You will be squeezed and thrown into garbage when you strategy stop generating money. That's the problem, there is no product, no team, you can't relax because your product is making money and get fairly small share of it. What's about attrition rate in this industry, anybody has information?
Why quants don't get paid
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Where I used to work the annual turnover was less than 10%
That's probably unusual though
GAT
That's true of most things though isn't it. Weirdly nobody is willing to pay much for articles of 50 words or less.
GAT
I'd recon PM team turnover at any large multi-manager is upward of 30%.
I've been wandering if RenTech is just an hft firm in a quant skin. I understand it's very secretive, so anyone know what timeframes they operate in?
They were making $billions before HFT was viable (unless it always was, not sure) and after HFT shops outcompeted each other out of the game. Rentec may have an HFT component but they’ve also made many indications that they do a lot of other stuff:
- they’ve stated they were sending couriers to gather SEC filings before the times of electronic dissemination.
- they’ve sued their Russian employees who were leaving the company, stating that they could use their strategies to make millions within a year, which would be very difficult with expensive HFT infrastructure and huge competition.
- they’ve once stated they hold positions from a few seconds to a few minutes, which cannot be HFT. Though that could be just one of many strategies they utilize.
- they use thousands of servers to analyze new strategy ideas from their team - not needed for HFT.
- they trade equity options, which is less liquid than stocks and futures. But they can make money in seconds or minutes in other ways with options.
- they failed in making decent profits trading futures, which should be a component of HFT strategy
- they employ couple hundred scientists who shouldn’t be needed for HFT
- your question doesn’t seem to carry any importance. If they are an HFT shop then what?
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But that's my point. Let's say you are a HFT shop and, as far as I understand, most of HFT strategies are quite simple. Now, HFT has a negative spotlight. So why not hire a couple Phds and give them some severs and data to play around. I m not saying PhD s don't contribute anything, but that maybe the bulk of alpha is coming from latency arbitrage or similar. I m not knocking them down, just want to understand what exactly they are doing - conceptually that is. Maybe they are another LTCM waiting to happen?
No I want to understand if its really the Math that makes them money or it's just a facade. There's a lot of talk about AI and ML, but is it really the alpha generator or is there a talented manager who, at the end, throws all this reasearch in garage and does what he knows works and always will. I'm asking, not stating.
Does anyone know how much more returns the HFT firms make vrs common mutual or hedge funds or prop desks of big banks that conduct old fashioned analysis based trading?
Have heard that several HFT firms "did not" report a single losing day for weeks to even months at a time when the HFTs were in the high gear.
Have heard that several HFT firms "did not" report a single losing day for weeks to even months at a time when the HFTs were in the high gear.