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Are they a pure IT technology group in the back office? What are the organizations about Quant/Sales/Trading in Morgan Stanley?Thank you!

does morgan stanley have quants who are not risk managers?

MS has desk strategists (desk quants) like GS, I believe that they have their own reporting structure (i.e. are NOT on the desks PNL directly) but I could be wrong on this one...Deepvalue, why so down on the quants?

QuoteOriginally posted by: EscapeArtist999MS has desk strategists (desk quants) like GS, I believe that they have their own reporting structure (i.e. are NOT on the desks PNL directly) but I could be wrong on this one...It seems to me that that having quants have their own reporting structure is becoming something of an industry standard.

QuoteOriginally posted by: deepvaluedoes morgan stanley have quants who are not risk managers?Does anyone, any more?

IDEAS group is not technology group. Ask them when you go for interview and you would know. In fact you could be placed anywhere and that is part of the interview process. MS has strategists who publish newsletters to Hedge fund clients, prime broker quants who are mainly risk managers, desk quants who come up and tweak changes to models, interact with traders and there are quant traders who also write their own scripts but mostly trade (use their hunch in addition to the model signals to come up with Pnl).

QuoteOriginally posted by: losemindAre they a pure IT technology group in the back office? What are the organizations about Quant/Sales/Trading in Morgan Stanley?Thank you!It's a very diverse group, all the way from back-office database architects to Fixed Income quantitative modelers. It's not front vs. back office per se.

QuoteOriginally posted by: cougar91It's a very diverse group, all the way from back-office database architects to Fixed Income quantitative modelers. It's not front vs. back office per se.That's also another common pattern. The front office/back office dichotomy is going the way of the dinosaur, because it turns out to be an awful way of running an investment bank. Everyone forgets that the original idea behind the split was to have checks and balances so that no group gets too powerful. The risk management people were supposed to be separate from the front office people *precisely* so that they could be a powerful and independent check on the front office.The trouble is that what happened was that the front office got so much money and power, that they could run everything, which defeats the whole purpose of the system. The internal structure of investment banking is being massively rethought right now.

QuoteOriginally posted by: EscapeArtist999MS has desk strategists (desk quants) like GS, I believe that they have their own reporting structure (i.e. are NOT on the desks PNL directly) but I could be wrong on this one...There is a critical difference between desk strats at GS and MS - at GS desk strats are responsible for modelling, coding and using the strategies. desk strats at MS are pure users of models developed by other IDEAS quants and there is far more division of labor; whether this is good or bad is up for debate.

I know guys at MS, they certainly do a lot of programming. At GS most strats don't develop the models either... That being said that does NOT mean they don't spend a lot of time programming.