Topic · Interview, Career & Industry
← All topicsFirms & Roles
19 articles · 4 checkpoints · 12 deeper reads · 3 reference notes
Every article, in reading order
plant a flag as you finish eachRead these first
A hedge fund trades other people's money under a fee arrangement designed to align the manager's incentives with investor returns, understanding that arrangement explains most of how these firms actually behave.
Base salary, bonus, and P&L-linked pay work very differently across prop firms, hedge funds, and banks, the mix tells you as much about a firm's incentives as the headline number does.
Prop trading firms, hedge funds, banks, and asset managers all hire quants, but they pay for different skills, take different risks, and feel very different to work inside, a map of who's who before you specialize your prep.
Prop firms trade only their own capital, mostly in liquid exchange-traded products, and their whole hiring and culture model, fast, meritocratic, high-variance, follows from that one fact.
Then the rest