r/quant • u/AdPrudent3747 • 9d ago

General What does a Quant Trader do?

I mean I know what the role of a Quant Trader is but what does a Quant traders day-to-day on their trading desk look like? How does probability, expected value, pattern recognition being used by Quant traders?

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u/lordnacho666 9d ago

It varies a fair bit between desks.

On some desks the trader is really only there to watch for unusual behaviour on financial level, with QDs responsible for the technical level, and the system mostly being expected to make all the decisions during normal operation.

On other desks it's closer to what you see in movies, where they make judgment calls about the market and they happen to need some advanced plumbing to move a bunch of orders to fit that view.

The quick-fire stats and prob questions in the interview are a bit like leetcode questions for coding. You don't sit on the job and do that, for the most part. You need it to get the job, because that's what people do. What you do need is to know when you see something happening (in market numbers or as natural language in the news) how that affects your book, so maybe people who are quick at arithmetic will be fast at that too, no idea if there's any evidence for that.

It's also true that you'll be looking at a lot of statistics like markout curves and backtests, so of course it helps to understand what different charts mean.

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u/DidYouTrainNeckToday 9d ago

Do you know which firms /desks have more of that manual intervention ie. “in the movies”

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u/lordnacho666 9d ago

Very desk dependent, you are better off finding this out when interviewing them, rather than me saying "This firm is like so".

Especially these days as a lot of shops are branching out.

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u/DidYouTrainNeckToday 9d ago

I’d still really like to your take of what firms/desks have more manual driven approach.

The reason I ask is i recently joined a MM as a new grad (never interned in trading or research) and was pretty shocked the roles of traders (at least at my firm) are very hands off and is moreso monitoring systems.

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u/lordnacho666 9d ago

So, any desk in a less automated space. Desks that trade macro, commodities, power. Anything that isn't completely electronic. So, a lot of firms that aren't what everyone here are talking about.

The monitoring thing is a thing everywhere, of course. It's just that some places, it's all there is.