When people think of intense jobs in finance, they tend to imagine the 120-hour weeks worked by investment bankers. Algorithmic trading jobs slip under the radar in this regard, but can be just as exacting.
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Andrew Courtney, formerly head of international ETF trading at Susquehanna International Group (SIG), recently appeared on a podcast to discuss quant trading careers. He said that quant traders typically spend “all day” looking at “multiple monitors covered with numbers, signals, flashing lights… your eyes are flittering across those screens trying to extract meaning and signal from those patterns.” Courtney’s experience isn’t unique to SIG; at Jane Street, tools are optimized for individual traders to the point where UI elements can be as little as six pixels tall.
The role requires such focus and intensity that Courtney said he’d “never had a lunch break in [his] career.” The trade-off is that traders generally work around the times that markets are open, but that doesn’t mean the work is inherently safer than a banker working until 4am. Around the time that Bank of America associate Leo Lukenas infamously died of heart complications, Adnan Deumic, an algorithmic trader at the bank, also sadly passed. While Lukenas was allegedly working 120-hour weeks in its investment bank, Deumic was working half that. The New York Post reported at the time, however, that the work was incredibly intense and Deumic didn’t have time to leave his desk for a coffee.
A career in quant finance can also have long-term (but not necessarily bad) psychological effects. Courtney said that “thinking in bets is [such] a part of the culture at SIG that I can’t not do it.” He said that, whenever faced with uncertainty, he will “think of everything as a bet… I kind of don’t understand how you talk to normal people, and they don’t do that.”
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