get such high salary. I was shocked. I know average salary for software developers working in Amazon is only $160,000.
Hmm. $500 is probably total (fairly common, actually). Bases on the buy side are fairly low, base for a PM would be 150-200 in most places.
These are excellent pays! For someone choosing a career as a family practice doctor, median pay ~$189K. This is after finishing 4 years of undergrad at the top of their class, 4 years of medical school and 4 years of residency training and to add insult to injury, after accumulating $200K of student loan.
The key difference that shelf life of a quant (or a PM, for that matter), is way, way shorter than the career of an MD. Lifetime earning potential of any dentist is way higher than mine, for example, even though my annual take for some past years would raise some skirts. PS. Plus, a specialist in medicine makes that type of money easily, from what I hear.
Did I say HK? When were you last in the mainland? You got links and prices or are you going to give me pure opinion out of your ass and not facts?
The thing with those quants developers who develope "bread and butter" strategies for those trading firms should have profit sharing in their package. If it's their strategies that's rolling in the dough for the firm, it's not right that they are only paid 1/1000 of the money when the firm is making $billions of dollars of profit even if they are making $1 million. The structure of the business of a trading firm is very different from a doctor's practice where the profit potential in a quants trading firm grows exponentially and is more directly attributed to the quant developers' work so the structure of the pay should also be different in that the people who made that exponential growth of profit possible should also be sharing some portion of that exponentially-growing profit depending on his/her contribution. The base salary doesn't have to be high but it's the profit-sharing that's the key that truly reflects the quant developer's direct contribution and fairly remunerates it as such. If those suits don't like it, then they can just write the codes themselves.