Finding Alphas, 2nd Edition

32The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Quants

By Richard Hu and and Chalee Asavathiratham

A quant is sometimes referred to as the “rocket scientist of Wall Street,” a phrase that conjures up an image of someone who is smart, well educated, and very highly paid. In a typical buy-side quantitative investment firm, the work environment is collegial and professional, and it offers plenty of opportunities to gain new knowledge. Therefore, it's not hard to understand why many top engineering and science graduates from the best universities in the world want to become quants.

But what does it take to become a successful quant? We have encountered this seemingly simple query countless times, and it took us more than a decade of managing hundreds of quants to be able to answer it. Yes, successful quants are highly intelligent; they are usually top graduates of quantitative disciplines like mathematics, engineering, and computer science. Yet we have noticed some additional traits that characterize the most successful quants. To confirm our observations, we ran a survey among the top quants in our firm and synthesized the results. In a nod to Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here are the seven habits of successful quants.

1. WORK HARD WITHOUT EVEN REALIZING IT

Highly successful quants are willing to put in the extra effort necessary to maximize their potential. If failure is the mother of success, extra effort is the father.

We once hired an extremely smart ...