Fellow AFers, I am at the middle of the cross road after being offered a new role at my current company and externally. The new role at my company will be working in Exotic derivative product control, which involves in business & trading strategies, due diligence and business questions. The use of greeks (delta, gamma, etc) to explain P/L movement. The role at UBS AM is working at FI supporting the portfolio manager is analysising market data and communicate with technology in building the right analytical tools to support them. Both looks very interesting, the one extenal will give me a pay rise of 10%, where internal will be no pay rise. Any suggestions on which one to chose to become a quant or risk manager at the end of day.
I have a feeling that people are going to have too much financial indigestion to handle exotic derivatives for a while. The job does sound intellectually interesting though. At UBS, you have a bunch of advantages: 1) more traditional asset class that is clearly going to continue to be needed during and after this crisis. 2) 10% pay raise 3) having experience at more than one organization can be helpful later on (so you don’t implicitly assume that all cultures are like Merrill. If you want to become a quant, knowledge of option greeks is something that definitely jumps off the page as “quanty.” However, fixed income is pretty quant-y too. The one concern at UBS is that you’d definitely want to make sure you are doing investment analysis for your PM, and not simply developing requirements documents for the IT folks. Just do some due diligence on that.
UBS isn’t owned by BAC…so right there its worth something.
Cheers bchadwick and tvPM: That is something I am worry about, as part of the job requries to help them to build a new portfolio management tooks which would involve working with tech to build business requirements document. Is AM a good place to be at the moment, as people are starting withdrawing funds away?