Hi Guys,Was just thinking about about the occupy wall street protest and its growing strength day by day I think at last the reality has reckoned to all of us but a few delusional folks here that the financial markets and quants profession are no more root to salvation (or for that matter for earning one's day to day bread and butter!) in life (as various people have already mentioned) and we are moving towards just like other normal profession such as retail banking professionals, people in other walks of life such a store chain manager and so on. I was just thinking of compiling the requirements for new age quants for both who need to adapt to this new era as well as people who need to look for new avenues. So what can be these.. Some of them which I can think of am writing below, others can post their own list1.Growing use of documentation and need increasingly to work with others- A lot of our work time is going to involve lot of documentation and work with other people in other departments who do not think highly of us (in fact might be looking down), so this requires the first and foremost quality of being humble and willingness and ability to do some of clerical job2. Hedge Accounting - For people looking for new avenues and for people willing to enhance their marketability hedge accounting can be a good move as this requires a sound knowledge of basic derivatives instruments and understanding of some of the basics of financial markets (surprisingly this might be a bit tricky for some of the people here who are more into exotic thinking!)3. Revisiting mathematical foundations (especially the probability ones) - Lot of people in this forum need to revisit their mathematical foundations especially the probabiloity one . How it can be done and especially what topics is very much debatable and how to move forward in this direction 4. Identifying Complimentary Skill sets - I have seen some of the people moving from quant to mobile computing (developing apps for iphones , android and windows phone). So are there skill sets which can be honed and can help as an emergency measure.. What are others views in this forum...

Before thinking too hard on this purported New Age, are you sure this time the celebrated "trickle down" principle can't work?The "trickle down" is when everybody who's fired from Firm A goes to a Firm A' that has a slightly less good reputation.And only those who are in the bottomest firms (you know who you are..) really need find something else to do.

I agree with you but here there is a fundamental assumption that firm A' will be there but if that assumption does not hold ( as many in this forum can vouch) then?

That point is also true that only bottomest of the lot require new skills but what if bottomest of the lot make 50% of total population? An Einstein does not require any body and will force God to open new avenues but the problem is Statistical in nature that not everybody can be an Einstein. What's about average who are caught in flux of time. What's about for them? Any answers on this

Nikhilessar, I think you have a very good question but I am afraid I do not know the answer... yet.I would have started from trying to understand that the New Age is going to be and how it will be different to the old one. Then it would be very easy to figure out the required skils.

Is the new age the Ice Age ?

Plastics.

It looks to me like monolithic financial institutions are going to less profitable in the future, i.e. megabanks. There are two drivers for this, firstly regulation will explicitly prevent a single bank from operating retail, investment and trading divisions. Secondly governments have woken up to the danger of banks being financial hubs around which the spokes of saving, debt and money-creation all revolve. So I dont think that it will be allowed to continue in its current form (which is quite right IMO).This will mean banks breaking up by selling off or partitioning investment and trading operations from retail. Regulations may also mean that it is easier for trading and speculation to occur in prop. shops and hedge funds than in large financial institutions. This will however decrease the profitability of these operations and the banks themselves, since it will no longer be possible to punt with deposit money and there will be a loss of efficiency due to economies of scale. So the financial landscape may start to resemble itself in years past, before the repeal of Glass Steagall and before the 'Big Bang' in the city of London.What would this mean?- More smaller firms- Smaller bonuses and compensation packages- Longer term focus on careers in the sector (less retiring at 30 etc...)- Reversion to the 'old boys network' of model hiring?- Innovation?- Greater focus on compliance and technologies to reduce the overhead of compliance.- Speculative leveraged trading will involve smaller sums of money- Greater mistrust of all things quant - Greater reliance on computers and numerical methods as opposed to analytic methods and assumptions? ('Assumption is the mother of all f*ckups')These are just a few of the things I have been thinking. The trap to avoid: Is to believe that because things are bad now that everything quant is consigned to the ashes and that finance itself is finished. I think that certain aspects of the old model (untrammeled OTC derivates trading, complicated stochastic calculus, massive bonuses etc...) might be significantly curtailed, but that does not mean that other developments will not occur. People are still going to want to play the game and quant skills will still be useful to do it.