Peter's Q3 2016 Market Report

Q3 surprised us with a strong uptick in hiring, led by Morgan Stanley.  After a couple of good quarters, the firm realized that last year’s cuts in Fixed Income were too aggressive, and we saw significant hiring on all fronts, both fulltime and contract positions.  The activity continues as I write this report.  Hiring managers are very actively seeking to fill their open positions, since it won’t be long before the inevitable end of year freeze sets in.  There’s a race to fill that has us scrambling.

More Algo Trading

For many in this industry, Algo trading is the perfect intersection of technology and markets.  I talk to many developers who are targeting positions that involve algo/systematic trading development.  The good news is that we are seeing more and more such roles.  Regulations are driving fixed income and derivatives trading to electronic exchanges, and all of the major players are building systems to make markets electronically.  Mind you these are some of the more elite development and quantitative groups, so it remains difficult to land an offer in this area.

Anecdotally, I heard that at the biggest bank, algos significantly outperformed humans around the BREXIT event.

Hedge Fund Struggles Continue

Many hedge funds continue to have a hard time with their returns.   Some are having to cut fees to attract/keep investors.  A well-known fund in Greenwich was forced to significantly reduce head count last month.  Still, the returns are quite varied, and we continue to see hiring at a number of hedge fund/prop trading clients.

Coding Boot Camps

Coding boot camps have been around for several years now and have exploded in popularity.  This article from 2013 already lists about 100 such outfits.  I hadn’t seen many resumes from graduates of these programs, until we recently posted a junior Python/JavaScript position.  This JD appears to be the perfect bait for boot camp graduates – a junior role requiring the two most popular boot camp languages.  The resumes from these candidates all look the same (amazingly so) – one page, very modern, a list of the latest JavaScript and Python technologies, a reference to their github – and no real experience.

Does anyone have experience with these outfits?  Attending, hiring from, instructing at?  If so, I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Computer Science Master’s Degree for $7000

This just in (today’s NY Times) – Georgia Tech, one of the top 10 computer science programs in the country, is offering a masters in Computer Science for only $7000.  The school is offering the program at cost.  It sounds like a very effective and innovative program.  I would highly recommend looking into this program.

Current Priorities

Buy Side

• Quant to develop an optimizer in R for equity portfolio construction
• UI developer (.net/DevExpress/WPF) for risk management and trading limits applications – quant team
• UI developer (.net/WPF/web) for middle office applications
• Hands-on dev manager for Trade Flow group, preferably with Murex experience
• Senior PM to focus on fixed income margin, clearing, settlement initiatives
• Junior Python, AWS, JavaScript developer – 2+ years’ experience
• A large hedge fund needs a QA Lead (still)
• A large hedge fund needs a DevOps professional to support a critical enterprise data warehouse

Sell Side

• Executive Director – Wealth Management Strats – C++/C# developer with significant expertise in grid computing, model integration, and client-server GUI applications for trade analysis
• Desk Strat – Credit Algo/eTrading
• Desk Strat – various, for diversity initiative – call me
• C++/Java/Scala developer for fixed income model integration
• WM Strat - C++ developer/quant for fixed income model integration
• Equities division seeks C++ developer for algo trading
• Market Risk SME Project Manager
• Java algo trading developer – equities
• Java/Scala algo trading developer – fixed income - credit
• Web/JavaScript developer for risk, scenario viewers – new strategic infra - fixed income
• KDB developer for equity market data
• C# developer - various

Technology/Fintech

• A Fintech company seeks a Javascript/HTML5/AngularJS developer - Remote position

Lighter Note

Also from today’s NY Times: Tips for Landing a Career at Your Father’s Software Company.