"10-50% of quant researchers in hedge fund pods have stressful, miserable jobs"
Balyasny's head of quantitative research, Giuseppe Paleologo, has not shied away from criticizing the gruelling nature of hedge fund quant research roles in the past. He recently gave a talk at MIT's CSAIL lab and, in discussions on Twitter afterwards, he reinforced just how difficult these jobs can be.
Paleologo released the slides from his presentation, in which he estimated that "2.5% of portfolio managers (PMs) are 60% of hedge fund PnL on a good year." If you support one of these PMs as a quant, you'll likely be under intense pressure to maintain their returns.
The intensity is not limited to quants working under those PMs, though; Paleologo said on Twitter that "between 10 and 50%, of quant researchers in pods have really difficult, stressful, miserable jobs." Bad managers, Paleologo said, are responsible for the resignations of a "very high number of excellent traders, portfolio managers and quants."
Other times, quants are pushed out by "unstable organizations." There's also the fact that "doing good research is really hard" and few have the right "mix of skills and smarts" to survive. It doesn't help that an abundance of competition is causing stagnant returns; Paleologo said in his presentation that "Every investment style has maybe an effective size of 50 participants," and that "everyone is an imperfect copy of everyone else."
Going into quant research, therefore, is high-risk, high-reward. Paleologo tweeted that working in research can be a "living hell," but being successful in the role can be "the most enthusing thing in the world," and that it can be "the best job in the universe for you." Choose wisely.
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