<t>There is a lot more industrialisation and commoditisation within FX, 90% of the FX options market is pure vanilla. There are more exotic structures in IR and the opportunity to constantly update your models. The scale of the mathematics is also different (as an example FX is scalar, IR is a vecto...

<t>I met the guy running the LSE risk and stochastics course and was certainly not impressed. While LSE may give you a theortical founding in martingale pricing and interest rate models, this course will lack the foundational C++ and mathlab implementation skills you will need, which is something em...

<t>I'm actually researching a couple of deals for Edf on their long term energy structured products side. Edf is big in trading in the UK, but quite a lot of the market has disappeared as desks have shut down. Edf now concentrates on managing its hedges, rather than active / speculative market makin...

Forget LSE, try Imperial

<t>HiGraduated in 1999 (back then not from Judge Institute but from Faculty of Economics and Politics). Work in FO/MO for a small project finance / risk transfer business. I always believed that Cambridge Finance Mphil did not prepare me adequately in terms on programming skills knowledge, or quant ...

<t>What's your background? Model validation requires some out of the box thinking and some (portfolio) replicating skills. Most of the exotics are priced using models which are different from those used to price vanilla's eg for exotic IR swaptions, use of two factor spot rate models is common, but ...

<t>Congradulations on your move. You'll find London very open and with a range to suit everyone. If you are working in the City you probably want to live close by (in London speak that means no more distance than Zone 2). Hip areas to rent include Bermondsey (just south of the river), Islington, and...

<t>The City Cass course is well recognised, however more interesting is an MSc in Financial Engineering from Birkbeck. The lecturers there are gaining traction and they have a good Stochastics faculty. Birkbeck is certainly moving up in the world and will soon have the same reputation as Cass. (I DI...

<t>A close friend recently interviewed for an entry position as an equity derivatives developer, he is pretty good at C# and they grabbed him. He does not know the first thing about jump diffusion processes and the like though so I guess CSFB is looking for good developers within equity development ...