Quant, or quantitative analyst, is a particular person

Quant, or quantitative analyst, is a particular person working mainly in a financial institution, for instance, in an investment bank, a software firm or a hedge fund. The main obligation of a quant is to research, design and implement mathematical or econometrics models for derivative valuation, risk analysis, or trading strategies generation. Quants are therefore core employees because of their large influence on the growth of a firm.

How much should a candidate learn just before becoming a quant? There is however not really a huge certain answer, the depth some sort of quant's knowledge varies a lot around companies, for example, a front business office desk quant has to be good at math and have a strong market Hedge Fund Database sense, ever since (s)he works directly with investors; a quant developer needs to expert programming languages as (s)he should code scripts very quickly and accurately all the time; a statistical arbitrage quant aiming at finding trading signals depending on historical data understands econometrics and statistics very well. Generally speaking, an ideal relativement candidate should have knowledge on money, mathematics, statistics and programming more or less.

What degree is expected to certainly be a quant? Usually a PhD may be a necessity to find a quant job, a lot of jobs even require candidates managed to graduate with hard-core majors, for instance, physics or pure mathematics because nowadays financial institutions are becoming progressively more mathematical. However, there are some quant jobs available for masters, especially for those people using a master degree in financial engineering (MFE), although those jobs are not directly quantitative but mainly about danger analysis or trading support, they are really indeed good choices for starters.