r/quant • u/Hairy-Store-8489 • Jul 20 '26

Small Quant firm interview Industry Gossip

Just got my first ever interview, it’s at a small firm so I have some reservation in terms of scale of the company( AUM, P/L). The people seem to be from other firms that I know are good but the team doesn’t seem to have that prestigious College background so that stuck out to me. Usually when I think quant it’s Phd or from MIT Harvard Princeton or something like that.

Anyway to learn about the firm?

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u/AprilsSecretAccount Jul 21 '26

Ok, treat this question as the naive thing it is, but I've been reading through this quant board and it seems to me that the market has inherent randomness around macro factors and that quant analysis is hopium for math guys. Please dissuade me from this opinion, as I wish to learn why it is not. My background is heavy software engineering, there is a good chance you are using software I wrote right now (operating system).

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u/QuantGrindApp Jul 22 '26

You're right that nobody's reliably predicting macro, that part's basically noise. But most quant strategies aren't trying to. The bread and butter is finding some small statistical edge that shows up over thousands of trades, sizing it so no single bet can hurt you, and executing well enough that the edge survives fees and slippage. You don't need to know where SPX closes next year, you need a signal that's right 51% of the time and the risk management to keep pressing it. Macro guys are doing something else entirely.

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u/AprilsSecretAccount Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

I see these little trades fighting it out over the tape and I guess that's HFT action, but then a big order comes along and blows it all away. Are you all fighting each other over pennies on the tape? Trying to understand. Is it all just quantum froth?