Hi all,
I am a front-office quant who has worked for a decent number of years on the trading desk of a big bulge-bracket bank in LDN, literally sitting beside the traders. During my time working in this environment I had the chance to interact with pretty much all stake-holders, trading, sales, quants, MO, finance, research and mgmt, gaining a pretty good idea of what different teams do in a IB and how they are perceived by the people at the top. At the same time I have grown massively disillusioned by what quants do on the sell-side these days, which is far from what a graduate student think they do, while at the same time I developed an interest for what Research does, and I am contemplating switching to that area. Basically I'd love to join a team where there is much less focus on technology and more on research and analysis; some quants I know already managed to jump boat internally (actually 20% of my quant graduate class are now in Research), and therefore I'm keen to consider doing the same. Unfortunately because of a # or reasons I cannot pursue this move internally, my team will never allow me to leave, therefore I was wondering if there is any headhunter here who has ever placed a quant into a pure research team (or know any headhunter who did it or would be interested in talking to me), so to gain some insight on how to get an interview in the filed and properly prepare for it (I would imagine less focus on coding and more on econometrics/time seris/macroeconomics/ML ?) Or simply any opinion on the matter would be useful, since I noticed outside my bank when I mentioned to ppl that I want to move to Research they all seem very surprised, while internally I have seen many quants taking this step, and all of them after a few years in research keep saying that that was the best decision they made in their life ... which does not surprise me at all.