What qualifications and skills do you need for a career in electronic trading
In top electronic trading firms, there's a notion that the specifics of your education don't matter. Jane Street, for example, says that it's "more interested in how you think and learn than what you currently know," and doesn't expect applicants to know much about finance. Despite this, the profile of most students going into electronic trading is remarkably similar.
Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️
When we assessed Jane Street's intern class last year, we found that most of its successful applicants studied mathematics, computer science, or a mix of both. Traders and researchers were more likely to be mathematicians while computer scientists went into engineering roles.
Successful applicants usually attend top schools. Schools like MIT and Harvard provide a lot of entry level hires to Jane Street and Citadel Securities. In Europe, Oxbridge, the French Grandes Ecoles and Russian technology institutes are prestigious. In Asia, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are a key source of talent.
Even if you attend one of these schools, you're not guaranteed of a place. You'll need top grades, but you'll also need something more. Quant careers coach Ash Cross told us in February that "a lot of US students with a 4.0 score in their undergraduate degrees don't have internships." No internship usually means no graduate job.
If you're early in your studies, there are plenty of things you can do. Apply for all the spring weeks, insight events and trading competitions that electronic trading firms run. They have low acceptance rates, around 1%, but some internships in the space are even more selective, accepting as little as 0.1% of applicants.
If you're at the end of your undergraduate studies, you're in a bit more of a pickle. You can go into further education but, counterintuitively, spending more time in education might hurt your chances. James Holland, director of recruitment firm Quant Capital, previously told us that prop trading firms sometimes discriminate against PhDs when hiring because "they find those people too academic, too stubborn, and too set in their ways." PhDs are, comparatively, loved much more in banks and hedge funds.
Trading firms make exceptions for PhDs who have studied more niche or theoretical topics. You might need a PhD in electronic engineering to work on hardware like ASICs, FPGAs or GPUs in a trading firm. Jane Street previously stated that the majority of its researchers aren't PhDs, but its PhD headcount had grown to 160 as of March. Petter Kolm, head of NYU Courant's mathematics in finance program, said that "postgraduate training will still be valuable, especially for research-heavy roles."
If you don't want to risk committing yourself to education for an extra 5+ years, you could try a masters. Master in financial engineering (MFE) courses are popular for giving students a chance to learn about finance before jumping into a quant job, and they're known for having strong recruitment pipelines. Top courses are hard to get into, however, and many of the lower ranked MFE courses are substandard for a career in an electronic trading firm. The gold standard is Baruch College in New York, which is both cost effective and offers access to the highest paying jobs. Baruch students earn as much as $25k per month as interns at trading firms like Tower Research Capital as well as hedge funds like Point72. Getting onto the Baruch course requires being able to answer questions like 'in how many ways can you make a bracelet with ten different beads?' Princeton and Carnegie Mellon also offer some of the MFE courses in America.
If you really want to stand out, you'll need to impress much earlier in your education. Electronic trading alums have said that these firms begin recruiting at high school and have particularly strong presences in Olympiad tournaments for subjects like mathematics and informatics.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: WhatsApp: http://wa.me/442079977910 (+44 20 7997 7910), Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
