Starting Your Career as a Wall Street Quant: A Practical, No-BS Guide to Getting a Job in Quantitative Finance and Launching a Lucrative Career [Paperback]

Brett Jiu (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1432706810 | ISBN-13: 978-1432706814 | Publication Date: June 18, 2007 | Edition: 1st (2007)

All Practical, No BS!

Working in quantitative finance can be highly rewarding, in both intellectual and monetary terms (but especially the latter!). Quants-finance practitioners who develop and apply sophisticated mathematical and statistical models for asset pricing, trading and risk management-routinely make six figures, with the top ones raking in millions each year.



Starting Your Career as a Wall Street Quant is the first and only career guide specifically written for readers who want to get into quantitative finance and launch a lucrative career. It covers everything you wanted to know about getting a quant job, from writing an effective resume to acing job interviews to negotiating the job offer. Written by a practicing senior quant and packed with practical, useful tips (and devoid of BS that would get you nowhere), this book will help you get the quant job you want.



Want to know what the single most critical element of your resume is? Want to know how to impress any interviewer as well as what to say and what not to say at a job interview? Want to know which books to study to acquire the right kind of quantitative education, the kind relevant to finance, and to gain an edge over your competitors? You'll find the answers to these questions, and many more, in this insider's guide.

Editorial Reviews

From the Author

As a working quant, I've been to both sides of the job search process: I've been to many job interviews where I found my palms sweating wet all day long, and I've also been on the other side of the desk interviewing candidates whose palms were probably sweating wet. In writing this book, my goal is to offer you practical information and advice that can prove valuable in your quest to get a quant job on Wall Street.

I call this book a "practical, no-BS guide" because that's what it is: lots of practical information you can use right away. I don't BS. I won't be selling you anything, and I don't have a hidden agenda like someone who is a professional headhunter might. I simply want to help you and others who are looking to start a quant career. It's that simple. (BTW, BS here does not stand for Black-Scholes!)

About the Author

Brett Jiu, Ph.D., currently works as a senior financial engineer at a leading technology-driven agency brokerage firm. Previously he worked as a buy-side quant at Deutsche Bank. He started his finance career at RGNCM, a hedge fund. Brett has a BA in applied mathematics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in economics from NYU. He has published papers in economics and finance and has been featured in the New York Times and the Boston Herald.

Product Details

• Paperback: 268 pages
• Publisher: Outskirts Press; 1st (2007) edition (June 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1432706810
• ISBN-13: 978-1432706814
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #91,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pretty helpful for the uninitiated, July 3, 2007

By 

PS3MyLuv (NY - USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Starting Your Career as a Wall Street Quant: A Practical, No-BS Guide to Getting a Job in Quantitative Finance and Launching a Lucrative Career (Paperback)

This book bills itself as the "first and only" career guide for Wall Street type quant wannabes. I did a quick search and found this to be the only book on the subject that covers the whole gamut of the job search process: from writing your resume to looking for open positions to interviewing. What's really nice here is the author gives you a list of books to read if you want to acquire the basic knowledge a quant should possess. (The books he recommends tend to be on the entry-level side, which is appropriate for the book's intended readers.) The last chapter is quite good, explaining in detail the compensation structure at Wall Street firms as well as what "vice president" and "director" titles are.

The book is light on sample interview questions. There are a few in the 2nd chapter, together with some hints, and the author gives a few concrete examples that are, well, entertaining and sort of funny. He emphasies on "knowing your stuff". That's pretty hard to do, so if you are looking for a "cheat book" on interview questions this is not for you. But if you want to know how to get a quant job, I think this book will give you some helpful and practical insights.

Other than a few typos, this book is pretty good and easy to read. Definitely recommended if you plan to get into quant finance and haven't got a clue where to start.

71 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars good book missing some key points, November 5, 2007

By 

R. Keyvani "hmmm" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Starting Your Career as a Wall Street Quant: A Practical, No-BS Guide to Getting a Job in Quantitative Finance and Launching a Lucrative Career (Paperback)

I have been in front office development for 10 years. The author should be more realistic about his assumptions about getting a quant job. 1) your chances of getting a role as a proper quant are slim to none without having a phd. 2) Add Ivy League school to that Phd. Trust me I have read all the books the author mentioned, I have a MSc in Fin Eng, worked with many traders and PM's. If your smart enough to understand stochastic calc and heavy stats, but don't have Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, NYU etc.. go learn C++ and go into business for yourself don't waste time. There's alot of nepotism on Wall Street which is why there are very few funds that have serial correlation in returns. Its not how smart you are rather its where you went to school and who you know.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exactly what I needed!, October 20, 2007

By 

RaCh (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Starting Your Career as a Wall Street Quant: A Practical, No-BS Guide to Getting a Job in Quantitative Finance and Launching a Lucrative Career (Paperback)

For a starter like me, who were mystified and terrified by the prospect of competing and working in the financial sector when I first started looking for a job, this book told me everything I really needed to know. Unlike other self-help books of similar content, I never got a sense from the author that I was not being told the honest truth about Wall Street.

I strongly disagree with the previous reviewer who criticized the book as being "fluff" and "breezy". It's precisely the all-too-serious approach one sees so often in similar books that mystify a field which image is already being distorted in other media. The other books I have read seem to be "war stories" that're designed to glamourize the industry or the authors, or both. They left me dazzled with the prospect of becoming one of them, but confused with the question: now what? No one's path can be replicated exactly. It's one thing to hear about other's war story, it's another to prepare for your own. This book tells me how to stock up my own ammunition.

Now that I am working on Wall Street, the pointers given in this book helped me enormously, especially in the comprehensiveness of topics this book covers. The previous reviewer complained that not enough was written on what a quant do. I think he missed the point entirely. The books tells you exactly what a junior quant is expected to do, on a daily basis. Books with detailed history of financial engineering merely tell me what financial engineering is, but not what financial engineer actually does. The latter is what we readers really need to know.

One should keep in mind this book is about "how to launch a wall street career", in other word, getting your feet in, not "how to make millions as a wall street quant". Perhaps the author can save that for his second book. I'll be looking forward to it.