Competition for top quant talent has never been stiffer.
With top hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms in expansion mode — and increasingly encroaching on the same turf — the mathematicians, physicists, data scientists, and engineers who power them are in high demand.
The emergence of AI labs, which can outbid even the top-tier finance firms with war chests of tens of billions in capital, has only ratcheted up the competition.
For those eyeing a career in systematic trading — and the skills to get hired — the financial incentives have never been better. Quant interns at Jane Street can now earn tens of thousands over the summer, equivalent to a $300,000 base salary. New grads at top-tier firms can earn compensation packages exceeding $500,000.
The truly successful quant researchers and portfolio managers can reap tens of millions annually as their careers progress.
Technical brilliance is no assurance of success in this arena. Lasting in such a competitive field, let alone making it to the top, requires skills that are often overlooked or underdiscussed.
Business Insider compiled advice and insights from quant execs from firms including Cubist, Schonfeld, Tower Research, and D.E. Shaw about what it takes to succeed in the industry — and in life.
Geoffrey Lauprete, head of Cubist Systematic Strategies
Lauprete took over as head of Cubist Systematic Strategies, the quant arm of Point72, in September. He previously spent nearly two decades at systematic giant WorldQuant, including a long stretch as CIO.
When interviewing quants, he’s looking to suss out what kind of value a candidate added in their previous role — but he’s also paying attention to how well they communicate this and whether their answers indicate authentic passion for the job.
“Substance matters, but what I’m really impressed by are candidates who have a structured thought process, can clearly articulate why they played an important role in previous mandates, and can bring passion to their story,” Lauprete told Business Insider.
Quant investing combines several specialties — quantitative analysis, programming and deploying code, and market knowledge — and if “someone can articulate why putting these three things together is exciting, it’s usually a reflection of their passion,” Lauprete said.
Strict, lengthy noncompetes are ubiquitous in systematic trading, with firms sometimes having to wait two years before a hire can join. Lauprete wants to “understand how they are planning to structure their time off and what skills they’ll be working on during that time,” he said.
John Cogman, CIO of Tower Research
In the hypercompetitive quant job market, soft skills can set you apart and maximize your earning potential.
Tower Research is one of the giants of quant proprietary trading, with over 1,100 employees across a dozen global offices.
Identifying and hiring top quants is “one of the most important aspects of our business,” CIO John Cogman wrote in a paper titled “The Myth of the Quant God.” Cogman said the challenge isn’t just in finding technically gifted people, but those who also have the right demeanor and social IQ — a combo that “is infinitely harder and far more valuable.”
“Quants who reach their full potential tend to share subtler traits,” Cogman said.
Quantitative brilliance can be undercut by an inability to communicate ideas to other departments, like risk or engineering, by alienating coworkers, or by crumbling under market pressure, Cogman notes.
“No one, not even the quant gods in our midst, is great at everything,” Cogman said. Those who plateau tend to lack self-awareness.
The full package for a quant, in Cogman’s view, includes a mix of technical skills — modeling, programming, data analysis, and market know-how — combined with “translational skills” (communication, understanding the big-picture business, and adaptability) and “behavioral skills” like self-awareness, resilience, and consistency.
The reality is that quantitative trading is a highly collaborative endeavor, and “lone-wolf geniuses” — or overbearing jerks — aren’t good for business.
“Our most successful traders aren’t necessarily the loudest, the flashiest, or the most strong-willed. They’re the ones willing to learn, collaborate, and be self-critical,” Cogman wrote. “You can’t optimize empathy or quantify resilience, but they move the needle more than any parameter ever could.”
Mike Tiano, deputy head of systematic strategies at Schonfeld
While technical chops, from linear algebra to statistics to coding, are a given, a key trait Tiano — who was promoted to deputy head of systematic strategies in the fall — looks for is curiosity.
“An important trait is just obsessive curiosity about problems, especially outside of finance. Because there’s a lot of cross-fertilization that goes on,” Tiano told Business Insider.
Whether it’s physics, fluid mechanics, or biological evolution, many disciplines offer problem-solving frameworks that can be applied to systematic trading, including generating alpha signals, portfolio construction, trade execution, and transaction costs.
“It gives you the ability to take inspiration from other areas of science and incorporate it into a logical problem,” Tiano said.
Other attributes that help quants succeed include the ability to fixate on a problem for an extended period of time and dissect it into manageable pieces.
“You want to find someone who will obsess over a problem,” Tiano said. “They’ll go into a research project, and it’s going to dominate what they do for a long time.”
They also need to “have the ability to take a complex problem and break it into smaller pieces in a sensible way.”
Something that goes hand in hand with that is patience.
“They have to be patient. That’s hard, because in our industry money is always moving — PNL can change a lot from day to day,” Tiano said. “People can get flustered, and it can break their obsessive work on the problem.”
For new grads, one of the most important pieces of advice is not to underrate the value of networking in getting your first job and building a career, Tiano said, noting every job he’s held — from engineering, to academia, to finance — was due in part to networking.
“Go to conferences, go to events, join professional societies. Reach out to alumni in the industry,” Tiano said.
Jeff Yass, founder of Susquehanna International Group
Yass, the betting-enthusiast turned options-trading titan, thinks our society overrates the value of calculus and underrates the necessity of understanding probabilities, which has a greater impact on everyday life.
“If you really want to be a decision maker under uncertainty, which is what humanity is, you have to learn probability and statistics,” Yass said on a recent podcast appearance.
It’s a blind spot in American education, in his view, and the problem is compounded by the fact that people tend not to properly weigh life’s most important decisions — like who you marry.
“One of the things that we do in reverse: the bigger the decision, the less time we think about it,” Yass said.
He continued:
“You know, if you’re buying or selling a stock — and it’s basically irrelevant what you’re doing because the markets are fair — you’ll spend a lot of time on it. If you’re deciding who to marry or who to have a relationship or whatever, you basically just plop into it without much thought. “And one has a gigantic impact on your life and one has a very small impact on your life. Yet we spend much more time worrying about the minor things and not enough time worrying about the big things.”
In a notable year of financiers offering dating advice, Yass’ romantic wisdom is pragmatic, though his solution may be more difficult to implement in practice.
“Don’t go out with somebody that your friends think is a nutcase,” Yass said.
He recommends asking your friends — and have them respond honestly and anonymously if possible — a single question: Am I making a gigantic mistake?
“So many lives are ruined because you get involved with the wrong person, and no one wants to speak up,” Yass added.
Gappy Paleologo, global head of quantitative research at Balyasny Asset Management
Paleologo is known for offering memes, advice, and unvarnished views on LinkedIn and X.
In an extended X thread this past summer, Paleologo offered advice to all the disappointed interns — people at top firms accustomed to succeeding at whatever they put their mind to — who fail to receive a full-time offer.
His first piece of advice is not to bottle it up and wallow in failure in isolation.
“Because everyone has experienced at some point what you are experiencing now, and just the memory of rejection burns,” he wrote.
Then, if you’re still set on a career in finance, start getting accustomed to the feeling of failure.
“Finance is built out of being right only slightly more than being wrong. You don’t learn how to succeed. You just learn how to suffer successfully. Working in finance is like being Jackie Chan’s nose in a 1980s Hong Kong martial arts movie.
“The bad news is that eventually you look like a tuber. The good news is that ugly noses can be famous too. The big question is, of course, how many punches can a nose bear before stopping functioning altogether. The non-scientific answer to this question is: surprisingly many.”
His more practical advice for ambitious quants tasting professional rejection for the first time:
- Apply to a number of firms — not just the best of the best
- Learn from failed interviews and rejection
- Don’t undervalue external recruiters (but do your diligence)
- Customize your application to the job
- Consider a master’s or postdoc in a relevant field
“The only reason to quit is if you realize that you were cosplaying for someone else. But if you find out you do like finance, most likely things will work out for you.”
Jeremy Reff, head of recruiting at D.E. Shaw
D.E. Shaw, one of the most successful quant hedge funds in history, has been known to boast of the International Math Olympiad medal winners on staff, but it also makes a practice of hiring people from non-traditional backgrounds.
Reff explained that hiring academics, doctors, veterans or others from fields outside of quant finance can cost more in upfront training but typically yields a strong return on investment.
“There are benefits to having a beginner’s mindset,” he told Business Insider in 2024.
D.E. Shaw’s interview process aims to gauge whether candidates have creativity, “learning agility,” and other attributes that signal potential success at the hedge fund.
“There are thousands of indicators for success that we use,” he said. “No one is hired solely based on their résumé.”
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