Is Quant’s Life Hard or Easy?

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Last month, efinancialcarreeers published a post, stating that quant’s life is getting harder these days.

Back in the day, a quant in finance could devise a strategy, sit back and let the money roll in while lounging about in a silk robe with a fat cigar. Such are the halcyon dreams of the contemporary quantitative finance type who finds him/herself forced to grind continuously in front of a screen in search of illusory alpha while every man/woman with a piece of Python code does the same.

This wasn’t the exact complaint at today’s Quant Conference (held digitally this year), but it came close. Read more

A week later, they published another post. This time it told the story of a former hedge fund IT professional who is trying to commoditize the systematic trading software market.

Our mission is to commoditize high-performance systematic trading software,” says Bogdan Donca. “This software is built over and over by both the buy-side and the sell-side and it has a high degree of reuse. We’ve created an off-the-shelf product for systematic hedge funds.”

… He says software is a factor in alpha generation. “Your success as a systematic hedge fund is partly about how quickly you can iterate trading strategy ideas. There is no Holy Grail and there is no single strategy – it’s about iteration and deploying test strategies and this requires software engineering excellence.” Read more

The latter article implies that big hedge funds and investment banks still have an edge by using software and data, and that quant’s life is still easy.

Don’t you think that these 2 articles are contradictory?

So is quant’s life hard or easy?

Let us know your opinion.

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