Quant trading / Systematic trading

Hi guys!
For reference Im London based and a first year Physics student at Oxford. I recently did a couple of insight days (Brevan Howard and Susquehanna) and I got really inspired by the talks and people I met. I have always had an interest in maths and coding (and I like talking to people and collaboration) and QT/QST seems to be the perfect intersection between these two (and obviously makes good money).
Im a bit lost as to what kind of things to do to beef up my CV - from projects, work experiences, skills, courses, interests etc and what kind of websites to use/ courses in order to perform well on the assessments for the internship applications (maths and coding or maybe even the behavioural ones) and I was wondering if anyone had any inputs/tips?
Im relatively strong in python and I obviously do a lot of maths at unversity (but less focused on probability and statistics and more calculus and linear algebra) and Ive dabbled in ML (and LLMs - less relevant) in a few projects before but nothing super in depth and I have very little financial knowledge, but the graduates at the insight days said they mostly got taught finance on the job so I guess at this point I just wanna make sure my internship application is as strong as possible and just keep up to date with the news related to financial markets (obvs very volatile right now cough)
I am planning to explore my interest in greater depth in the next few weeks and over summer holidays am planning to do a lot of ML projects and go over probability and stats but not exactly sure the best way to go about either of these or if this is even the right move. Should I grind leetcode or something for python? Or improve my python in some other way - or is this a waste of time?
Any insights/tips to do with anything at all related to these fields or applications would be so so appreciated - I am still very new to quant trading in general so any info would be super duper helpful!
Also any firms you would recommend applying for - for either spring weeks or summer internships - that are ideally London or at least UK based?
Thanks so much in advance for everyones help!

Reply 1

Higde

I would learn about basic financial derivatives if you haven’t already such as options and other more advanced financial instruments like CDS. Understanding what makes them work can give insight into how to trade them which should help you :smile: