Ah, sorry about that MattF. I sent that response without it being finished.Thanks for your feedback and your honesty. Can you think of some things that I could do to make myself a stronger candidate?

The best way is to do a Masters in Finance at a good school ...Of course I appreciate that may be very difficult. It's not that you acquire information you couldn't otherwise get, it's more that you now look like the sort of person they should be hiring and you can demonstrate your interest in finance.

QuoteOriginally posted by: MattFThe best way is to do a Masters in Finance at a good school ...Of course I appreciate that may be very difficult. It's not that you acquire information you couldn't otherwise get, it's more that you now look like the sort of person they should be hiring and you can demonstrate your interest in finance.Tbh I was thinking similar things, just didn't want to discourage the OP as they clearly have talents most of the wannabees here don't. Also they may consider areas like machine learning or sentiment analysis as paying for an MFE is only going to cause strain. I also think they need to consider that there's more to life than finance.Unfortunately though, of course, firms don't hire by going "they're brilliant at something let's find a job for them", It's more like "you've got what we need?" "Well I'm brilliant at maths, you're looking for maths grads". "ok, You say you're brilliant at math, but that's not what we asked. What skills help us?".The environment for quants is 180 from when I did it, where PhD was preferable to MSc.Now MFEs are picked ahead of PhDs in many cases. Also, it sounds like many of those grads have a PhD, which solidifies their case and makes the OP's situation vwtv difficult. It's also just plain harder to become a quant.Finance being "back in business", as some people (usually not in finance) say, is a bit of a fudge and acting like as if no recession happened is a bit like talking to someone as if they're your best friend only minutes after punching them, then complaining that just because you apologised that the dispute is over. Some areas like corporate finance are recovering because they weren't blamed for the recession but derivatives is different. A lot of roles pricing complex derivatives will have vanished in favour of "simple is better" modelling, meaning less needs for PhDs. Unfortunately it's not like eras gone by when you could easily find something that's not as challenging as a "safety net" when things like this happen. And MFEs are a) perceived as more focused and b) saturating the market.I'm not 100% convinced a PhD like this is out if favour just might have difficulty matching themselves to a role eg is there something in machine learning that may be more suitable and where they'd be in demand - again could be tricky. One thing is that, while finance people tend to understand that looking for a quant role is vastly different from looking to work in back office, say, the equivalent isn't true for IT and "Big Data" where I know some idiots that have been in server maintenance for 10 years that actually don't know the difference between server maintenance jobs, programming jobs, software engineering, IT compliance - not easy to deal with if you're looking to network. One would hope the OP finds a decent recruiter that knows this stuff.These days the biggest issue postgrads face isn't so much lack of experience but more that matching yourself to a role ie "career hunting" takes months, if not the guts of a year or two, where everything like matching your personality to the job environment and technical and commercial considerations come in. Some people might scoff at the suggestion but I know many graduated PhDs still doing shitty unrelated work 2-3 years later for these reasons (albeit sample size is small). Granted one struck me as a bit of a dope (she applied for ONE JOB in her final year and has zero clues about how anything works) but it can happen even with the best guidance - the OP will need to be prepared for the strains at home and in family that go with that especially if you have a family like mine, full of c***s that know nothing about maths careers or finance but think they're founts of wisdom and that I know nothing.