The days of quant graduates flocking to the trading floor are over. What caused the shift? Traders Magazine Online News, May 26, 2015 Penny Crosman Quants, with their computer, math and statistical modeling skills, are as sorely needed as ever in financial services, but their role has changed dramatically since the heady pre-crisis days. Instead of pricing complex derivatives and helping to fuel exotic markets, they're more likely now to apply their massive brainpower to comparatively mundane activities like risk management and stress testing. At Carnegie Mellon University, only 45 percent of the December 2014 graduates of the school's quant program (it's technically called Master of Science in Computational Finance) moved on to front-office trading roles, down from 60 percent a decade earlier, said Steve Shreve, the school's Orin Hoch Professor of Mathematical Sciences. By contrast, a quarter of last year's class went into risk management, up from 15 percent. What are the top Quant Schools? Traders gathered an elite panel of judges to choose the best school for tomorrow's trading quants. "These days the big banks have consolidated and quant jobs there are much more structured," said Emanuel Derman, head of risk at Prisma Capital Partners, a professor at Columbia University, one of the original quants and author of "My Life As a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance." "There's lots of regulatory work, lots of 'model risk.' It's not as exciting as in the old days, I believe." The changes reflect the industry's postcrisis emphasis on playing defense, also borne out by who else banks have been hiring (compliance specialists, largely) and where they spend their tech dollars. http://www.tradersmagazine.com/news...T=tradersmagazine:e4473266:1175783a:&st=email
An unbelievable amount of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets need to be converted to C++/C# client server programs. Additionally, they need to go through model validation for compliance. No more "doing your own thing" as long as it's profitable.