James,Just wondering why you decided to work on both the PRM and FRM?

<t>Hardfoul,HK is tough now. I'm not a quant, but more of a fundamental analyst, but everything is a bit tough. The bright spot is that many Asian funds are reporting good results, so interest in the region is huge and that is starting to translate into more jobs.Since you said you are going 'back' ...

Congrats on the job! The market is tough now!

This is just a general question, but without work experience, how do you know that you want to go into quant? With an MBA, why not get a few years of banking experience to see what working in a bank entails?

The salary aside, he is damn lucky to have gotten out of the back office!

<t>Generally, salary will go down when you move from the sell side (IB) to the buy side (fund), but there are exceptions.The major attraction for me on the buy side is that I'm actually generating research that is used to make investment decisions. On the sell side, you are simply trying to drive vo...

IB is an incredible overused and misused term. Can apply to everything from equity sales to issuing debt. Think of the basic break-down of businesses on either side of the Chinese wall.

<t>Thanks for catching my typo KR. You are also right about the legal issue. Disclosure and documentation issues are driving alot of activity in Asia now.So if I understand correctly, the company is AAA, has been AAA for a while so there have been no rating changes, is not gaining on the interest ra...

Sounds like a simple restructuring. Have worked on many many of these. Issue new debt to take out the old to lower interest costs and/or else to stretch your repayment schedule which then makes your coverage ratios much more attractive.

<t>The discussion so far seems to be marketable debt, but if you are talking about bank debt or even private placement, you have to think about breakage costs. After all, any covenant can be easily waved, especially in this day and age were everyone is looking for a deal. The breakage costs may cove...

Completely agree! One of the reasons I decided to go to work for the firm I did was because of the emphasis on training. If I'm not going to get the training, I might as well work for a smaller shop where I have more responsibility and less bureaucracy!

<t>That basically goes for almost every single country. If you don't have a work visa, forget it. That is why working abroad these days is difficult. With so many able candidates, banks don't need to go through the whole visa process.I've been working abroad for a decade and am complete fed up with ...

<t>I also work for one of the big firms (but am now on international assignment which seems to never end!) and we have a large number of internal training classes. I enquired about one of the more advanced classes and was told that there is no way that I could take one since they are running at abou...

I recently saw a public utility that had a PPA with the government. In the terms of the contract, certain risks were assumed by the government. One in particular was FX movements.The utility then goes out and buys a currency swap. ????

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