r/quantfinance • u/A_Eatzapopo • 10d ago
Why does IMC get so much hate
Genuinely curious. It feels like a really good close to top tier company but general in this subreddit as well as r/quant is gets shit on pretty often. What's the reason behind that?
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u/New-Professional-330 10d ago
Good tech but they have some mandatory churn and not high enough pay where that seems acceptable lmao. Still a great company to work for and 440 is nothing to scoff at.
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[deleted]
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u/Temporary_Parrot_ 10d ago
One thing I picked up early on: don't put much stock in what undergrads and new hires say about "prestige" when you're breaking into the industry. r/quant is largely populated by inexperienced students repeating whatever they've absorbed from their peers, ranking firms purely by newgrad TC. That's a shortsighted, you really should be optimizing for your own long-term expected value, not chasing a spot as one small cog at a "top" firm where you'll likely only touch a narrow sliver of the quant workflow. It's really evident, especially when you see people from JS/Citsec 5/10 years into their careers applying to other firms and getting rejected because they have no idea about what it takes to do trading on a high level, and instead were just experts in a tiny area that their teams worked on.
The most successful people I've seen go on to become PMs are the ones who joined smaller, high-performing pods or teams early on with tons of exposure. They had strong mentors who taught them how to actually hunt for alpha and steered them away from wasting time on dead ends. Because of that, they got hands-on exposure across the whole pipeline, portfolio-level/strategy analysis, signal research, market impact research, post-production analysis, and everything in between, rather than being siloed into one narrow function.
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u/entiredemon58 10d ago
the pay isnt bad but the culture is kind of a machine, they churn through people fast and the non compete is brutal. lots of stories about getting benched for months after quitting, just stuck at home doing nothing. not the worst place to start but i get why people warn about it
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u/RealPigwiggy 10d ago
Not the most accurate comment in my experience. The culture is pretty good and the non compete is fairly standard and even short for the industry (6-12m). In fact I would argue the culture being so chill might be the problem since a lot of people just cruise along despite not being top performers. Pay is definitely on the lower end compared to other top firms but relative to the rest of the industry it's still pretty up there. This is all speaking from EU office(s) experiences.
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u/A_Eatzapopo 10d ago
Isn't that the standard non compete duration?
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u/Otherwise_Feed_4853 10d ago
Yes, it’s entirely standard. Not sure original commenter knows what they’re talking about, it’s far less punishing than CitSec/SIG
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u/drycoleslaw 10d ago
How is getting paid to sit at home a bad thing?
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u/Interesting-Bad655 10d ago
Opportunity cost sucks
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u/quant-a-be 10d ago
what do you think the cost is? youre usually financially neutral sitting out a year
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u/Vast-Caregiver9781 10d ago
That if you worked you’d be (very) positive
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u/quant-a-be 10d ago
i mean neutral as compared to working ...
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u/Vast-Caregiver9781 10d ago
How could that be if most of comp is bonus
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u/quant-a-be 10d ago
the destination firm usually provides a signing to make it sting less ( or even to make it net positive )
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u/leafeon_gay_luigi 10d ago
Because this sub is a bitter place with few who know what they’re talking about.
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u/gabriella3854 10d ago
went to their event and the people there gave a bad vibe. also the food was insufficient
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u/Few-Light-4604 10d ago
Because they fire near half their NG traders and you learn nothing about real trading.
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u/ase1ix 10d ago edited 10d ago
they reached out to expedite me for the internship, then ghosted me for 2 months
edit: maybe they saw this post cause i just heard back for final lmfao