I know there are many younger readers of this letter. I’m not a quant. I took Calculus BC in HS and one stats class in college (although I do want to take more math online — I’m not advocating ignorance). Many of you are very strong in math. There’s a perception that options are about graduate degree stochastic calculus and differential equations. There are research-oriented jobs for which this is true. These jobs require raw mental horsepower and lots of training to tackle technical problems.
On the trading side, don’t get discouraged by academic notation in option papers. Here reasoning and numeracy are the pen and hammer. The tools of the trade. I should add for college students looking to get into trading coding is now table stakes. You need to have something to give in exchange for learning. The business is harder than ever, fetching lunch is not enough. (I know what you are thinking. Every generation in trading always thinks “if I was just born 10 years earlier it would have been so much easier to rake in the bucks”. It’s as stupid as a 300 lb lineman who wishes he could have come up in a time when linemen only weighed 250. He’s committing a time travel fallacy where he gets to go to the past with knowledge of recent innovations in diet, drugs, and exercise). Continuing on. The ability to code is also self-reliance. My own ability is very limited and I’m sure a junior will look at me the way I used to look at older traders who struggled with Excel. Circle of life.
Perhaps more so than the pure quant roles, in trading there’s a lot of room for grit. The analogy is as simple as the fact that most poker players are not quants, but there’s no doubting their discipline, endurance, ability to focus, number-sense, and logic skills. Your liberal arts (and no economics and business degrees are not science) degree is not a life sentence in ops.
(To be clear, this is not an affront to ops…my wife went that way. In fact, there is a whole conversation to be had about why a career in ops can be a more lucrative route. But it’s a parallel route and if a person wants to trade and take risk, anything else will feel like they failed even if objective standards might say otherwise).
On the other hand, tying this all back to the Parable of the Talents essay — trading is not for everyone. It’s not even for many. You can do anything, except for what you can’t do.
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