wilmott.com

Hello.I'm only on the start of my career - looking on opportunities, trying to choose the "best" one. The thing I'm curious about is - what is the general formula for Quant's bonuses, in terms of year's compensation. I understand that the bonus varies very much and depends on market, firm policy, time spent telling jokes to your boss etc. So I ask only for the most general range in more or less calm market and calm relations with boss. The answer I'm looking for is something like "if you did usual routine all the year and 2-3 new projects and it was an average year for the desk, you can expect your bonus to be from 1x to 2x your year salary". Can it be 3x to 5x? Or the thing are much worse and quants get less than 1x usually? And how does it progress with time (from junior quant to VP and to head of <something>) if it does...Thanks in advance!

The bonuses are proportional to revenues

Bad year, no bonus and out the door quicker than you can say gamma hybrid.

Take what you can get, not what you want.

It is not at all unusual for shops to really stiff even traders in their first year… kind of a right of passage or a buy-in to prove loyalty to the firm. A junior trader would generally be lucky to get ½ their base salary as bonus in their first year unless they did something truly astounding and profitable. To my eye and experience (from both sides of the management desk), your expectations for quant bonuses seem very, very high.

How likely is it that quants get a bonus of 5x their salary at any stage of their career? Surely this only happens to very few, and definitely not junior quants.

For junior quants that probability is zippo...unless their salary is minimum wage.Having been on the bonus pool distributor side a couple of times, I can tell you that 5 times is rare even for a very good trader. You would have to have a subscription to other bonus pools (e.g. loyalty incentive program for key employees, senior officer "bonus" bonus", etc etc) and add all of them up to get beyond 3 times of base.

I have quite a lot of experience of job-seeking for junior quant positions.From my experience, 15% of salary is low for a bonus, and 50% is high. Those are the lowest and highest percentages that I've seen (just some slender anecdotal evidence, I know.)Not sure why people are talking about "traders" when the OP seemed to asking about quants, not traders.CommodityQuant