Most 'Mathsy' sector in investment banking

My strength is in maths; I'm wondering what specific sector would most appreciate maths ability.

A secondary question, what sectors are more easy than others to get into in terms of application success rate?

Thanks!

(edited 10 years ago)

Reply 1

Commercial Paper

Original post by jisaac1

My strength is in maths; I'm wondering what specific sector would most appreciate maths ability.

A secondary question, what sectors are more easy than others in terms of application success rate?

Thanks!

Maybe look at something in Quantitative Analytics/Structuring? :smile:

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Reply 2

hypercaine.

Original post by jisaac1

My strength is in maths; I'm wondering what specific sector would most appreciate maths ability.

Any, all areas like people with a strong ability in maths.

A secondary question, what sectors are more easy than others to get into in terms of application success rate?

Thanks!

None; apply to the 'easiest' and expect to be rejected.

Reply 3

jisaac1

Original post by will2348

Maybe look at something in Quantitative Analytics/Structuring? :smile:

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Others have also suggested quantitative analysis. How much programming does it involve?

Reply 4

Commercial Paper

Original post by jisaac1

Others have also suggested quantitative analysis. How much programming does it involve?

In all honesty, I have no idea, I'm more of an IBD kind of guy, I know it just has a lot of Maths. If you go on Google, you might be able to find some more information there or more specifically from Barclays and Morgan Stanley which have info pages on it. I'd imagine quite a lot of programming though with a ton of C++, VBA and Excel models.

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(edited 10 years ago)

Reply 5

Swayum

Quant: typically you'll require a PhD though and an insane level of programming and systems knowledge (a lot of these guys are Computer Science grads). Part of this role involves quantitative strategy and research (i.e. using statistical techniques or something to analyse data and find profit making opportunities/understand risks) and then the other part involves building models (i.e. all the spreadsheets and systems that other divisions in the banks use - a trader just click a button which says give me the price, the quant actually programs that button to decide what the price should be theoretically).

Structuring: I don't think most of these roles directly require you to be using maths per se, but they involve complicated products so a talent for maths means you'd probably be good at this stuff, you can go straight from undergrad but Masters are quite common. Here you're basically selling products to clients who don't just want a normal kind of product (e.g. a stock or a bond or a normal derivative), they want something with a different sort of risk and payoff (e.g. "I want to pay £100 and get 5% each year if the worst performing stock out of my list of 10 stocks returns more than 1%, then after 10 years I want my £100 back).

Risk: I've never sat in Risk as such, but a lot of these roles get very technical and have very high academic requirements (you can break into Risk with a normal undergrad degree that's not super technical, but I'm just saying parts of Risk are very very technical with minimum PhD requirements, but typically just MSc). Here I think you're doing things like volatility modeling and trying to understand on a statistical basis how much money the bank stands to lose + recommendations to traders to get rid of some of their positions/add on positions because of risks they may not have taken into account.