April 30th, 2004, 8:27 pm
There's no real 'vs.'; someone can be both, either or neither. "Structurer" says what they do, and "quant" says how they do it.A structurer works to create securities and conditional payoff combinations so that they are more desirable (=expensive) than the parts they are constructed from.A quant is someone whose approach to finance is quantitative, and whose tools include things like option pricing formulas, PDEs, Monte Carlo methods, econometrics, etc.I happen to be both: I routinely solve SDE and PDE systems, run Monte Carlo programs, optimise hedges, etc. in the process of structuring trades. Some of the other structurers I work with are attorneys, tax accountants, and marketers who certainly are not quants. Some of the quants I talk to are risk managers, traders, researchers, of which I'd say there are more than us quant structurers.