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mekornilol
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Posts: 22
Joined: April 13th, 2013, 5:29 pm

How to transition into quantitative portfolio management

April 22nd, 2019, 8:44 am

Hi all,

For a while I have been thinking of thinking about the next step in my career.

I have been working as a rates&fx quant at the front office of a big American investment bank, but I have now started to realise that I would prefer not to keep fixing pricing/hedging issues for traders for the rest of my career, and rather move into quantitative portfolio management since I find the field very interesting.

Is there any specific knowledge of education that I need in order to get my foot into a quant portfolio management job? Advice from practitioners would be particularly helpful.
 
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bearish
Posts: 5180
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: How to transition into quantitative portfolio management

April 23rd, 2019, 3:51 am

It’s not a very easy question to answer. I just hired somebody with solid, but not spectacular, sell side quant experience into what I think is a moderately exciting buy side quant role. The things that counted the strongest in his favor were his prior academic math background (very high level, although entirely unrelated to what we do) and an inquisitive mind. He struck me as someone who would not merely solve a problem, but make a considerable effort to try to make sure that it stays solved. The fact that he had been doing at least moderately well working for people I know on the sell side was also duly noted. As for nuts and bolts, he is a strong Python programmer conversant with modern data science tools as well as traditional statistics, and he has contributed to large scale C++ libraries. I don’t think any single item listed above was critical, but the total package is appealing, at least to me.
 
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Alan
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Joined: December 19th, 2001, 4:01 am
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Re: How to transition into quantitative portfolio management

April 24th, 2019, 12:52 am

Here's a job opening in the US. I'd say the most important of the technical qualifications is "a strong background in econometrics and statistics". As a practical matter, you should be interested in equities at all levels of detail. 
 
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Amb
Posts: 4
Joined: July 4th, 2007, 3:11 pm

Re: How to transition into quantitative portfolio management

May 12th, 2019, 2:59 pm

Hi All

I am in a similar situation as Mekornilol. I have recently made few attempts in applying to buy-side roles, but despite having worked few years in the buy-side at the start of my career, after ten years in the sell-side, it seems that I cannot pass the HR filtering.

Would you think that certificates like ARPM or Yale / EDHEC could help? Or any online courses?

Thanks,
Amb