The potential career link between big data and Wall Street
It has been a long known secret that Wall Street will hire from fields like rocket science trying to find skills in modeling, advanced mathematics, and analysis. But did you know that there is now a job field that Wall Street uses to describe these data and mathematics driven analysts and that it is directly related to big data. Their called Quants. Thats short for qualitative analyst.
I thought that since we are getting close to the end of the semester, that I would share about this field as it uses big data in a very finically rewarding career. It turns out that most large Wall Street investment firm will employ Quants as analyst who build models for understand markets, securities and instruments based on large data sets of past market performance. And these analysts have become so integral to Wall Street that graduate degree programs have been created specializing in training Quans. here are the links to two of these programs: the first is at South New Hampshire University (http://www.snhu.edu/online-degrees/graduate-degrees/MBA-online/quantitative-analysis.asp) and the second is at UC Berkeley (http://extension.berkeley.edu/spos/quantitative.html).
If you were to read the Wikipedia page that describes Quants, it has a marked similarities to many of the things that describe Industrial Engineers only it focuses solely on the uses of the techniques to build predicative and descriptive models involving different types of finances. Quants uses tools like Monte Carlo simulations, stochastic modeling, and time series analysis to inform investors and portfolio managers on different areas of finance.
Gavin posted last week about High Frequency Trading. The foundation of High Frequency Trading is models and algorithms made by Quants. I know that there are undergraduates in the class that are considering an MBA and taking their IE knowledge to the business world, so I thought that I would share this in case anybody was interested in a career using data mining in business.
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