7 ms·

School for quants - Inside UCL's Financial Computing Centre

53 points by bjdixon 15y ago

dustineichler 15y ago
I sometimes think HN is trolling me. I just had this conversation about Quants, finance etc. Is there anything like this in NY? I'd go.
- chrisaycock 15y ago
  You're looking for quant schools in New York? There are tons of those. The most common degree is the Master of Financial Engineering or equivalent. QuantNet maintains a list of the top programs in the US: https://www.quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/ https://www.quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/ But you should think very carefully about whether starting a new degree like this is worth it. Firstly, you'll notice that the tuition for all of these programs is very high, so there's a strong financial commitment to this. More importantly, an MFE is extremely specialized; it's not like getting an MBA or an advanced degree in computer science, both of which will open doors for many opportunities. An MFE leads to a very limited set of employers since these programs don't teach the general programming or statistics or even finance skills that are widely applicable to other industries. Lastly, without any prior experience in the field, a degree alone isn't very attractive to employers. And given the devastation that has occurred to the industry over the past few years, there are plenty of unemployed experienced people that you'll be competing with for jobs. So you can go into a ton of debt for a degree with limited opportunities that likely won't come anyway.
  - dustineichler 15y ago
    I should've said "unschool". Mia culpa. There's no way I'd go back for another degree at this point. I just might be interested in finance related programming.
    - SkyMarshal 15y ago
      Wilmott's Certificate in Quantitative Finance is the way to go in your case: http://wilmott.com/cqf.cfm http://wilmott.com/cqf.cfm http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Paul-Wilmotts-Financial-Magazine/ http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Paul...
      - dustineichler 15y ago
        Am I reading this right... Wilmott's program is roughly $20K. Ouch, but I guess the salary expectation would also be considerably different too. Thanks.
        SkyMarshal 15y ago
        Yeah, expensive, but the most highly regarded non-degree quant certification in the industry.
  - tikhonj 15y ago
    While the tuition is very high, a compromise is that the programs are surprisingly short. I know that at Berkeley--which has a fairly good MFE program, I think--the entire program only lasts one year. I think other programs are similar. This might make it more attractive than a cheaper but longer degree for some people.
inetsee 15y ago
This is a duplicate of a post that appeared four days ago. I thought the HN software caught duplicates like this.
- hndude 15y ago
  Do you have a link to it? I'd like to see the discussion on the post.
  - nik_0_0 15y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 4 Days ago and 0 comments. I'd say this 'repost' is warranted, was an interesting read for many people it seems.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  It catches duplicates only if they're identical, which they're not in this case. Same article, slight differences in the link querystring.
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  Dupe-catcher seems to treat fragment IDs as defining a unique URL: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685113 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685113 In fact, out of curiosity I tried to submit the story once again by munging the fragment ID. And was able to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687267 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687267
disgruntledphd2 15y ago
The main idea when you become a quant is that a computer is less prone to pitfalls than a human. Computers and humans are prone to different pitfalls. Humans have far too many biases to count - see for example, the works of Kahneman and Tversky and most of social psychology. Computers, on the other hand come with a whole host of different problems (perhaps because they're made by humans). The essential advantage a human has is the eye, which is extremely well adapted to picking out patterns. That, and an ability to go beyond the model or completely change it. This is something that computers have difficulty with (unless of course they're programmed for it - i think genetic algorithms claim to do this, but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about those). Nonetheless, i agree with the thesis that this kind of analysis will invade the rest of the social sciences. In fact, that's one of the reasons I learned to program.
- mdda 15y ago
  One of the things about financial markets is that large numbers of people are attempting to spot patterns, and eek out a profit from the patterns repeating. People are very good at this - which means that, over time, the number of profitable patterns reduces. Thus, to human eyes, market behaviour becomes noise : just like zip compression reduces a bytestream to being essentially white noise by taking out repetitive sequences. Computers are just the next step, crunching out the patterns until they are unexploitable (below the threshold of trading costs). The end result is that markets are a random walk - unless you are at the bleeding edge with faster machines, better latency, lower transaction costs, etc. Of course, an alternative to this is to do true bottom-up analysis, or invest in illiquid companies (like VCs do).
  - marchdown 15y ago
    This is a strong point, and the one rarely acknowledged at that. Many people stop at pointing out that efficient markets cannot be gamed, and almost all exploitable inefficiencies have been ironed out already. In correctly observing that most investment activities are fueled by greed and human biases, they incorrectly extend this to trading illiquid goods, which still have a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick.
  - 15y ago
hendrix 15y ago
I was thinking mining online data to gauge the feeling of the market awhile ago, looks like someone is actually doing it.
- comm_it 15y ago
  Check out http://bullbear.ca/ http://bullbear.ca/ - it was posted here before and is quite interesting. (I'm not involved with it)
  - radikalus 15y ago
    This looks pretty excellent. (Based on my playing with it for 30 seconds) I'm constantly underwhelmed by Bloomberg and would love to see more players in news aggregation/analysis space in finance.
    - comm_it 15y ago
      Yeah it's pretty impressive parsing of natural language to form financial opinions. The Bloomberg website or Bloomberg terminal? There's a big difference between the sorts of things you can do with those two, but the website leaves a lot to be desired! Google's finance pages are fairly good at aggregation.
elchief 15y ago
that's cool and all, but it seems like a waste of talent to learn all that stuff to shuffle money around and occasionally destroy the world economy. it's interesting that it's 80 percent men. it's obviously going to be very lucrative.
- comm_it 15y ago
  In what way is it a waste of talent? Additionally, how are they occasionally destroying the world's economy?
  - elchief 15y ago
    Are you kidding? Did you miss the whole 2008 financial crisis? The quants thought the could control risk, but couldn't. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?curr... It's a waste of resources as moving paper around does not contribute to economic growth, whereas say spending time and energy on AI or nano might.
siavosh 15y ago
Oh boy, the financial wizard porn articles are being peddled again, right when the markets are supposedly OK. I hope we all don't have such short term memories.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Markets aren't ok. "What’s really going on is something akin to an evenly matched tug of war that fails to move the ribbon tied around the center of the rope, giving the impression of harmony while powerful forces do silent battle until someone slips." [1] 1. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKOzWiTDseUE&refer=home http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...
SkyMarshal 15y ago
Wishful thinking, but I would love to see scientists like these searching for computational solutions to either stabilizing the financial system, or robustifying it and its essential ecosystem (government, banking, lending) against inevitable, reflexive instability. I wish they'd take a step up the hierarchy of needs from simply trying to find ways to make more money by predicting the future, to instantiating a safer, more robust, more resilient global economic system. If their funding and earnings need to be guaranteed by governments instead of offered by industry in order to incent and achieve that shift, then so be it. When the entire world and the lives of everyone in it is your lab because it's too complex for isolated simulation and testing, then re-evaluation of your priorities and conflicts of interest is in order.
ovi256 15y ago
The article was very interesting, with the exception of the occasional technical non-sense that made it suspect. I'm talking about things like: “Personally,” he replied, “I would run the connectors outside the cloud machine.” "her boss mentioned that he could never work out the simultaneous price and position of a trade" - price and position ? - this sounds like something written by someone who heard about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Then "a cosine formula from physics useful for measuring electromagnetic waves", yup, sure sounds smart.

53 points by bjdixon 15y ago

I sometimes think HN is trolling me. I just had this conversation about Quants, finance etc. Is there anything like this in NY? I'd go.

chrisaycock 15y ago
You're looking for quant schools in New York? There are tons of those. The most common degree is the Master of Financial Engineering or equivalent. QuantNet maintains a list of the top programs in the US: https://www.quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/ https://www.quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/ But you should think very carefully about whether starting a new degree like this is worth it. Firstly, you'll notice that the tuition for all of these programs is very high, so there's a strong financial commitment to this. More importantly, an MFE is extremely specialized; it's not like getting an MBA or an advanced degree in computer science, both of which will open doors for many opportunities. An MFE leads to a very limited set of employers since these programs don't teach the general programming or statistics or even finance skills that are widely applicable to other industries. Lastly, without any prior experience in the field, a degree alone isn't very attractive to employers. And given the devastation that has occurred to the industry over the past few years, there are plenty of unemployed experienced people that you'll be competing with for jobs. So you can go into a ton of debt for a degree with limited opportunities that likely won't come anyway.
- dustineichler 15y ago
  I should've said "unschool". Mia culpa. There's no way I'd go back for another degree at this point. I just might be interested in finance related programming.
  - SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Wilmott's Certificate in Quantitative Finance is the way to go in your case: http://wilmott.com/cqf.cfm http://wilmott.com/cqf.cfm http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Paul-Wilmotts-Financial-Magazine/ http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/08/13/Paul...
    - dustineichler 15y ago
      Am I reading this right... Wilmott's program is roughly $20K. Ouch, but I guess the salary expectation would also be considerably different too. Thanks.
      - SkyMarshal 15y ago
        Yeah, expensive, but the most highly regarded non-degree quant certification in the industry.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  While the tuition is very high, a compromise is that the programs are surprisingly short. I know that at Berkeley--which has a fairly good MFE program, I think--the entire program only lasts one year. I think other programs are similar. This might make it more attractive than a cheaper but longer degree for some people.

inetsee 15y ago

This is a duplicate of a post that appeared four days ago. I thought the HN software caught duplicates like this.

hndude 15y ago
Do you have a link to it? I'd like to see the discussion on the post.
- nik_0_0 15y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 4 Days ago and 0 comments. I'd say this 'repost' is warranted, was an interesting read for many people it seems.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
It catches duplicates only if they're identical, which they're not in this case. Same article, slight differences in the link querystring.
jamesbritt 15y ago
Dupe-catcher seems to treat fragment IDs as defining a unique URL: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3667166 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685113 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3685113 In fact, out of curiosity I tried to submit the story once again by munging the fragment ID. And was able to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687267 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687267

disgruntledphd2 15y ago

The main idea when you become a quant is that a computer is less prone to pitfalls than a human. Computers and humans are prone to different pitfalls. Humans have far too many biases to count - see for example, the works of Kahneman and Tversky and most of social psychology. Computers, on the other hand come with a whole host of different problems (perhaps because they're made by humans). The essential advantage a human has is the eye, which is extremely well adapted to picking out patterns. That, and an ability to go beyond the model or completely change it. This is something that computers have difficulty with (unless of course they're programmed for it - i think genetic algorithms claim to do this, but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about those). Nonetheless, i agree with the thesis that this kind of analysis will invade the rest of the social sciences. In fact, that's one of the reasons I learned to program.

mdda 15y ago
One of the things about financial markets is that large numbers of people are attempting to spot patterns, and eek out a profit from the patterns repeating. People are very good at this - which means that, over time, the number of profitable patterns reduces. Thus, to human eyes, market behaviour becomes noise : just like zip compression reduces a bytestream to being essentially white noise by taking out repetitive sequences. Computers are just the next step, crunching out the patterns until they are unexploitable (below the threshold of trading costs). The end result is that markets are a random walk - unless you are at the bleeding edge with faster machines, better latency, lower transaction costs, etc. Of course, an alternative to this is to do true bottom-up analysis, or invest in illiquid companies (like VCs do).
- marchdown 15y ago
  This is a strong point, and the one rarely acknowledged at that. Many people stop at pointing out that efficient markets cannot be gamed, and almost all exploitable inefficiencies have been ironed out already. In correctly observing that most investment activities are fueled by greed and human biases, they incorrectly extend this to trading illiquid goods, which still have a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick.
- 15y ago

hendrix 15y ago

I was thinking mining online data to gauge the feeling of the market awhile ago, looks like someone is actually doing it.

comm_it 15y ago
Check out http://bullbear.ca/ http://bullbear.ca/ - it was posted here before and is quite interesting. (I'm not involved with it)
- radikalus 15y ago
  This looks pretty excellent. (Based on my playing with it for 30 seconds) I'm constantly underwhelmed by Bloomberg and would love to see more players in news aggregation/analysis space in finance.
  - comm_it 15y ago
    Yeah it's pretty impressive parsing of natural language to form financial opinions. The Bloomberg website or Bloomberg terminal? There's a big difference between the sorts of things you can do with those two, but the website leaves a lot to be desired! Google's finance pages are fairly good at aggregation.

elchief 15y ago

that's cool and all, but it seems like a waste of talent to learn all that stuff to shuffle money around and occasionally destroy the world economy. it's interesting that it's 80 percent men. it's obviously going to be very lucrative.

comm_it 15y ago
In what way is it a waste of talent? Additionally, how are they occasionally destroying the world's economy?
- elchief 15y ago
  Are you kidding? Did you miss the whole 2008 financial crisis? The quants thought the could control risk, but couldn't. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?curr... It's a waste of resources as moving paper around does not contribute to economic growth, whereas say spending time and energy on AI or nano might.

siavosh 15y ago

Oh boy, the financial wizard porn articles are being peddled again, right when the markets are supposedly OK. I hope we all don't have such short term memories.

SkyMarshal 15y ago
Markets aren't ok. "What’s really going on is something akin to an evenly matched tug of war that fails to move the ribbon tied around the center of the rope, giving the impression of harmony while powerful forces do silent battle until someone slips." [1] 1. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKOzWiTDseUE&refer=home http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

SkyMarshal 15y ago

Wishful thinking, but I would love to see scientists like these searching for computational solutions to either stabilizing the financial system, or robustifying it and its essential ecosystem (government, banking, lending) against inevitable, reflexive instability. I wish they'd take a step up the hierarchy of needs from simply trying to find ways to make more money by predicting the future, to instantiating a safer, more robust, more resilient global economic system. If their funding and earnings need to be guaranteed by governments instead of offered by industry in order to incent and achieve that shift, then so be it. When the entire world and the lives of everyone in it is your lab because it's too complex for isolated simulation and testing, then re-evaluation of your priorities and conflicts of interest is in order.

ovi256 15y ago

The article was very interesting, with the exception of the occasional technical non-sense that made it suspect. I'm talking about things like: “Personally,” he replied, “I would run the connectors outside the cloud machine.” "her boss mentioned that he could never work out the simultaneous price and position of a trade" - price and position ? - this sounds like something written by someone who heard about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Then "a cosine formula from physics useful for measuring electromagnetic waves", yup, sure sounds smart.