Beginning

2007-12-25T16:25:00.000-08:00

A long time since the last time I wrote here, but I got a lot of busy weeks recently.

Coming back to the point, the idea of this blog is to try to keep a record of my advances towards a possible "quant path", that is, leaving the basic sciences (Physics, in my case) to become one of the "rocket scientists" working in Wall Street (or WS-like places).

Nothing better than keeping a control of how things started. If someday I really become one of those guys making some money and trying to figure out the way the finance world works, or should work, I REALLY should pay a dinner to a friend of mine. It's an old friend from the starting years in college that I've lost contact with for a long period of time, and got in contact again two years ago through our network of friends.

He is one those self-made guys, who had a complicated path to reach where he is now, and is certainly one of those examples of hard-working and success to keep in mind. But, concerning the "quant thing", the point is that we started discussing recently some "economical issues" (he is working as a financial guy), and I realized how dummy I was in this area. In this day, I decided learning some stuff about Economics.

The best way to doing so was some "public understanding of science-like" books, in particular the "classics" The Undercover Economist and Freakonomics. Both were very nice readings, and worked to show me that unlike my previous prejudices, Economics can be really interesting, cool and, in some sense, scientific!

But up to this point it was just a curiosity, nothing else. And it continued to be until the day in which I received from him a fwd of a email with an article commenting on How I Became a Quant, a book on the mathematical elite of WS and like telling their stories on how they made a turn in their careers. The article let me curious enough to search for the term and the kind of jobs quants do.

During the "research", my first stop was the book My Life as a Quant, by Emanuel Derman, an ex-physicist (Columbia PhD) who turned to finance during the 80's, and worked with Fisher Black (who should have shared the 97' Economics Nobel Prize) at Goldman Sachs. It was "consumed" in a couple of days, and I "tasted the blood": I've noticed that it is possible doing stuff which are intellectually challenging that is no basic science, with a lot of room to innovations, and that pays back!! Moreover, more than a couple of times I felt the same kind of feelings that led him to leave Physics...

Still unsure as I was (I am...), I went through How I Became a Quant. Nice collection of articles, some obviously better than others, but in general good. In particular, the ones by Neil Chriss, Ronald Kahn, Gregg Berman, Peter Carr, Peter Jaeckel, Steve Allen, and Mark Kritzman are highly recommended! The reading was extremely pleasant, and it worked to look backwards for more technical references on the topics. Moreover, in parallel, I was looking for more information in internet websites and blogs (post about that soon).

Making a long history short, after cross checking information from many websites, blogs, books, etc, I realized that the very first step in the way of becoming a quant is (obviously), learning much more about finance. It seems that the bible in this area is the book by John Hull, Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives, which I am going through right now. Moreover, taking the dust of my old abilities with C and C++, I'm also going through Duffy's Introduction to C++ for Financial Engineers (although really checking first C Programming Language). It's about those books that I'm going to write a lot more in the next future here.

Well, that's it by now. Soon I shall come back. It's going to be a busy 2008! :-)

On becoming a quant

2007-11-07T02:57:00.000-08:00

Piece of advise by Mark Joshi.

Why this blog?

2007-11-07T02:29:00.001-08:00

Going directly to the point: I'm a graduate student in Science (Physics), and I am seriously considering the option of leaving Science, sooner or later, to become "a Quant". For obvious reasons, I am not identifying myself here, since I still like very much doing Science, and it might well be that I continue on it and forget completely about this stuff of quantitative finance.

Anyway, the point of this blog is that I can keep to myself a full record of my activities towards finance, as well as notes, tips, references, articles, etc, etc. Moreover, hopefully there will be some few readers that can help me on my way with suggestions and comments.

The idea is keeping an almost daily record of the things I could read and learn during my "free time" (although a grad student is supposed to have none), and maybe, from time to time, being able to see what I have achieved and what are the next steps, having the past activities in perspective.

Well, that is it for the moment. Let's see where the random walk takes us in the medium and large periods of time.

Random Walk to Quant Finance

Beginning

On becoming a quant

Why this blog?