UK
Want to become a trader? You’ll need to go down the quant development route.
“[A move to a trading role] doesn’t happen frequently, but it does happen,” says Dean Looney, head of financial services at recruitment agency Huxley Associates.
And it seems to be getting easier. “It’s the right place and the right time,” adds Looney. “A lot of banks are building out high-frequency trading platforms now. The more [the banks] see the value in [automated trading], the more IT gets the chance to move into this area,” he says.
Recruiters say most people move into quantitative roles such as quant development, and use that as a springboard to become a quant trader. The growing use of algorithmic trading makes quantitative knowledge and programming experience a strong asset.
“It comes down to quantitative skills,” Looney explains. An algorithmic IT specialist, for example, may be able to move into an automatic trading role – but only if the candidate has excellent quantitative skills and is up to speed with the newest programming techniques, particularly with Java and/or C++.
“Quant analysts certainly have the technical skills,” says Richard Melkonian, a senior consultant at executive search firm Napier Scott. “And as products become more complex there is more opportunity [for moving to trading].”
However, opportunities to make the move vary from firm to firm, depending on policy and the number of jobs there are to fill.
If you aspire to become a trader, recruiters say you should focus on expanding your product knowledge and improving your mathematical skills.
I disagree!
I trade currencies as a side business and, after taking many losses during the learning process, I can firmly say that you can be a trader without the advanced skills mentioned.
Plus, working for a big firm isn’t necessarily the mark of a ‘good’ trader. Many, many successful traders work from home and trade their own money.
The articles talks about the move to posisitons such as quant trader or even derivative trader. This is different from currency trading.
The complexity of the products is not the same, equity derivatives models are all about quant maths. I really see the bridge between quant dev and trading, since trading is more and more about dealing with information systems. Quant IT are exposed to all the aspects of the job, this is also why many Traders would only give the minimum information necessary to the quant dev to program the applications.
The article is also right to mention that this is not a common move. So far I only know two people who have made that move it was a matter of being at the right place, the right time with the right set of skills.
I agree with Chris, the other problem is that many companies will promise you that you will be moving to a trading role soon, and this will never happen in most of the cases since they prefer to keep you at your IT role rather than finding a replacement for you.
Honestly, if your goal is to move into trading, you would rather have little IT skills like VBA and more quantitative skills. For some reason all the people who cannot write proper VBA macros and do not know any language will have better chances to move into trading than yourself …
Even if you do have extensive programming experience, hide some of it if you want a trading job-dont flaunt it too much. especially true for hardware/electrical engineers who might list all their machine coding skills on the resume. Math/quant skills are more important as things stand now, then comes a bit of programming. This could change as trading gets more automated.