23 · Closing Windows

The new niche of quant is something Jim Simons and D.E. Shaw revolutionised, and it's still very new. So there's a time attack on reaching for alpha. It will soon be oversaturated by geniuses in the US, UK, India and China — better get there faster. Plus we're entering post-Covid, where the global cycle usually runs about ten years; right around the time you finish your masters you'll probably be in the AI-bubble phase. That is your small window for starting a quant firm alongside the doctorate. Demand will shift slightly rightwards, supply will go radically off the charts.

Yeah, I guess I'm neurotic — but this paranoid cognisance of how the jobs are shifting makes me realise the level of dedication needed to be four to five sigmas from the norm. When you stake your entire existence for a decade on building the intellectual foundation — the modules, the mastery, the reading — you won't just get a return offer; the scale of revolution will be off the charts.

"Lateral quants" are quantitative analysts making a lateral career move — shifting from one role to another at a similar seniority, moving between departments, firms, or asset classes rather than climbing the traditional ladder. Going from quant dev to quant researcher, I guess.

A lot of betting and poker. Betting is really hard, but the volatility exposure in quant makes you more risk-tolerant — it's just exposure. Chwazi, something like credit card roulette.

The market and demand for quants is rising, but the supply is rising much faster. We have a short window to get into the industry, get work experience, get rich, then get out. Macro-economically, there's an over-allocation of talent into finance and medical school, a massive shortage in blue collar work with consistent demand there. The tech industry is an expanding market; for trading, there's less expansion in the money to be gained, though the AI boom's spillover keeps capital flowing into stocks. I can't speak on futures, options and other derivatives — I lack the knowledge there. But at least for equities, there's an influx of capital and a massive new supply of people trying to break into quant. The tension is high; nobody knows how it plays out in a couple of years. Building the intellectual foundation first, faster and better, is my edge.

For quants it's been about ten to fifteen years in the market. The distribution of which firms are biggest is still fairly even — not oligopolistic yet, unlike big tech — but the blueprint of the work is already out there. You just need to do more of what you know must be done. Read 10,000 books, take the courses, ingest sheer knowledge. We're on the right track; just accelerate.

Every insight has a finite lifespan. The alpha is context-dependent and it decays. The people who win are the ones who know the cues — data collection — which continuation is most probable — the statistical tails, the Monte Carlo simulations in pragmatic application — and how to make the buy and sell decisions at the best time.

I see frontier technology being leveraged for trading — AGI or quantum computing channelled into HFTs, going almost instantaneous, minuscule trades at sheer frequency, almost a trillion trades per second, each one making the market more fluid and efficient. I don't know how that manifests later, honestly. Quantum computing is something I need to learn more about — it's going to expand massively in South Korea over the next decade. The emergence of betting markets, statistical analysis and the stochastic mind is very important.