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beeliner
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Joined: March 28th, 2003, 1:59 pm

quant vs structurer

April 30th, 2004, 3:08 pm

Structurers are people who make "structured products" by combining products, right?And quants are ...what, programmers?I thought someone said structurers code as well...???
 
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Watchman
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Joined: November 13th, 2003, 1:52 pm

quant vs structurer

April 30th, 2004, 3:15 pm

depends on your institution I expect.At Watchman Towers, the structurers are somewhere between quants and marketers - whilst they don't interact directly with clients, they need to understand client requirements and how to meet them in addition to a detailed understading of the products. Something like an "applied" quant rather than "Pure" quant perhaps.
 
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Baltazar
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Joined: January 21st, 2004, 4:27 pm

quant vs structurer

April 30th, 2004, 4:17 pm

would you say it's financial engineering, in the technical/building/designing sense of engineering?That's the way i feel about that, but i'm not sureB.
 
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Watchman
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Joined: November 13th, 2003, 1:52 pm

quant vs structurer

April 30th, 2004, 4:26 pm

I'd say the structurer is the architect to the quants' structural engineer and marketer/salesman's interior designer.
 
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exotiq
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Joined: October 13th, 2003, 3:45 pm

quant vs structurer

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.