"Prop trading firms often avoid PhD quants, try banking instead."

I'm an executive search firm director in quant finance. If you're a PhD graduate looking for a job as a quant, some firms are going to love you much more than others. 

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Systematic hedge funds are very academically snobby, and won't touch anyone that doesn't have a PhD from a top 50 university for its quant researcher roles. They interview thousands of PhDs, however, and very few actually get hired. 

Prop trading firms are the opposite; they're less interested in PhDs and will sometimes actively discriminate against them. They find those people too academic, too stubborn, and too set in their ways. These firms are much more collaborative and want to fit people into a mold that they create. They tend to want someone with a first class bachelors or master's degree who's dead keen on working for them, rather than someone potentially overqualified that will still need to learn everything about systematic trading.

If you can't get a hedge fund quant job, you'll have to look for one in a bank. They've been hoovering up PhDs over the last 5-10 years; it looks good for their clients to have quant teams full of PhDs, and they're happy to pay reasonable amounts for them. 

You can sometimes earn better base pay in a bank than a hedge fund as a PhD quant. They give $150k to $200k to fresh PhD graduates. There's zero upside there compared to hedge funds though; your bonus might be 50-100% of your salary in a bank but at a hedge fund you could get a bonus of over $1m within a few years if you've added to its strategies in a meaningful way.

For quantitative developers and engineers, it's different. There's a slightly unwritten rule that computer science PhDs are better than undergraduates, and that the most success is usually had with PhD quant developers. These are the types of people that have been interested in low-level engineering and high performance computing since age ten, and are working with more complex technologies. In the FPGA space, for example, almost all engineers at top firms have PhDs.

James Holland is the director of executive search and recruitment firm Quant Capital

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