i have completed my engineering and do have any interest in that how to enter in trading ? like working for fund houses , i came around CFA , will that be enough? i dont have any prior job experience and currently 28 age , how should i approach ? but i have spent approx3-4 yrs full time trading and seen success and failure , i know trading is not counted as experience but how should i approach in life now ?
It won’t be easy considering your profile. I don’t have much idea about domestic ones but I have seen how the hiring process goes for international ones like Fidelity or Blackrock. They tend to go for fresh Engineering grads at top unis who are good at maths and programming. Trading experience of the applicant, especially discretionary trading experience, is not even considered. This is because it is assumed that it is much easier to teach trading to someone who is good at maths/coding/data than it is to teach maths/coding to someone who is good at trading. Another reason is that these funds often trade in dozens of different markets, you can maybe have experience in 1-2 markets, but the rest you’d have to learn anyway.
Also, from what I have seen among my friends, jobs at these firms are supposed to be you first job after college. Most people tend to leave them for FAANG in their late 20s or early 30s where the pay is lesser but still good and the work-life balance is much superior.
I should mention that I am mostly talking about “quant” roles as these are the ones that come for placements and offer the highest CTCs. Discretionary traders are often a minority in these firms, but the picture may be very different for domestic ones.
Hmm curious. Don’t they need PhD in mathematics to be considered for a quant role ?
We have all heard the story of Jim Simons hiring only Math/Physics PhDs. That may have been because Simons being a professor was probably more comfortable hiring postgrads, but this is not at all usual.
As for the rest of the quant industry, they don’t like hiring postgrads at all. In my college, quant firms that come only open their roles to compsci/math undergrads. On some requests from our side, they sometimes open these roles to electrical/mechanical/other undergrads but never to masters or doctoral students in even compsci. The logic is that if a student is good, he won’t be in academia after a bachelors degree. So if you want to hire the best of the best, you have to hire them in undergrad only.
Even in top us unis like MIT/Princeton, firms like citadel/jane street hire almost exclusively from the undergrads. They often have internships for sophomores/juniors that pay more stipend that a fulltime job in FAANG. The objective is to hire the best talent before any other company gets to them.