Hello there,Does any one have any idea on "Product Control Groups" in BarCap? Or are they similar to just supports (with a qaunt twist)? With what I heard, people are exposed to creating structured products, hedging, validating the models against market data ...Bottom line, for a hard working quant, these are groups with amazing prospects. Is this true?Thanks in advance.

pcg at barcap do many things. you can look at it as two pieces - accounting stuff and mtm/pnl stuff.accounting - i generally ignore.mtm/pnl - very interesting. it is just like what you said, look at hedges, value the trades, look at risk number, compute pnl, and etc. for complex exotic products, barcap needs very smart people to do the job. they need guys somewhat smarter than average traders (or head traders) to make sure traders don't put shit on the books for revenue. but it is very hard to find good people to do this job since smart guys on wall street traditionally want to find jobs to arbitrage the bank for big buck.

QuoteOriginally posted by: LucetiosHello there,Does any one have any idea on "Product Control Groups" in BarCap? Or are they similar to just supports (with a qaunt twist)? With what I heard, people are exposed to creating structured products, hedging, validating the models against market data ...Bottom line, for a hard working quant, these are groups with amazing prospects. Is this true?Thanks in advance.this doesn't correspond to the impressions i have from talking to people in that team

>>This doesn't correspond to the impressions i have from talking to people in that team.Then what have you heard? Don't just leave us hanging.

Hi - I just heard about a role there that was filled...Are Product Control Groups common in the industry? This group doesn't even exist at a large bank that I know about where traders do their own P&L & pricing- after all if the traders don't understand anomolies in the pricing how can they hedge properly?. Can someone post common bases + expected/average bonuses for this group? It seems that these people doing the P&L only have lifespans until IT systems are put in place to automate from what I understand....

don't think there is a standard on product control role. it really depends on the organization.citivp - who is this bank that trader do their own official p&l? this is bad for the bank and good the trader.

I am not at liberty to tell you this, but I can assure you that they are honest and it is all reviewed properly

agreedpcg at barcap (like many banks) don't have much power... generally even if you are smart you will be railroaded by the traders who are usually just as smart, more experienced and also more powerful.so a frustrating job with a lot of boring routine work.the pcg quant's are less respected than the seperate quant analytics group which reports to a high level md who is part of the markets (i.e. front office) group; these guys do the more interesting stuff and are better protected and respected