Nobody wants traders anymore!
A trader was the most coveted job in the top business schools for much of the last thirty years. You get to move money and if luck is on your side, you could get a million dollar paycheck before you were 25!
But some thing has changed now. We are losing traders faster than ever, and quants aren’t doing too well either. It’s all about data science, AI and FinTech! Read report below.
Even in google trends, the interest in traders is a fourth of what it was ten years ago.
Why trading is becoming extinct
- One in twenty people who join in a sales and trading class get to be a trader after two years.
- Average salary of a trader with ten years experience is less than that of a data scientist. This is in the good case that they still have a job as a trader after ten years.
- World’s largets money manager, Blackrock, recently fired all human portfolio managers.
Portfolio management is becoming a science
The amazing innovation around Deep Learning, information retrieval, machine learning with a focus to denoising the data is making portfolio management a science. In the enxt ten years every single trading fund will turn to Deep Learning. Comprehensive report on it below:
From star traders to complex systems
Like Blackrock above, we are moving from star traders to complex systems because:
- Simple trades are gone.
- Computation is cheaper, and more easily accessible.
- Data is more widely and cheaply available.
- The importance of the “trading seat” is nothing now. I remember in three months after I started trading, I was trading more US govt bonds than mighty Goldman Sachs! This was in August 2005.
Finance is becoming FinTech
Mansi Singhal, co-founder and C.E.O of QPlum, believes the financial services industry is on the cusp of a major transition. “Many financial companies are transforming their businesses to turn to a systematic approach in their most revenue intensive areas,” Singhal says. “It is not just about being able to access all the information via your smartphone or laptop. We are moving towards the next step, where decision making is becoming more data-driven and systematic.”
Choose wisely, young graduate!
As a young graduate, you need to choose wisely today. Don’t chase professions that used to make a lot of money earlier. Chosoe the ones the world needs today!
