Customer Reviews

How I Became a Quant: Insights from 25 of Wall Street's Elite

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4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although people may argue why this and that person was not on the Wall Street's quant elite list, I'd say that the authors picked an amazing list of 25 quants, representing quantitative equity portfolio management, market microstructure, derivatives pricing, and risk management. Yes, as you may not be aware of, there are two types of quants, one in quantitative equity/market microstructure and one in derivatives pricing/risk management. They are somewhat related, but use very different tools. The former is less well known until early 2000s (the boom of market neutral hedge funds) and the latter is overly covered in academic programs since late 1990s.

It's very interesting and inspiring to learn how these 25 quants became quants. Many with physics/math background came to finance, due to the cut of funding in hard science after the cold war. Many people became quants because of "accident". Few people came to this world because they had wanted to do quant finance from the beginning. Of course, it's all different now. Smart and ambitious university students aim at quant finance from day one. There are also many graduate computation finance/financial engineering/math finance programs to choose from, so you don't have to go through a lengthy PhD program.

Life is highly path dependent (as many of the 25 quants said in the book). Choose your career careful, but more importantly, choose something that you really enjoy (and hopefully, also something you are really good at) - this is one of the key messages in the book. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone with a keen interest in joining the quant finance world.

A collection of first person narratives from some of the leaders of the quant revolution in financial markets over the last 3 decades. Some of the story telling seemed perfunctory, but in other cases it was downright inspiring. Most provide insight into the workings of Wall Street and the more exotic instruments and strategies in play in today's markets, and as such were of value to this non-professional reader.

Poor editing became annoying; words were not only misspelled, they were actually missing and had to be inferred from context.

Emmanuel Derman's "My Life as a Quant" provides only one story and not 25, but it is told with deep personal insight and a sense of humor. It also provides more technical discussion of a number of the important financial models developed and utilized in the market since the 1980s. For those interested in understanding how a hard scientist transitions from academia into finance, I would recommend it as a much better starting place than "How I Became a Quant."

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

It seems almost every chapter is a variation on this answer to the question:

i) You don't become a "quant", because nobody can really defin what that is, but thanks for asking
ii) I got where I am today through skill, work, and (lots of) luck
iii) here's my well-polished story
iv) story

Still, it's a good read, mostly. Many chapters are interesting for the further reading they suggest, or questions they raise.

I am one of those in a quantitative science field who might consider moving into finance. Based on the book title, the book is an obvious must-read for somebody in that situation. However, I must warn that you cannot get much out of the book unless you are somewhat familiar with the very basic terms and concepts of finance, as most essays do describe authors' endeavors in the financial field. I have absolutely no working knowledge of finance and could get nothing out of reading when financial concepts are discussed. If you can, it is recommended that you obtain a bit of basic financial knowledge from other sources before reading this one. A vast majority of essays are not written for pure finance novices; they are rather targeted toward young economics or finance majors or just those already in the field who want to reminisce with buddies.

The quality of writing varies substantially from one essay to another. On the one side of the spectrum are terse biographical sketches of how some became successful quants, merely listing their past projects. On the other side are rather philosophical proses of how "failed" PhDs in other quantitative disciples found themselves home in finance. That makes the book overall appearance of being incoherent, but it is still useful since we can read about a couple dozen different experiences.

Editing clearly lacks rigor as there are numerous typos and uncorrected grammatical mistakes - a minutia that gives rise to an impression that the book could have been much better given a proper attention and direction. However, for someone like myself in a situation similar to some authors who chose to jump ships, being able to read on their experiences is very valuable, since there is so much uncertainty. You could also form a vague picture of what a quant might do on the day-to-day basis, as well as what skills and activities in academic settings may be similar and transferable in corporate finance. Overall, this is a useful read but could have been a more pleasurable experience for myself.

This book gives 24 chapters of stories from different people. These quants are learned and respectable guys: many of them have PhD's from top business schools. Some of them stumbled upon the world of Finance quite by chance and others wanted to be there from when they were in nappies.

I struggled through the book. Some of the chapters are good and some are really boring as the authors ramble on like true academics about how many papers they have written and which journals they have been in. Some also enjoy name-dropping a lot which I found irritating. Other chapters are just simply too complex for the man in the street. An example is: "I notice that the straightforward code in Numerical Recipes only goes to a fairly low number of dimensions: 6! Whilst they tabulate the required primitive polynomials modulo two up to dimension 160, the equally crucial initialisation numbers are only there up to dimension 6..." Really?

I am sure this means a lot to some mathematicians and is elegant and beautiful but I struggled to get excited about it. I have completed 3 years of Engineering Maths and that was enough thanks.

Overall, I would recommend reading it only if you are considering a career deep in the quantitative modelling division of Goldman Sachs or something. If you are just an average Joe trying to pick stocks through a bit of fundamental and technical analysis in order to build up some extra cash on the side, give this one a skip...in my humble opinion.

The stories are pretty good at first but they start to all sound very similar after the first 5 or 6.

I found the book to be interesting not from a professional-technical perspective (i.e. no differential equations in the book), but from a more personal perspective. Though the stories may come off as overly polished or dramatized as some reviewers hint, the stories nonetheless do not fail to inspire readers to think big. Even only from this inspirational perspective, this book is worth reading.

This book is not intended to reveal some trade secrets or interview tips; rather it is intended to show how some great people in finance survived despite difficulties and challenges in the increasingly competitive industry.

What I also liked about the book is that it gave a broad, almost historical perspective on how the financial industry has developed to the point where it is now. This may be helpful for those of us who are just trying to understand what people mean by "financial industry" or even finance professionals who are interested in knowing what other people in the same industry are thinking.

The book is a collation of short professional autobiographies by some financial practitioners. They belong to different vintages (some entering the field as early as the 60s, some as late as the 90s), fulfill different roles (structured products, risk management, portfolio management and alpha generation), and have various degrees of prominence in the field. This variety of view alone makes it an interesting and non-monotonous reading. I am under the impression that the public perception of quants is skewed by the Berman-Taleb-Wilmott clique, and this sample is certainly more representative of quantitative finance professionals. I also found the book more instructive than "The Quants" by S.Patterson, which falls into sensationalism and artificial story-building. There are some negatives: some authors delve into a few too many birthdays of their children, and others are just providing a longer version of their C.V. (with celebratory music in the background). Aside from selecting the chapters' authors, the editors put little work in the book: there are repetitions, missing words, typos. However, by and large their essays give a suprisingly accurate description of each author's personality, and offer non-trivial and honest advice on how to become good practitioners in their field. Gregg Berman tells how he found his true calling in finance; Evan Schulman, one the oldest and most experienced quants here, shows how current problems have ancient roots. Thomas Wilson comes off as unassuming, and providing some good, no-nonsense advice. Overall, a good reading. One has to wonder how different the tone of the chapters would have been, had they been written today. Asness wrote his at the time when AQR had $35B AUM. It's at $9B today. Quant strategies have been battered. Risk managers have been (rightly) fired. Complex derivative pricing models have been proved worthless, or just plain bad mathematics. I think several of the quants here would be humbled, or retired.

I read this book in a bookstore. It is interesting to see how people from completely different backgrounds transition into finance. This book will serve as a good past time reading, but it may also be inspirational for newbies and students.

I really enjoyed the personal insight into the 20 quants spotlighted in this book. There are so many brilliant minds featured on CNBC and Bloomberg TV and these guys are on there all the time. So it was interesting to read about so many of them and how they stumbled upon being the best and brightest at the forefront of their industry. It really is a must read if you are thinking about going into financial math or if you just want some insight into the masterminds of financial mathematics.