can someone seriously explain to me what the purpose of a quant is? to me it looks like someone who backtests data, comes up with some screwed black box trading model that applies large leverage, and then hopes the market doesnt trade 3 or more standard deviations, so they dont have to blow up the fund... i mean seriously thats what I think, no jokes, whats the truth?
This question has been asked and answered on numerous occasions, but even the experienced ET epsilon semi-morons still appear to have no idea, so maybe that is asking a bit too much for a noob like yourself to know: In order to avoid repeats, Read what one very smart ex-Quant has to say: http://www.markjoshi.com/downloads/advice.pdf
Sorry Anna, but I did my MBA thesis on the Black-Scholes option valuation model and formula years ago. I told Surf this at the NAG forum/conference.
No doubt, men everywhere are breathing a collective sigh of relief. Women, on the other hand, are almost certainly exhibiting a pallor in the ashen-gray family.
... and I built a Vasicek model in my MBA program. Definitely not the stuff most MBAs do but at some schools it is an option. I also did some "quant lite" work in fixed income for a few years - risk and strategy stuff. Probably the most common profile of my coworkers was MBA or MS finance with engineering/CS/ or other technical undergrads and at least some progress on the CFA program. I did have one boss who was a math phd but he was the exception. I am not saying this is the normal quant profile - both places I worked had some groups like this and some more traditional phd-heavy quant groups that did the hardcore model building. But you can get into the same neighborhood with an MBA, and I thought the work we did was actually more fun.
Agree that a decent Masters program in Financial Engineering beats the certificates hands down. For someone who can only do this part time, besides a full-time job, there are plenty of part time Masters program out there, although I dont recommend doing it remotely. By the way Wilmott is a very respected guy despite the fact he tries to sell his stuff, whats wrong with that. Go to the Willmott quant finance forums you will see guys posting such as Patrick Hagan, Carr, Pieterbarg to just name a few. Lol, unless you work in the industry you might not even recognize the names of those innovators and leaders of the field. Wilmott has recognized the nitche by selling "education" to those who could not get into the top programs or dont want to put in the time (1.5 years plus). At least his stuff is real not the cheap crap 90% of snake oil salesmen try to market here at ET.
Lol, maybe you should think a bit harder...maybe he just does not want the same amount of losers at his forum than what is sneaking around here. (not suggestion you belong to the latter). By the way, I think the normal Wilmott quant forum is free to join, no special affiliation needed. So, not sure what you are even talking about.
Lol, thanks for educating us on monte carlo methods and what you remember form the lectures. However, to clarify m.c. is pretty much the simplest solution technique in quantitative finance. Nothing gets easier than that. One notch higher are variance reduction techniques but also those support m.c. What quant programs are really about is stochastic calculus and the solving of partical differential equations. But thanks, Marketsurfer, for keeping us all on top of the latest developments ;-)