Quantitative Researcher | Systematic Futures/Equities | London / NYC

A senior leader at one of the firms I work with said something recently that stuck with me:

The median researcher adds zero value.

He wasn't being provocative for the sake of it, if you think about it. Most quant researchers at most firms are working on the same low-hanging fruit, on overlapping research, competing internally for the same capacity.

He went on to describe the kind of person he actually wants to hire, and it was pretty specific:

Someone who finds genuine satisfaction in the work itself. Not the comp table (appreciating that no-one works for free, right!), not the brand... Quant researchers who read JVM optimisation papers because they want to understand why their backtest is slow, not just that it's slow. Developers who dig into market microstructure literature because they want to understand what their execution code is actually doing, not just that it works. The kind of person whose curi...