How Lucrative Are Wall Street Jobs?

Quote from hftvol:

Sorry but I do not buy your story. The very few who choose academic careers over the private sector due to their true passion and drive to research and eventually publish groundbreaking developments can be counted on one hand globally in a ten year span.

Obviously, the net worth that comes along with a career of a professional in finance, consulting, technology, anything, is a lot higher than the net worth of most any tenured professor.

This leaves me with the conclusion that most in academics are there because it leaves them with a convenient, lower stress life style while it comfortably places them in the middle to upper-middle class in terms of net worth. Nothing wrong with that at all but they are on a scale closer to the one choosing a relaxing life style on a deserted island than someone trying to bring the best out of him/herself. And it comes again down to the 90-95% of people who tried to reach the mountain top or know they cannot reach it and instead settle with less but at least the second best choice.

See, only look at the attitude of your average professor or researcher. Do most strike you as being engaged, highly passionate and motivated or do they mostly come across with an attitude of "I hope the damn office hours are over soon" or "I do not really care what you guys think of my lecture or research"? Someone who is engaged and who has a genuine love for what they do reflect their passion in anything they say and do. Just think about that for a moment and tell me how many of 100 research papers you came across most recently strike you as noteworthy of keeping or bookmarking...

you don't make a case by using the word obviously. business professors have lucrative consulting assignments. that + 6 figure salaries+ pension benefits offers the possibility of outstripping the average professional on wall street. comparing average professors to wall street professionals is comparing apples to oranges. a more useful comparison is business professors who are in the masters and phd programs.
 
you are talking about the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, who seem to be so cash strapped they need to damage their reputation (if they ever had one) by representing Greece as an "economic adviser" and making themselves to a laughing stock in front of the world?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAAnV-AolTI

Sure, lets narrow it down to business school professors. Only very few ar as active as Krugman. Most others max out at around 300-400k, a salary any VP or SVP at a trading desk should make.

P.S.: By the way, I never said there is no possibility, Krugman for one made for himself a nice little empire of research, books, and tv appearances. Should make for at least 1-2 mil per year. But that is not the average, while 400k-600k is average salary for anyone at or above VP in a trading seat.

Quote from zdreg:

you don't make a case by using the word obviously. business professors have lucrative consulting assignments. that + pension benefits offers the possibility of outstripping the average professional on wall street. comparing average professors to wall street professionals is comparing apples to oranges. a more useful comparison is business professors who are in the masters and phd programs.
 
The quant team I used to work with were all phds. It was a requirement to be on that desk.

When they were making their career decisons they saw the list as:

1. Tenured professor
2. Wall Street at 500k/year
3. Untenured professor

Tenured professor was best option because you had job stability for life and you got to work on whatever you found interesting, the track to get there (untenured professor) was miserable and highly political. They opted for wall street because it was "more stable" in many ways.

I know wall street traders who went the other way. They left trading desks and went to get their Phd's and are working their way to tenured professor. They are interested in doing research and teaching.
 
Quote from hftvol:

you are talking about the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, who seem to be so cash strapped they need to damage their reputation (if they ever had one) by representing Greece as an "economic adviser" and making themselves to a laughing stock in front of the world?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAAnV-AolTI

Sure, lets narrow it down to business school professors. Only very few ar as active as Krugman. Most others max out at around 300-400k, a salary any VP or SVP at a trading desk should make.

P.S.: By the way, I never said there is no possibility, Krugman for one made for himself a nice little empire of research, books, and tv appearances. Should make for at least 1-2 mil per year. But that is not the average, while 400k-600k is average salary for anyone at or above VP in a trading seat.

you may have a point. a friend of mine informed me that stiglitz was on a panel at a columbia university showing of the movie,wall street.
of course, let's not forget professor sachs, who was the most hated man in poland. it is not clear but perhaps the shock treatment was exactly what the country needed. i suspect it was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_(economics)
 
Quote from SeventhCereal:

you broke morons ruined the thread. how the fuck did this turn into a debate on professors? get a job.

this what the $uck higher education has done for this country.
 
Quote from hftvol:
Not sure who made your life that miserable at your banks and I have never worked much in New York but I can tell you that life as prop trader in HK and Tokyo is/was fantastic and all the perks added to the beauty of it. Maybe it was that I never had to take delayed and dirty trains, never had to be fearful to get robbed or shot on the street, never had to deal with The ridiculously high US income taxes, never paid a penny on capital gains (in HK) , enjoyed the worlds best food at reasonable prices without standing in line to get into a restaurant and without having to make reservations 3months in advance.
Most of the misery comes from being forced to play politics once you reach a certain level. If your book is making a 50-100mm, there is a lot of people around the firm that want to stick their hand in your pocket. You end up working really long hours and the content of these working hours is mostly counter-productive bullshit. I only spend maybe 20% of my time doing R&D and maybe another 30% actually quoting and trading. The rest is emails and meetings.
The second source of misery is the cost of living - you are forced to live in a rather small set of cities with a high concentration of people with similar income. For example, my relatively small apartment on the UES costs way more then a multi-story house with a 10-min drive to the mountains. Heck, to give you the sense of scale - when I tell the fellow New Yorkers that I have a 600ftsq roof deck, they find it luxurious. At the same time, given that I start work at 7 am and finish around 7pm, living outside the City is impractical and nearly impossible.

PS. yes, I hear that Singapore is the place to be.
 
Quote from sle:

Yup, if you take the five-six thousand people that work in direct revenue producing roles or in senior management, these numbers do make sense. This, however, is very much like saying "look at the top actors income" when looking at the entertainment industry.

Pretty much. It's the lottery winners of the financial industry.
 
Quote from sle:

Most of the misery comes from being forced to play politics once you reach a certain level. If your book is making a 50-100mm, there is a lot of people around the firm that want to stick their hand in your pocket. You end up working really long hours and the content of these working hours is mostly counter-productive bullshit. I only spend maybe 20% of my time doing R&D and maybe another 30% actually quoting and trading. The rest is emails and meetings.
The second source of misery is the cost of living - you are forced to live in a rather small set of cities with a high concentration of people with similar income. For example, my relatively small apartment on the UES costs way more then a multi-story house with a 10-min drive to the mountains. Heck, to give you the sense of scale - when I tell the fellow New Yorkers that I have a 600ftsq roof deck, they find it luxurious. At the same time, given that I start work at 7 am and finish around 7pm, living outside the City is impractical and nearly impossible.

PS. yes, I hear that Singapore is the place to be.

You are either defending yourself from vultures who or from parasites depending on your last trade. But the battle never stops.
 
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