"Quant researchers spend all their time coding while junior traders do real quant work"

I started my career as a hedge fund quant in London. I moved into discretionary trading so that I could do more than just write code.

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Your experience will vary from firm to firm, but in my last fund, quant researchers spent nearly all of their time coding and almost none managing positions. As a quant, you feel like your mandate is not to make money yourself, but to aid in the generation of PnL for your portfolio manager. You have no large exposure to a positive PnL and, while you have no direct exposure to a drawdown either, you may be in danger if your pod gets shut down. You also have to try and explain complex mathematical problems to people who don't even understand first level undergraduate mathematics.

At the same time, the junior traders being hired are becoming increasingly quant-like; they now need to understand a lot of the mathematics and statistics, plus they need to code at a much better standard than junior traders in the past, who only needed to pass Python 101. 

The day to day of a junior trader is to use code to understand the markets and predict some portion of the future in order to generate PnL... sound familiar? 

This is why I have become a trader too. The lines are blurred but traders get many benefits. We're first order observers of the market while quants are second order. We have skin in the game and actively shape the trading sessions at our fund while, as a quant, your work can feel particularly futile if your research isn't going well.

The only real difference between a quant and a junior trader today is how much time is spent coding versus managing positions. Moving from one role to the other, therefore, isn't the jump you might expect.

Phil Hennessey is a pseudonym

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