On Talking About Your Alpha Research Project In HF Quant Interviews
sorry sir big dawg your Random Forest doesn't have a Sharpe of 18
Recruitment season is back again. Last time I wrote an article on how I think about designing a good project for HF Quant roles, which is step Uno. This is not Part II. This is part I and a half. Part II is still in works (I swear I'm not slacking).
quantymacro
Most candidates have personal projects on their CV, and 90% of them are related to alpha research. I wanna give my take on how I would talk about this project in interviews.
I'm not so heavily involved in recruitment, but I do interviews from time to time (normally the first rounds). All my articles are speculative, but I want to stress it even more for this one. As I said before, I'm quite reluctant to write about recruitment because 1) it's incredibly noisy, 2) just because someone got HF offers doesn't mean they know much about recruitment. But sometimes I do answer questions about this topic in DM, and I find myself repeating the same things. So might as well write about it in detail here.
And for my subset of audience who are already practitioners and do not care about this junior recruitment stuff, I'll release an article about some sick regression soon. Promise. It's hard to write when there's a huge dispersion in your audience's profile, so thanks for your understanding xx ❤️
looked through some student CVs for quant roles. IMO a quick (& extreme) heuristic is that if your experiences can also be written in someone else’s CV, they’re too vague/not specific enough
— quantymacro (@quantymacro) June 18, 2024
“utilised ML techniques to develop quant strategy” isn’t rly saying anything.
gl all🙏