I'm thinking about applying for this one: http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/postgradu...nance.html

Will it make me more employable? Is it worth doing it? I don't have too much chance to get into it, but still I'm going to try and see

Yes that will lead to a good career. Companies gobble up finance masters really fast and they make good money. But is that what you really want to do? It's really difficult.

Edit - in the states, a new grad in that field could command a 60,000-70,000 starting salary with an MSF degree from just an average school. Grads from top schools like Oxford could easily grab close to 100,000 a year. Right out of school.

Raschaverak Wrote:I'm thinking about applying for this one: http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/postgradu...nance.html

Will it make me more employable? Is it worth doing it? I don't have too much chance to get into it, but still I'm going to try and see

Looks like a limited application of mathematics (mainly statistics, which is boring...) to economics (veeery boring...). Then, after graduating, you are going to work in a field of a high stress factor.

"Is it worth doing it?", not in my opinion.

Ask yourself

1. Do you like the stock market?
2. Are you really good at math?
3. Are you really good at statistics?
4. Are you really good at building excel models?
5. Are you ok with doing years worth of continuing education throughout your career involving lots of tests to gain certain financial qualifications?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, do something else.

The world needs more bright people working in areas that aren't finance in my opinion, but I guess it wouldn't be bad if that's what you want to do.

I guess being an actuary is somewhat respectable..

You'd be studying to be a quant.
$200,000-$1,000,000 salary easily (that's NOT including your yearly bonus which could be $500,000 to $1,000,000 in many cases).

Don't believe me?
http://www.topmoneyjobs.com/en/saleslist.html

Isn't it aimed at people who already have several years' work experience in the financial industry?

kitakitsune Wrote:Ask yourself

1. Do you like the stock market?
2. Are you really good at math?
3. Are you really good at statistics?
4. Are you really good at building excel models?
5. Are you ok with doing years worth of continuing education throughout your career involving lots of tests to gain certain financial qualifications?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, do something else.

Really?

1. If he likes money he can like the stock market for it.
2. He can become good at math if it takes to, especially being a graduate student.
3. same as above
4. same as above
5.probably the only question worth considering since some people have other interests in life other than work and money.

chamcham Wrote:You'd be studying to be a quant.
$200,000-$1,000,000 salary easily (that's NOT including your yearly bonus which could be $500,000 to $1,000,000 in many cases).

These figures are way too inflated for the current market unless you're a managing director.

[Zgarbas]

My sister just went into auditing. High stress factor but pretty stable (and easier than what this sounds like) and really well paid. Don't even need a master's, though she got a bonus when she got her MA in auditing. Paid for her ACCA as well. The big 4 are hiring pretty much 100 fresh BA grads per year, though that's mostly since they know only 10-15 will stick around till the end of the year.

chamcham Wrote:You'd be studying to be a quant.
$200,000-$1,000,000 salary easily (that's NOT including your yearly bonus which could be $500,000 to $1,000,000 in many cases).

Don't believe me?
http://www.topmoneyjobs.com/en/saleslist.html

I'm mainly into the money on this one. I'm also interested in the trade market and all that stuff, and maths, and buliding excel models, yes. But my main motivation factor is money, elegant or not. So.
How reliable is your source chamcham? I usually use glassdoor, and I've something different than your numbers, lookie:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/quant-..._KO0,5.htm

But when I search for engineers for example software engineers the average is a good 125,000 USD which is is better than a quant. So maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction, and just go for programming, dunno.

Any ideas on what qualifications are marketable, and can make good money with them? I'm interested in physics, biology, IT, programming, Excel, Macroeconomics, a little bit in accountancy, engineering. Just don't know what to choose, makes is even more difficult that the degree course itself has to be part-time, because I can't afford to be a full-time student anymore, I have to work on the side.

Raschaverak Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:You'd be studying to be a quant.
$200,000-$1,000,000 salary easily (that's NOT including your yearly bonus which could be $500,000 to $1,000,000 in many cases).

Don't believe me?
http://www.topmoneyjobs.com/en/saleslist.html

I'm mainly into the money on this one. I'm also interested in the trade market and all that stuff, and maths, and buliding excel models, yes. But my main motivation factor is money, elegant or not. So.
How reliable is your source chamcham? I usually use glassdoor, and I've something different than your numbers, lookie:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/quant-..._KO0,5.htm

But when I search for engineers for example software engineers the average is a good 125,000 USD which is is better than a quant. So maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction, and just go for programming, dunno.

Any ideas on what qualifications are marketable, and can make good money with them? I'm interested in physics, biology, IT, programming, Excel, Macroeconomics, a little bit in accountancy, engineering. Just don't know what to choose, makes is even more difficult that the degree course itself has to be part-time, because I can't afford to be a full-time student anymore, I have to work on the side.

Those numbers are not exaggerated.

For quants, traders, etc, salary don't mean too much.
They're yearly bonus is often many times their salary.
So while you're salary might be 150K-200K, your bonus
might be 20%-100% of base salary.

If you're a programmer, you might get 150K or 200K salary, but
your bonus might only be an extra 2 weeks of pay.

Definitely go for the quant position if you only care about money and have the education.

Here are some quant jobs:

$200,000-$300,000
http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/jobs/l/?id=1537

$150,000-$500,000
http://jobs.efinancialcareers.com/job-40...Any=quant/

$150,000-$500,000
http://jobs.efinancialcareers.com/job-40...Any=quant/

The hype over this career started years back and now there is a glut of people trying to get into it (to the point of becoming a brain drain) with lots of schools having popped up to take advantage. I think aiming to become a fully fledged quantitative analyst without a PhD on just the back of a part time masters is somewhat unrealistic unless one graduated from a top math-heavy undergraduate program as well, so don't do it if you expect a $500k remuneration package - do it if you enjoy mathematics (probability, statistics, mathematical finance) and programming. You are going to get sick of this kind of work if you don't, and for a lot of positions, you have to ask yourself if you're okay with employing your intelligence to get rich off the back of society without providing much in the way of service in return.

dizmox Wrote:The hype over this career started years back and now there is a glut of people trying to get into it (to the point of becoming a brain drain) with lots of schools having popped up to take advantage. I think aiming to become a fully fledged quantitative analyst without a PhD on just the back of a part time masters is somewhat unrealistic unless one graduated from a top math-heavy undergraduate program as well, so don't do it if you expect a $500k remuneration package - do it if you enjoy mathematics (probability, statistics, mathematical finance) and programming. You are going to get sick of this kind of work if you don't, and for a lot of positions, you have to ask yourself if you're okay with employing your intelligence to get rich off the back of society without providing much in the way of service in return.

Guys,

The link posted in this thread was for the University of Oxford, one of the top ten universities in the WORLD (http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-b...-the-world). It's famous for being the home of the Rhodes scholarships. If you've ever heard of Rhodes scholars, you'll know what I'm talking about.

If he gets accepted and graduates from Oxford University with that Masters degree, he could definitely get the salaries posted in the job links I provided. In fact, the second job posting ($150,000-$500,000) said "Ph.D. preferred, may consider a strong M.S. from a top school as well."

A Masters from Oxford University would DEFINITELY be a yes to that.

Yeah, I'm familiar with Oxford university. Still, a part time (non-resident?) Masters from there is not an automatic ticket to becoming a millionaire. Median salaries in the profession are a lot closer to $100k than $500k and competition is high no matter where you graduated from.

2011 stats from the UC Berkeley MFE (Masters of Financial Engineering) program:

ALL - Average Bonus
Average First Year Total Compensation: $155,975
Median First Year Total Compensation: $144,000

Average First Year Base Salary: $101,125
Median First Year Base Salary: $100,000

Average Sign-in & Relocation: $22,876
Median Sign-in & Relocation: $5,000

Average First Year Guaranteed/Unguaranteed year-end bonuses, housing/transportation and other compensations: $50,606
Median First Year Guaranteed/Unguaranteed year-end bonuses, housing/transportation and other compensations:$36,700

That's only the first year salary. In a couple of years, you could easily get a 200K-400K quant job. Considering that the average first-year total compensation was $155K, I'm sure that means there were others who got way more than that coming out of the MFE program.

Not in your wildest dreams would you get a $50,000 first year bonus as a software developer (unless it's for a hedge fund or similar financial company).

dizmox Wrote:Yeah, I'm familiar with Oxford university. Still, a part time (non-resident?) Masters from there is not an automatic ticket to becoming a millionaire. Median salaries in the profession are a lot closer to $100k than $500k and competition is high no matter where you graduated from.

Why does it count so much wether the course is part-time or full time? Not everybody has the opportunity to study full time, even at their early tweines. Part-time courses are perfect equivalent of the full-time courses, except, it is otherwise structured, but the requirements of the completion are the same.
PHD is good, but I don't think you can advance much in your career with just any PHD in your field, the topic is the important factor, in my opinion, you make it sound like any kind of PHD would open doors to higher paid jobs, in the same area - that sounds illogical to me.

Hyperborea Wrote:One thing that hasn't been mentioned in all this discussion of salaries is that all of these top salaries, whether for a (blood sucking leech on society) quant or a software engineer, will require relocation. There are only a few locations in the world that you can get those top tier figures and the costs of living in those locations are high. There is another larger but still limited batch of locations that will give a second tier salary. None of those are likely to be in Hungary if that matters.

The big financial centers are very few.
New York, Chicago, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong are the main ones.

You could live modestly in New York. You don't have to have a
million dollar penthouse.

Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is ridiculous.
People earning 50K and homeless is not uncommon.

I have a masters degree in mathematics from a top 10 university (not Oxbridge). While I preferred not to choose what area to specialize in until after I had already tasted all the options available, you can't go wrong specializing in finance if that is an area you are interested in and you want to make big bucks.

To be honest with a masters degree in any mathematical field you won't be short of money even in the economical crisis especially an Oxbridge degree. The typical jobs I have been entertaining are around £30,000 starting/training up to £50,000 while qualified rising to over 6 figures base salary after 10 years. This is of course not including bonuses which depending on the field can be anywhere from £10,000 to £1,000,000+ easily.

It looks like that particular course is for people that are already experienced in the finance sector and wish to further themselves to maybe get higher up the ladder, if this sounds like you then its definitely worth pursuing so long as you can deal with the extreme pressure and workload you will get.

Edit: Just to add I wasn't talking about quant jobs which pay considerably more, but tend to be extremely competitive and stressful. With jobs dependant on the stock market you have to balance out pressure vs quality of life. I know people that are involved in the stock market and they often work through the night, work at weekends etc..

Can anyone tell me how much of these massive finance salaries essentially come from skimming the speculative component of the market? ie. basically being a professional gambler scooping up the value injected into the market by amateur investors?

These salaries seem way too high to be possible through actual growth generated by investment in sound aspects of the market alone.

kitakitsune Wrote:Ask yourself
4. Are you really good at building excel models?
5. Are you ok with doing years worth of continuing education throughout your career involving lots of tests to gain certain financial qualifications?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, do something else.

This is a little inaccurate. The Excel model building is not so much done by the top quants but by people with MBAs. You'd probably be doing more interesting stuff like developing cool estimators in R. You also won't need the financial qualifications. Even people with econ graduate degrees rarely get a CFA.

But the case against specialization and for a "generic" math masters like Kewickviper's is that the financial sector will be shrinking for the foreseeable future. Obviously that is less likely to affect highly-qualified quants, but spreadsheet-types are being downsized in NYC and London by the thousands right now, and I'm sure quants are also being fired, not least because they are wrongly blamed for some of the trades gone horribly wrong.

Nonetheless, a masters in mathematics from a top school is great. Sometimes I wish I had done that!

From what I understand about quant jobs is that the majority of the models are built in C++/Java. I used R on every statistics course I took and also used Matlab (shudders), but I'm not sure how widely these are used outside of academia. I certainly cannot picture them using excel to design any of their models, that would be horrifically bad.

It seems after doing a little research into quantitative analysis that the highest paid jobs revolve around machine learning research, i.e. developing robots to "intelligently" scan the market and make live decisions on where to invest in order to attempt to quantify the risk and optimize profits based on a finely tuned statistical model. Since the data is live and ongoing much of the research I expect goes into finding short cuts to reduce the time cost of solving the model, while still keeping the accuracy of the risk analysis as high as possible.

I don't know why they are paid so much, but since billions are invested annually by the companies that hire quants I expect it is cost effective for them to pay such high prices for even incremental increases in speed and quality of their market analysis models.

I'm talking a little out of my field of expertise, but this has greatly peaked my interest and will try to find out as much about quantitative analysis as possible.

dizmox Wrote:Median salaries in the profession are a lot closer to $100k than $500k and competition is high no matter where you graduated from.

This discussion needs more clarity about what's meant by "salary" as opposed to total compensation. Having known people who worked in the finance industry and other non-engineering areas, salary easily can be a minority of total compensation. For some, it's a tiny percentage. Even in the software industry, it can be less than half.

Hyperborea Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is ridiculous.
People earning 50K and homeless is not uncommon.

That has to be an apocryphal story. There are a fair number of people who earn less than that here in Silicon Valley and they aren't homeless. There might be somebody in that situation but it's got to be a pretty rare circumstance instead of "not uncommon".

I do agree that the cost of living here in Silicon Valley (along with New York, London, and all those other high wage locations mentioned above) is high and will eat into the high salaries. It's also very easy to slip into keeping up with your neighbours and spending too much.

Here is one story from 2009 (I'm sure there are many more):
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-168566.html