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I'm looking into making a career transition into Quant Finance. Some background on me: I'm 29y. I'm born and raised on a dairy farm in Belgium. I have always been good at Mathematics (I made it 3 times to national Math Olympiad finale in highschool). After highschool I got a Bachelor in Bio Engineering (KULeuven, Belgium) and a Masters in Management, Economics and Consumer Sciences (Wageningen UR, Netherlands). In general I'm a quick learner and never struggled with any class. During my studies I spent more hours milking my parents' cows than actually attending classes, but I did pass with honors, I was asked to become student assistant for some Decision Science classes... After University, with some pressure from my parents, I decided to follow my family tradition and go into the dairy world. I went to work for a dairy in Germany for 1 year and after that I came to the US to work as a herd health technician/robotic milking system technician on a large dairy farm. Soon after getting hired, I became the General Manager of this location and was doing pretty good (salary from 70k-150k during the 5 years I worked here). I got married and have 3 kids now. I am easy to get along with but not the best people manager. Even though I have been getting better, I struggle holding people accountable. With being easily motivated and a bit smarter than average, I still made it work but I have been feeling tired. Tired of doing 90-100 hours/week, tired of barely seeing my kids and tired of not getting to use my skills. Since I and my wife got here on a workvisa and we want to keep living in the US, we didn't have much other options than to keep doing this job. While managing this dairy in the US, I did a lot of little things on the side: * I played around with some crypto, was arbitraging bets on the US elections on different crypto betting websites and protocols (eg. receiving odds of 1.9x for Biden to win, while receiving odds above 3x for Trump to win election) * Buying and selling large amounts of crypto for cash for a 10-15% mark-up * Buying bitcoin miners from China after their crypto ban and selling them locally for a profit * I felt publicly traded bitcoin mining companies were way overvalued, but shorting them is risky since it's hard to predict what will happen to the bitcoin-price so I started to run efficient bitcoin miners in a facility with cheap electricity, while shorting stocks like RIOT to eliminate the risk of the bitcoinprice going up. Basically I made my own smaller copy of RIOT for 10% of what their stock was worth and shorted RIOT at the same time. * Buying SPY at the stock market while shorting mSPY (mirrored SPY) on mirror protocol (DeFi - Decentralized Finance) with aUST (acnhored UST) as collateral, leveraging this up many times to get yields around +100% APY on USD (with no UST depeg risk by taking out insurance for a UST-depeg through Unslashed (who did pay out through a Kleros-court case). Of course while the UST depeg didn't directly cost me any money (because of insurance), it did take this income stream away. All these things combined have made me more money than my GM job has been paying me, but it's risky. eg. I lost 300k $ on Mirror after making 600k $ with it because of SPY pricing jumping up by 4% to come back down 4% a bleep of a second afterwards on the actual stock market (dark pool after hours). A couple months ago we got our permanent residency approved and we started looking into our options. When I was reading about Quantitative Finance, I felt that I finally found the industry I belong to. This is what actually interests me. I just breath, eat and sleep math every day. I gave my company a 2 month notice and they are disappointed, but understanding of the situation. Doing long hours and to prevent my family from falling apart, I felt there was no other way out of this career than to quit. It's been 10 days since my last day of work and I have been studying full time. I took an online probability class from Harvard, did some quant interview question in the "green book' (Xinfeng) and am currently taking some online Harvard CS classes (finishing up CS50 and will be doing CS50P). https://www.linkedin.com/in/leenleenaerts/ How realistic is this career plan? If it fails (which I hope it doesn't) what else could be a good fit for me? I feel like I like programming, but not too much into webdev. (*applied to OMSCS just in case) What would you recommend me to study and do in the next weeks? I'm looking for any advice. Feel free to roast my linkedin-profile too. If you are open to a chat/phone call, shoot me a message. Thank you!
I remember reading this post before. Is this some new Blind copypasta?
i'd say get into plumbing
I heard that quant people like math guys. Just give it a try.
If you were active in crypto for the last 4 years and aren’t a multimillionaire yet then you’re probably not a very good quant.
I'd say semi-active. Been in the industry for long, but no quantitative trading. Never had much time either to focus on it. Either way, I'm still going for this path and have a quant advising me which steps to take to make it work and he thinks I have decent chances. Until know I did: - couple Harvard edu coding classes - Probability books, Harvard intro class and grinding questions - game theory - brain teasers - mathematical finance, black scholes etc. - little bit of mental math every day (top 10 US on mathtrainer.io, zetamac 70s) Started worldquants free master in financial engineering course last month, but it's kinda slow and easy. I'm considering dropping it. Anything else you'd recommend me studying that I might have missed? Any recommendations on subjects/books? Planning to study full time (80-90hrs a week) for at least 2 more months and start applying by the summer.
Do you know how a hedge fund works? Read “Inside the Black Box” if not. Other than that it would be good to have an impressive strategy or trade you ran on your own that you can describe in depth. Go deep rather than wide. You don’t need to know a lot of things or be good at mental math or brain teasers. Knowing a couple of things extremely well would be better.
TL;DR?
It's an essay man I can only stomach something shorter than 10s these days. Go for it if you want quant, forget the naysayers