19 · Two Ladders

A quant job in mind versus building the biggest quant firm history has ever seen — the approaches are totally different. One path: read the green book once, spring week, summer analyst, return offer, quant researcher, senior trader, £500k a year with bonuses on top. Life is good. But a quant firm founder? He meets the professor and conducts research under his supervision after reading the green book ten times, perfecting his craft of articulation. He is the best communicator, orator and public speaker. Just like the founder and CEO of DeepSeek, who also ran his own quant firm — this is more than possible. And I can guarantee you he was not as driven as you are at your age.

That's why the galvanisation of the spirit — the fire in the heart — is far more important than knowledge and skills. All you need is correction in direction, and time in play, to develop the knowledge and skillset. In games you just need better skills; in life, the soul's calling, the heart's love, the seeking of truth is what moves us. Once we stay true to ourselves, we have infinite elixir to channel.

The truth is, I know what I want to do. I know it will take time, but I am not going to wait until I'm forty to start a fund like D.E. Shaw did — and it shouldn't take that long, considering the knowledge asymmetry between my situation and Shaw's. I have the facilities to do it in a far more condensed period. I'm going to fast-pace the whole thing: start my DPhil and quant fund at the same time, pace through the internships during my masters and undergrad. Avoid the pitfalls. Even the quant firm founders I look up to made so many stupid mistakes that were inevitable in their timelines — part of it was luck. If you know what they did right and what they should have re-evaluated, and you are selective about the type of knowledge and work you take on, you can shorten the path.

Never, never listen to anybody who chose to conform to the negative reality they attracted. You can bend reality with Christ. I reject the antithesis of this hope from even permeating my consciousness.

If you want to be not just a job-level quant — which is far from what I'm aspiring to — but a founder-level quant, you technically need PhD-level mastery in all ten subjects. So honestly, it doesn't matter that much what degree you get at what school, because you are going to be the founder and CEO. All school does is help you network and pass screening for internships. Use and seek what fills your gaps. The people teaching me how to become a quant on YouTube went to universities I've never heard of, studying quantitative finance modules that are direct pipelines into the field.

The real, legendary quants — the ones so good they end up starting their own funds — operate on a fundamentally different level. Their basis is 50,000 hours of work and focus, at least 10,000 books including textbooks, hundreds of thousands of research papers, unfathomably small gaps between iterations, reading the equivalent of two to four textbooks of financial information a day, with unfathomable risk tolerance.

There are models at the frontier of chemical and molecular engineering — like the Half-Möbius model via quantum computing. How those get leveraged into trading is going to be unfathomable: higher-dimensional models trickling down into the 3-dimensional topology of an xyz-plane.

Everything else in academia I would leak, but trading I can't. Once a company goes public, once a personal revelation becomes the established paradigm, nothing about it stays fun or vital.